![]() ![]() The whole book feels a few degrees warmer, more humane, quieter, yet somehow more uncanny. It is startling how even the most minute shift in drawing style can affect the tone of a comic. Acting Class has a larger cast of characters than his previous books, and Drnaso has said that this required showing “a wider variety of distinguishing details”-but the result goes far beyond that purpose. The layouts are a little looser, there’s more surface detail on hair and clothes, more contour to people’s forms their eyes now have pupils and color. ![]() In his new graphic novel, Acting Class, this changes, just a bit. Drnaso’s people seem to be staring out from somewhere deep within their own amorphous bodies, imprisoned and perplexed. ![]() These faces are at times capable of registering subtle and powerful emotions-both books focus on the aftermath of shocking, violent events-but more often they are almost blank, barely animate. His characters are soft and boxy and barely differentiated, like cheap cars: their clothes are vague masses of fabric, their hair sits in rigid lumps above round, empty faces-in his first two books, the collection of linked stories Beverly (2016) and the graphic novel Sabrina (2018), their eyes are simply black dots. The colors are flat, the lines uniform and thin, the pages strict grids of small panels. Nick Drnaso draws comics with a minimalism just this side of crudeness. ![]()
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