Escalator

    (Alternative, 2005)
™ and © Brandon Graham

This black and white trade paperback collects cartoonist Brandon Graham’s short comic book stories, which Publishers Weekly calls “[t]hree parts skater cartooning to one part graffiti art.” These are everyman stories about average schmucks who get involved with, oh, illegal extraterrestrial pornography when they really just want to do their grocery-shopping and lonely guys trying to get over painful breakups. Here, two friends take on the project of tagging a subway car in a very big way; it’s an insightful tale, full of slices of life some of us will never know. Graham’s art is definitely the showpiece here; the stories, while entertaining enough, are almost incidental to his highly stylized pictures of schmoes, skater dudes, demons, aliens, and hot school girls.

— Thomas Moudry
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