Drawn & Quarterly Showcase: Book Two

Drawn & Quarterly Showcase - edited by Chris Oliveros - returns featuring two more of the brightest new talents working in graphic novels today. This edition focuses on new stories by two cartoonists from opposite ends of the globe: Chicago's Jeffrey Brown and from the other side of the Atlantic, Pentti Otsamo of Finland. Brown's story is a tense-murder-mystery: a co-worker at a factory has dreams about dogs attacking a girl two nights in a row. The next day he unloads a truck and finds dirty clothing in the trailer, clothing that looks like a young girls'. As it happens, a young girl was abducted and murdered the night before, and the truck had picked up the load in that area the same day. Brown deftly paces the story, drawn in his expressive line, never quite revealing more than we need to know. Pentti Otsamo writes about a boy's move to a new town and of the nastiness of the local kids who do their best to shun the new arrival. Otsamo's moody and atmospheric drawing style is perfectly suited to the subject of the story. His artwork is reminiscent of some of the best D+Q cartoonists, with the warm colors of Seth and the sensitive, yet expressive linework of Chester Brown.