Commies and comics

Its Booker-longlist nomination meant that Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta, £16.99) was the comic that everyone has heard of this year, even if it’s also the one most likely to give them post-traumatic stress. Drawn in deliberately bland colours and small, often wordless panels, this story about the human aftermath of a grisly American killing takes in internet paranoia, conspiracy theorists and the internet’s hyperspeed appetite for atrocity. But it’s also an intensely withdrawn book, full of desperate characters whose emotions vibrate at near-subperceptible frequencies. I admired it deeply, and I’d be happy never to think about it again.

Less emotionally stressful, though with deep seriousness lurking beneath its shrewd wit and artistic energy, is Jules Feiffer’s The Ghost Script (Liveright, £19.99), the third in a trilogy of graphic novels by a veteran cartoon satirist (Feiffer is 89). In straggly, super-vivid monotone art, it pays homage to the Spirit comics of Will Eisner, whom Feiffer once assisted, and the PI stories of mid-century Hollywood. This final volume ties up the loose ends of its predecessors, offering closure to some and a sticky end to others, as a bunch of detectives, commie screenwriters, gossip-mongers, starlets and right-wing agitators hare about after a dynamite screenplay that may or may not exist.

On the topic of commies, I’ve enjoyed few comics this year as much as Martin Rowson’s slim, ferocious retelling of Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (SelfMadeHero, £12.99). Published for the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth in a deft abridgement with introductory notes by Rowson, this is a nightmare fantasia in black, grey and, naturally, red, in which grisly industrial landscapes are stalked by toilet-bowl monsters with cash registers for heads and a huge iron giant of industry with the face of the Westminster clock.

Like all Rowson’s stuff, it’s extraordinarily clever and utterly savage: I didn’t know whether to squeal with laughter or horror at, for example, the drawing of the proletariat getting its tongue caught in a mangle, then being snipped up and pulped by wing-collared Lord Snooties, or the riot policeman shining a torch down an old lady’s throat beneath the iron cliff of a bank’s HQ.