GRAPHIC NOVELS

Harvey Knight’s Odyssey

Drawn & Quarterly. Mar. 2023. 160p. ISBN 9781770466326. pap. $24.95. F
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Cartoonist Maandag (The Follies of Richard Wadsworth) satirizes the human urge to find profound significance in day-to-day life in this collection of three deeply strange, often hilarious stories. In “The Plunge,” an office worker’s daily ritual of making French press coffee in his cubicle after lunch so obsesses his colleagues that they begin planning their entire workday around bearing witness to the process. The titular tale follows the second-in-command of a bizarre religious order whose scheme to overthrow the group’s leader results in a series of gruesome murders and his writing, producing, and starring in a play entitled Harvey and the Amazingly Multi-Hued Human Flesh Coat. The final story, “Full Day,” follows an office worker navigating an increasingly nightmarish series of misadventures that include interrogation by an overly semantic efficiency expert, getting kidnapped by a stranger anxious to share an extremely long and violent story about his experience at the DMV, and being forced to undergo trauma counseling following a disturbing encounter on the subway.
VERDICT Maandag’s combination of surrealism and deadpan humor makes these stories unpredictable, unforgettably weird, and thoroughly entertaining.
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