Blue

Australian cartoonist Pat Grant doesn’t have a résumé as impressive as Jason’s or Tom Gauld’s, but his debut graphic novel, Blue (Top Shelf), is still stunningly accomplished. Simultaneously impressionistic, collage-like, fantastical, and down-to-earth, Bluemostly follows a trio of teenage beach bums as they skip school to surf, then get sidetracked by a quest to go see a dead body on the railroad tracks. (The nod to Stephen King’s “The Body” is intentional, as Grant explains in the book’s extensive end-notes.) Though Grant’s characters are thumb-headed freaks, their dialogue is flavorfully profane, and true to the way adolescents try to one-up each other and gross each other out. Bluethen surrounds the story of these kids playing hooky with an extended flashback to when they were even younger, and snapshots of who’ll they’ll become when they’re older. And Grant connects all this to the history of the fictional town of Bolton, which is eventually overrun by blue-skinned, tentacled aliens.

Or at least Grant attempts to connect it. At times, Blue feels like two uneasily co-existing books: one a vivid slice-of-life, the other a way-out allegory about immigration and bigotry. But both halves of Blue are exciting on their own, as are the little lyrical interludes and design experiments Grant throws in along the way. This book is eccentric, but it never feels like anything other than what Grant wanted to make: a surf-punk-scored reflection on old friends and the roots of racism. As with Jason’s work and Gauld’s, Grant’s Blue is a wholly original, enormously entertaining comic, heralding a new talent that we may be enjoying for decades to come.