Sabrina
Nick Dranso
Granta
Nick Dranso’s Sabrina is a brilliant graphic novel where the central mystery becomes secondary to the everyday mystery of human interaction. It begins ordinarily, and it ends ordinarily. Sabrina visits her sister who is house sitting for their parents. The two chat, they make plans for the spring, and then Sabrina leaves and is never seen again.
From here we meet Teddy, Sabrina’s distraught boyfriend, and his lovable, if pathetic, school friend, Calvin, who decides to house Teddy as he deals with losing Sabrina. The narration is slow and filled with riffs that are suspiciously hilarious. It is a creepy story, and an inexplicably warm one. An uncanny combination.
Dranso’s characters are weirdly shaped like flesh-coloured bowling pins, their proportions marginally off, and yet, somehow, they are still utterly familiar to the reader.
It adds to the generally unnerving mood which can turn the search for a lost cat into a tense sequence where trouble seems to lurk in every panel.
Much has been said of the political examination within Sabrina – fake news and professional angry men are tackled – but I found this to be a little too easy for a book which asks far more complex, grey and satisfying questions about relationships and alienation.
Words: John Patrick McHugh
