Amazing Rain — Sam Brown

With the deceptively simple use of line of Matt Groening or James Thurber, the deft and elegant use of color of Chris Ware or Hergé, the cinematographic eye of Eric Drooker, and the combined sense of dark humor and nostalgic sadness of Edward Gorey, Brown has created a sparse and engrossing novella that stands beautifully, beckoningly outside of any of the established forms or conventions of the comic book or the graphic novel to date. Like a medieval tapestry of Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelihearts drawn by Keith Haring on a Wacom tablet, Sam Brown weaves a story within a story, a fable entwined in a narrative of urban disenchantment and pastoral escape.