My graphic novel for this month is apparently not a novel because its creator, Daniel Clowes, has a particular disdain for that term. He writes comics and so this is "a comic-strip novel" (what it says on the cover) or "a narraglyphic picto-assemblage" (what it says on the legal page). To be fair, it's not a graphic novel in many other ways too, not least that it looks like a book of newspaper comic strips, short and wide and pretty close to the dimensions of my trade paperbacks, merely rotated ninety degrees.

It's unconventional inside too, because there's a single narrative arc that flows through the book but it's told through individual stories, each of which is laid out as its own newspaper cartoon and told from the perspective of a different character, each of whom is currently residing in the sleepy small town of Ice Haven, in an unnamed state. The overriding story is about a young and silent boy called David Goldberg, who's been kidnapped, but we learn about it through a whole slew of other characters, endearing or not.

And, fundamentally, this is a character study. It's a character study of the various characters, many of whom have issues and problems of their own that dominate their own stories, often in isolation from everyone else. Ultimately, though, it's a character study of a small town, whose residents are inherently concerned about other residents but, for a variety of reasons, can't communicate with them, keeping their secrets, sometimes to their own detriment.

For instance, the nominal narrator is a man named Random Wilder, who sees himself as a poet but hasn't actually published any poetry. He's written a lot of it and he rails at the fact that Ice Haven has its own poet laureate, a lovely old lady called Ida Wentz, who lives next door and whose poetry he views as insipid and constantly inferior to his own. Of course, he doesn't tell her that, just as he doesn't publish and so he churns in his self-created turmoil, which isn't entirely inappropriate for a creative soul.

What he doesn't know is that the collection that he lent Ida some time ago, has been read by her granddaughter Vida, who's currently staying with her grandmother on a holiday, and Vida adores his work. And Vida, who's eating up empty time by writing a zine about Ice Haven that absolutely nobody reads, even though it's on shelves in the local bookstore, lends an issue to Random, who's her new obsession, which he throws away. What Vida doesn't know is that he only does that as he adores her writing so much that he can't bear to even look it at any more, so much better it is in his eyes than his own work. So they're perfect for each other but neither of them has a clue. The obvious romance doesn't happen.

Clowes sets up all sorts of obvious stories here and few of them unfold in the ways we expect. Most unexpected is how it all ties into the true life story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who killed a young boy, Bobby Franks, as an intellectual exercise to see if they could commit a perfect murder. They didn't, which is why we know about them today and why their story has been retold so often in films like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. Here, we get a two-page strip recounting their story, ahead of a troubled kid called Carmichael lending a friend called Charles a book of his father's all about their case, then  leads him to believe that he kidnapped David himself, killed him and dumped his body in a large hole. He hasn't, of course, but Charles doesn't know that.

Many of these stories involve unrequited love, beyond the mutual unspoken admiration between Vida and Random. Charles, for instance, has a huge crush on his new stepsister, Violet, and plans to break up their newly together parents so that they won't be brother and sister and so can get married in the future. Violet, who's a seventeen-year-old high school student, is lovestruck by an older man who she wants to whisk her away from everything, but naturally he just wants to get in her pants. There's even a private investigator's wife who's in love with her husband, who's far too busy with investigating to pay her any attention, so, we presume, is sleeping her way around town instead.

Each of these character stories unfolds in what we could consider issues of different comic strips, each told in an appropriate genre, from hardboiled detective strip to girl's romance strip, with a suitably designed logo. The two pages recounting Leopold and Loeb are one strip in a true crime vein and there are even strips dedicated to wildly peripheral characters. The young kid who lives next door to Charles, for instance, is George, who has a security blanket plush toy rabbit that he's called Blue Bunny. Even Blue Bunny gets his own strip, in which he's neatly psychotic, and so does a caveman called Rocky who lives in what would become Ice Haven a hundred thousand years on.

There's also a strip dedicated to a comic book critic called Harry Naybors, who's part of the story, to the degree that he's interviewed by Mr. Ames, but who breaks the fourth wall and eventually provides the author biography for Daniel Clowes at the end of the book. This book already had a highly ingenious and original way to tell its story, but the inclusion of Naybors adds a whole extra meta level to the storytelling, not quite trawling the author into the story itself but hinting in no uncertain way that this is somehow influenced by real events. How far that goes, I have no idea. We should wait for Naybors to write a book about it, if only he wasn't fictional. I presume.

I've heard of Clowes before, because he wrote a famous graphic novel called 'Ghost World', which he adapted with Terry Zwigoff into a feature of the same name in 2001 with Thora Birch, a young Scarlet Johannson and Steve Buscemi. It didn't do well at the box office but I found it wonderful, as did many critics, and it's built quite the cult following. As I don't own a copy of the source book, it seems fair to dive into this one instead and I'm happy I did that because the original way it was constructed fascinates me. ~~ Hal C F Astell