RIVER AT NIGHT HC

One of our Gosh! Best of 2019 titles! The passage of time is one of the great tricks of cartooning. Controlling the pace and passage of time in a medium where the artist ultimately relinquishes control of such things to the reader is a masterful skill, with only a few really accomplished practitioners. Confident, then, is the cartoonist who actively engages with the subject as Huizenga does here, and exciting too that he actually succeeds. The River at Night is a meditation on time, a series of vignettes as author stand-in Glenn Ganges struggles with insomnia. His mind wanders to various fancies, and so too does the storytelling, engaging in the kind of formalist experimentation that lets us see things we've never (or rarely) seen done effectively before. A masterclass in the craft that also acts as a fascinating, not to mention entertaining, philosophical piece.