Slowly paced, visually minimalistic, thoughtful and quietly sad, reading In. follows Nick Moss, a young artist on a quest for social intimacy in a world of rote small talk and constant distraction. A funny, dreamy slice-of-life narrative, In.

(“Spice up your panic attack with a harmonica.”)Īs warmth and humor pervade McPhail’s single-panel cartoons, so too do they fill the pages of his debut graphic novel, In., which is a deeply pleasurable literary and visual experience. His characters have simple but wildly expressive eyes and a vivid, anxious humanness. He has a tendency to satirize the high-end coffee shops he likes to frequent (“Small, medium, or that,” says a barista, while a handful of patrons lap up coffee from a trough) and to anthropomorphize animals like birds and rats (McPhail finds inspiration for these characters from his formal training as a zoologist, as well as the pigeons that frequent the windows of his flat in Edinburgh, Scotland). Will McPhail, who has been contributing cartoons and humor pieces to the magazine for the last seven years, has cultivated a delightfully manic style which favors themes of loneliness and social performance (one couple ascends the stairs toward a house party: “Just be myself? Fine, I’ll go cry in the shower”). But the cartoonists behind these wry inventions each have their signatures, from Bob Mankoff’s besuited characters, shaded in with hatching and dots, to Emily Flake’s softly-colored-in, baggy-clothed hipsters. New Yorker cartoons are recognizable on sight: simple black-and-white sketches of a scene captioned with some drollery that gently mocks the upper echelons of liberal society.

In the graphic novel will mcphail