
A graphic novel about family in today’s world
The grim 2016 election season and its aftermath is both backdrop and foreground to James Sturm’s powerful new graphic novel “Off Season’’ (Drawn & Quarterly).
The story follows Mark, a carpenter who’s not getting paid, and the dissolution of his marriage to Lisa. It is about the real and daily woes of the job of trying to keep head-above-water under tides of demands of children, work, love. That she supports Hillary Clinton and he Bernie Sanders is both point of contention as well as reflection of their differences.
Sturm, who co-founded the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, as well as the Seattle alternative newsweekly The Stranger, works in a minimal palette of gray-blue, suggesting the chill of the New England late fall in which it’s set.