Will McPhail

One of the best of the sometimes confusing crop of new cartoonists for the New Yorker, Will brings a Brit-leaning sense of ridiculousness and a love of pigeons and rats to his renderings of city life. Additionally, he is very attuned the Brooklyn-ization of NYC, complete with the obligatory manbuns and doubts about childrearing. Men acting badly and women laughing at them also might be found offensive by the man-o-verse, but if they don't like it, they can enjoy the non-human rats. My show more favorite here is "NYC's Most Eligible Pigeons", featuring Benedict Elderberry, who wears a traffic cone on his head, and the one-legged David Hornby-Wenning, who is heir to a one-biscuit fortune. Big laughs! show less

I love Will McPhail's New Yorker cartoons, most especially his city pigeons. This graphic novel features humans who creepily look like the pigeons around the eyes! It's a story of a guy, most likely himself, who's pretty bored and miserable in a city (London?), looks for love, neglects his family until they really need him, and meets-cute an oncologist, immediately knowing she's too good for him. In his daily rambling life, he dreams up the silliest coffee shops imaginable. In the most show more stressful episodes, he falls out of his b&w sketched world and into deep chasms of color, fire, and flame. This is a difficult but worthy read. show less

Graphic novels are so intriguing - it's such a different way to tell/read a story. This one is beautiful - as so many are. The art is exquisite and captures emotion through nuances. The title refers to the ability to be 'sucked in' or immersed or honest without social barriers - referencing the feeling the narrator had in childhood of the thrill of a drainage-style water slide where you fall through the pipe and emerge on the other side exhilarated and feeling like you truly experienced show more something. Where does any of that childhood exuberance and presence go in adulthood and social circles? So many of our interactions with others are 'cocktail conversation' which fails to reach any true connection, even with our own family members in the busy-ness of everyday life. That is what the narrator is seeking - and finds - with a few rare relationships: a neighbor, a new love interest (that has a personal conflict), and finally with his sister and his mother. And when that happens, the pictures change to color, starting with the characters' eyes - truly seeing one another. With some risk and vulnerability, they are 'in' and changed for it. Very germane to our times and so spot-on for human nature - it made me want to hug those few people in my life I am lucky enough to be real with. show less

Nick Moss is an artist always watching and drawing people, but unable to make meaningful connections with them. He never knows what to say, and when he does say something, he feels like the conversation is a performance, not genuine. Yet every once in a while, there is a moment of transcendence, when he shares something about himself, and it is heard and reciprocated. These moment are depicted in gorgeous colored pages, in a book of otherwise black and white graphics.

The author, Will show more McPhail, has been a contributor to The New Yorker magazine since 2014. This is his first book. His cartoons can be found on his website (www.willmcphail.com) and Instagram (@willmcphail4). show less