Sabrina

There's this thing that happens where people who don't read comics occasionally all decide to read a random "serious" comic, and then decide it's great because it doesn't have Batman in it.

I fall for this every time, and read these dreadful books waiting for some event on the last page that redeems the rest of the book. It never happens.

Nominally a story about fake news in the aftermath of a grisly murder and it's effects on people who knew the victim. Actually the story of a guy who is going thru a divorce and for some reason decided to take in a person that he barely knows. He gets incorporated into an online conspiracy theory and thus experiences online harassment for his trouble.

None of the characters experience any growth, any new understanding, any catharsis, or any insight about fake news. For the most part they are passive recipients of fate. Teddy, addicted to listening to Alex Jones talk about his dead girlfriend, experiences no realization about Alex Jones. Instead, Alex Jones moves on to a new story, and Teddy loses interest. Calvin, conflicted between trying to put his family back together or pursue his career, has his decision made for him by his ex-wife, who wants nothing to do with him. And so he chooses his career for no other reason than that his family rejected him.

The ominous online harassment due to fake news never amounts to anything except for a few fake outs.

I expect the art is supposed to come off as workmanlike, but it's actually fairly incompetent. Perspective and proportions are all over the place. The art lacks contrast in basically any imaginable category resulting in a total lack of dynamism. It's difficult to tell the characters apart, particularly characters of the same gender. Even the lettering is incompetent, resulting in me squinting and straining my eyes despite having perfect vision.

 This is the first graphic novel I've ever purchased. I've read a few over the years, at the library, but I've never bought one. I bought Sabrina because I read that it was the first graphic novel ever to make the long list of the Man Booker Prize (the short list will be announced Sept. 20).
 Here's a good description (and part plug) of the book, stolen from themanbookerprize.com:

Where is Sabrina?
The answer is hidden on a videotape, a tape which is en route to several news outlets, and about to go viral.
Sabrina is the story of what happens when an intimate, ‘everyday’ tragedy collides with the appetites of the 24-hour news cycle; when somebody’s lived trauma becomes another person’s gossip; when it becomes fodder for social media, fake news, conspiracy theorists, maniacs, the bored.

 What's brilliant about Sabrina and probably other graphic novels is that it does things that can't be done on film or in prose. (If you're watching a movie and it shows a lot of text on a computer screen, you're not going to have good things to say about that movie.) Speaking of the text on computer screens, the one false note in Sabrina is that the author has conspiracy buff nut jobs (a redundancy) writing perfect English in their posts, with proper capitalization and punctuation. Not that I look at that sort of thing much, but from what I've seen of such writing (Trump's tweets, e.g.) I can tell you this: they don't write that well.
 I guess the book is in high demand and that the publishers didn't anticipate that because it took weeks to get it delivered. It was expensive, too, and that's a qualm I had with it. I understand that printing an entire book in color cost more than just black text on paper, but Sabrina is not printed with rich inks on glossy paper, nor should it be—being slick in any way would detract from its message. Still, the $27 price point was high for a book that you're going to finish in under two hours. I can't recommend buying it at that price unless you're going to share it with others.