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Nick Drnaso: Sabrina (2018, Drawn & Quarterly) 4 stars

"When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web …

Review of 'Sabrina' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

 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.