I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly & JM Ken Nimura.Favored Enemy?
Giants. Big, primordial.
Least favorite: cancer.
Did you ever read (or watch) The Maxx? Same thing, here, in a nutshell, though I Kill Giants is rooted much more in the real world, with the fantasy world being much more unambiguously imaginary. That is a trick Ken Nimura pulls off really well; the art in the book is very much hard lines of black & grey, which Nimura interrupts with blocky lines of white to show off the protagonist's....well, saying hallucinations is probably going to far, but saying whimsy is probably going to bright. This is a fairly dark book; the real giant in the text is the cancer that Barbara Thorson's mother is dying of. All the flights of fancy are Barbara's coping mechanism, & it goes deeper than just escapism. It is a remarkably accurate picture of someone having an emotional breakdown; Barbara lashes out at her family, at her friends, at her teachers, at strangers, at everyone. It is a little more psychodrama then I tend to like-- the curse of indie comics, I suppose-- but the catharsis with the titan at the end is worth it. Kelly writes with an eye for detail, which really anchors his verisimilitude; Barbara's emotional problems are utterly believable, & the things she chooses to latch onto are imbued with the kind of reverence that evokes the mania of childhood. The strange rituals, the favored objects, yeah, I buy it. I think the fact that it is Nimura's first long form project shows up in the occasional ambiguous panel transition, but I think a lot of modern comics sacrifice good panel sequencing for clever panel sequencing, so I'm used to it.
