We are living in a moment when our social lives are wired through screens, where everyday connection blends with distraction and the line between public and private becomes fuzzier with every scroll. The constant stream of faces, opinions, and curated moments creates a noisy backdrop that can feel both intimate and distant. People craft personas from the comfort of their living rooms, choosing when to reveal or hide parts of themselves, and the glow of the phone becomes a doorway to belonging, impression management, and fleeting validation. Yet, amid this chorus of online voices, a familiar loneliness persists, stubbornly present and hard to escape, as if the more we connect, the more the sense of isolation can echo back from the edges of the feed.
Two graphic novels arriving this week illuminate a society that keeps demanding more while often leaving those unable to keep pace behind. The Acting Class, by Nick Drnaso, translated into English and released by a respected publisher, returns to familiar ground with a tighter, more intricate structure that centers the people who make up a class as the core of the story. The book treats natural activity as a kind of therapy for the characters, who are wrestling with past shadows, insecurities, and fears. They attempt to perform who they are not as a strategy to escape their own realities and to locate a pathway toward futures they once believed in but now doubt. Drnaso crafts a steady current of unease that grows from the tension between what is true and what is staged, conveying it through dialogue that rewards careful listening and a still, reflective gaze. Although a comic book that leans heavily on talk, the narrative pulse remains buoyant, and the final pages offer a compelling entry point that lingers long after the last panel.
In a similar tonal space, Nadia Hafid’s new work The Jackals presents a stark, almost schematic vision of Intermittent Explosive Disorder. The three characters here navigate a failure to contain frustration that erupts into sudden, explosive anger. The artist’s style strips away extraneous detail, letting a pure line work as instinctive force, while color sets the rhythm and mood for each moment. Facial expressions are minimal, gestures sparse, yet the emotional impact lands with precision. The two dimensional world feels cramped, with urban spaces and streets acting as a backdrop to a deeper confinement that the characters endure. Shadows become the sole escape from a flattened reality, hinting at what remains hidden in the corners of city life. Hafid builds her page layouts as machines that guide the reader through the heroes’ viewpoint, turning architectural rhythm into a tool for storytelling. That approach makes the work intensely personal and instantly legible, a mark of Hafid’s growing significance in the national comics scene. The result is a powerful blend of form and feeling, where lines, color, and composition work in concert to reveal the psychology of people who struggle to keep their impulses in check, and in doing so, illuminate the everyday battles that shape a life under pressure.