Friends Is Friends

The sad elephant hobo on the cover of Cook’s first graphic novel in a decade gazes out from clots of dark ink, looking deeply haunted. This sets the tone of a much heavier story than what is generally told with anthropomorphic talking animals. Will, a young pig, befriends, and then insults and abuses, the elephant hobo. His older sister later meets the elephant and they share a sense of melancholy, but then, in a bizarre twist, the two pigs discover they have more family history with the elephant than they realized. Cook’s (Catch as Catch Can) obscure story—which also includes an aggressive little bear feuding with a ghost, and suggestions of a terribly violent but unseen crime—comes to an ambiguous ending. The interior line art, by contrast, is disarmingly cartoony. Readers of Cook’s stark comics depicting the war in Iraq will recognize his distinctively curly hand-lettered text, one of the book’s strengths. Weaknesses include the entirely borderless panels, which make an already confusing story even more so. (Aug.)