After reading Drnaso’s Sabrina, I was left with a deep feeling of unease. This was certainly due to the content of the work, but I think that the medium, especially in the way that comics allow an author to show moments of silence, amplified this feeling. A particular example of this are the scenes that show Sandra trying to go about her life while grieving her sister. The lack of text in these scenes made the grief more poignant than these moments could be in a traditional novel.

In regard to the story, I found myself empathizing with Calvin Wrobel. He was attempting to have a “normal” life in an increasingly fast-paced, interconnected world. I thought the exploration of Calvin as both someone who consumes the news cycle and becomes part of it was incredibly interesting. This is exemplified by when he gets spammed with emails after being ambushed by the news team, and then suddenly doesn’t get any more emails when a mass shooting occurs, and the public moves on to that tragedy. From the fictitious Calvin, I felt the strange sense of fatigue and fear that feels increasingly prevalent in our real world, where the news keeps us abreast of – and even involves in – every terrible thing that happens. The discourse that this book presents, especially in regard to the conspiracy theorists that harass Calvin, really made me question: have things have always been so sinister and violent and we simply weren’t aware of it because the world wasn’t as connected or is this new technology – and, truly, new culture – breeding whole new types of evil, on the part of both institutions and individuals?