Freeway - Softcover

Kalesniko is an expert at sophisticated, visually efficient narrative renderings of complex emotions. His drawings are spare and cinematic, and each panel underscores the characters' psychological isolation or another revealing detail.

In his first new graphic novel since 2001's acclaimed Mail Order Bride, Kalesniko delivers an ambitious 416-page tour de force chronicling a single day - a few hours, even - in the life of his recurring dog-headed alter ego, Alex Kalienka. Stuck in a horrendous traffic jam on his way to his increasingly miserable job as an animator at "Mickey Walt" Studios, a burnt-out and depressed Alex alternately rages, reminisces, fantasizes and hallucinates. There are flashbacks to his earliest days as a starry-eyed young animator snagging his dream job, through the increasingly depressing political battles and creative compromises, with a love affair gone badly wrong along the way, alternating with scenes of an increasingly agitated present-day Alex, who imagines a series of increasingly violent deaths for himself. Then again, are they in fact fantasies, or prescient flashes? Is a threatening car tailing Alex just a paranoid fantasy or a genuine threat? Readers will have to wait until the very end of this hugely ambitious graphic novel to find out. Moreover, woven into this narrative fabric is a series of imagined moments from two generations ago, a Golden Age of animation, when an earlier Alex made his way into a much different Mickey Walt Studio as imagined by the increasingly despondent present-day Alex., skipping seamlessly along the present and several different pasts, reality and fantasy, Freeway is another step forward for a major cartooning talent.