Animal Stories by Peter and Maria Hoey

We've established that I'm not comfortable writing about comics art-styles: I can occasionally swing some interesting comparisons, and I have a little vocabulary, but I'm really more at home thinking about and explaining story.

But I feel like I need to start with the art here. Peter and Maria Hoey use a crisp, tight, digital style for the six linked pieces in Animal Stories. Faces have minimal expressions - smiling is the most frequent, and it's almost templated. Motions similarly are standardized, as if these are outputs of an engine. Backgrounds sometimes show a wavy pattern, and panel transitions give a sense of limited animation, of a few moments chained together to appear to be moving.

It all looks to my eye very much like a computer game. Not a big AAA game, nothing with a major ad budget. Nothing the fast-twitch crowd is looking for. But some kind of online dating sim, or a quirky point-and-click in the depths of Steam, or an old Flash-based RPG on a disused site somewhere. Something that's not new, and not hot, and not well-known, but maybe has a cult following or maybe is the digital equivalent of that mysterious magic store that appears one gloomy night in your hometown and is never seen again.

That's what this looks like: like nothing else I've seen in comics and yet deeply familiar, entirely normal, a storytelling art style from another medium. It looks like something where the viewer is important, where the viewer has - or should have - more control than the reader of a book actually does.

There are six stories in Animal Stories, all of which somehow touch a single pet shop in what I imagine is Brooklyn. (One of the Hoeys lives there, and a street named "Atlantic" is a prominent nearby landmark in the book.) The stories are separate, but connected. All are narrated, by a voice outside any of the stories - like the text boxes in a game, I think, a tutorial to tell the viewer how to understand this world. All are enigmatic and told with a flat affect, drained of emotion.

Every one centers on an animal. First, the pigeons kept on a rooftop by "the girl." Then a dog, inexplicably found swimming far out at sea. Then a squirrel, in a very biblical city park. Then another dog, with an unexpected job. Then a cat, who brings back something unexpected in a hairball. Then a parrot, in that pet shop, at a time of change.

The stories are interlinked, as I said - not tightly, but importantly. We see the same places, and circle some of the same ideas. The stories are fabulist rather than realistic, unlikely and impossible events told quietly and matter-of-factly, in that same chilly narrative voice. And the art, again, looks like nothing else I've seen in comics, but is at the same time deeply familiar - maybe, also, at times like a pamphlet or government bulletin. Animal Stories is impressive, and unlike anything else, and entirely itself.