Shutter Volume 1

BOOKLIST (STARRED) -- When she's seven years old, Kate Kristopher's father takes her to the moon-the first step in carrying on her family's legacy of exploring the vast realms of the imagination. Now 27, Kate is jaded and aimless, an Alice who's seen too much Wonderland. Worse yet, when she becomes the target of both a kidnapping and an assassination attempt, she is cast down a rabbit hole of painful family revelations. Keatinge and Del Duca have created a contemporary world that teems with casual miracles and feels all the more real and lived in for it. Crammed with the elements of children's storybooks, the art offers soft lines and a panoply of almost-recognizable storybook figures that honor those hallowed childhood recollections. This evocation makes Kate's adulthood disillusionment all the more poignant and gives Shutter an entertainingly subversive kick, though the deeper emotions never derail the sense of humor, wonder, and adventure. With a mixed-race heroine and a transsexual best friend, Shutter also displays a higher-than-average level of diversity, and that's not even counting the psychotically upbeat cat, the mustachioed robot, and the divorced and destitute worm. Fair warning, though: volume one ends right in the thick of the action.