Not your average comic book

Israeli author Etgar Keret is known and loved, especially among younger readers, for his short, potent stories. So Jetlag, which pairs five of his tales with five different illustrators, seems a natural fit. It's clear just five pages in that this is not your average comic book. The first story, Hatrick, has a magician retiring in despair after his innocent pulling-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat finale yields increasingly horrific results. Keret's deadpan tone and the restrained Picasso-esque illustrations by Batia Kolton are a perfect foil for the brutal story. Things get progressively weirder from there: X is about a girl who lives in a village near the gates of Hell and falls in love with a vacationing corpse. There's also a zanily drawn, surreal plane-crash saga, a simple tale of a boy and his piggy bank and a story about a man who falls for a tightrope walker but ends up with her pet monkey. Highly recommended.