Class Photo

Like any good writer, cartoonist Robert Triptow likes to invent stories. When he stumbled across a real-life class photo of an anonymous 1937 public school under a pile of garbage, his imagination took off. Several years later, the result is the utterly charming, completely original graphic novellaClass Photo. Using the photo as a springboard, each student’s fictionalized life is depicted in one- page installments. Triptow weaves these imagined lives in and out like so many dedications in a yearbook, mixing in social satire, elegant cartooning, occasionally disgusting hilarity, and plenty of good, clean fun. What began as a self-motivating formal exercise has yielded one of the more whimsically engaging, original, and entertaining graphic books in recent memory.