Aron Nels Steinke, self-published

There are many ways Big Plans is no better than the autobiographical mini comic your hipster roommate used to crank out. Parts of it are embarrassingly slight. Boo hoo, the author went to a comic store with no Fantagraphics books. If he couldn’t draw, he’d have to go home and blog about it.

But Big Plans has two advantages over most autobio minis. One is a thirty-page story in which some interesting things happen. The autobiographical stand-in and his girlfriend encounter suspicious types at an airport, and decide to leave the flight rather than risk a terrorist attack. This isn’t a thriller, of course, but what we get to see–escalating fear, the giddy feeling of triumph once a decision is made–strikes true, as does the amusing epilogue.

The other, and perhaps more important, advantage, is a design element that makes the comic fun to read even when the story flags. The design rests on a simple innovation: Steinke’s gutters are enormous, leaving each page’s six tiny panels floating in a patriarchal cross of negative space. Steinke didn’t invent the floating panels technique–Chester Brown may have, but I’ve hardly researched the topic–but he uses it well. The tiny panels leave room for only simple, pleasantly iconic drawings, more often than not just a head and a line of dialog. There’s rarely any room for a background, but Steinke makes careful use of blacks to keep the pages visually appealing.

A side note: I will bet a shiny new nickel that in the actual incident the story is based on the two suspicious characters were Arabs, and Steinke changed them to an indeterminate ethnicity to preserve his liberal credentials.