When you combine the talents of a first-rate print journalist and an Eisner-nominated political cartoonist, chances are better than good that the end result will be something pretty damn great — especially when the topic under their collective microscope is equal parts relevant and disturbing — but then, we’ve seen highly respected people from outside the comics field come up short when they’ve decided to “slum it” in our little medium of choice before, so I guess I went into Pratap Chatterjee and Khalil (or, if you prefer, Khalil Bendib)’s new Metropolitan Books-published graphic novel (a term that actually applies in this case), Verax (Latin for “truth-teller”), with a sense of what we’ll call “cautious optimism.” I had little doubt that this “true history of whistleblowers, done warfare, and mass surveillance” would be interesting — but would it also be good?

Chatterjee, for his part, had a front-row seat…