Regular readers around here are used to seeing me looking at old friend Brian Canini’s works in my Weekly Reading Round-Up columns — short-form works like his tending to lend themselves well to one- or two-paragraph “capsule reviews” (such as the one that’ll be soon forthcoming for the newest issue of his ongoing Plastic People series) — but sometimes even the most modest mini can be well-served by a full-length examination, and his latest, Two Stories, definitely fits that bill.

I’ve always dug Canini’s minimalist cartooning style that utilizes a little to say a lot, his economic imagery drawing the eye precisely where it needs to go with just enough by way of “bells and whistles” to make things interesting though not nearly enough to make them cluttered, but even more than that it’s his thematic versatility that impresses me, and the apparent ease with which he can adapt…