Don’t let the sheer physical size of writer Viken Berberian and artist Yann Kebbi’s The Structure Is Rotten, Comrade intimidate you — much. Yeah, it’s a hefty hardcover tome that Fantagraphics has published here, clocking in at 320 pages (I assume its original French-language edition is roughly the same, give or take a title page or two), but it reads reasonably quickly. Much of the real wok comes later, when one mentally “unpacks” everything that’s been absorbed at breakneck speed.

That’s because this is a conceptually dense book in the extreme — and yes, I most assuredly do mean that as a compliment. But perhaps I’m pre-disposed toward appreciating it given what’s been happening not in the Armenian capital city of Yerevan, where this story takes place, but in my own hometown of Minneapolis.

Like too many municipalities to mention — maybe even yours — we’ve been inundated here in…