If there’s one comic that’s taken me a damn long time to wrap my head around, it’s Greg Stump’s singularly bizarre Disillusioned Illusions, originally self-published by the cartoonist in 2009 and later re-issued by Fantagraphics Underground in 2015. Folks are fond of saying that Seinfeld was a show about nothing, but this goes a step further — it’s a 356-page book about being about nothing.

Told via a strict, minimalist grid that shows its two principal characters (and later a third) in silhouette in front of a blank background with various inanimate objects and accessories making their way in and out of the narrative as necessary, each page is a short strip in and of itself in old-school “Sunday funnies” tradition, complete with either a concrete or vague “gag” ending, but — as with newspaper strips again — each builds upon the other to tell a long-form, overarching story…