Everyday life is weird enough, but it’s also nowhere near weird enough — and that’s where Stella Murphy’s cartooning comes in, specifically her 2019 Caboose-published collection Hometime, which defuses the tension inherent in much of what passes for commonplace domesticity by operating on it like a surgeon. Her humor is her scalpel, and she utilizes it with precision, but she confines her cuts to the margins and then stands back and allows the fissures to spread and grow.

It’s an approach that works — hell, it works spectacularly and consistently — but it takes an awful lot of nerve and an awful lot of trust. And in order to be effective, of course, trust has to be a two-way street, so Murphy places as much of it in her readers as she does in her own abilities. Where other artists go for the obvious, then, she goes for…