One of the more straightforward of Portland-based cartoonist Sean Christensen’s self-published minis — to say nothing of it also being perhaps the longest, clocking it at a whopping 60 pages — 2017’s Dress Rehearsal is both a figure study and a motion study, but is nevertheless an interpretative and fairly abstract formalist work on its own merits. Which sounds like me leading off on a contradictory foot, and so it probably is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an accurate and truthful summation of the work.

The bulk of the book, as you may have surmised by the cover, is an extended depiction of two people performing a nude dance — for, as it turns out, an appreciative audience — but there’s something more at play here than what can be seen on the surface. As the figures ebb and flow — working with, against, and sometimes in contradistinction to…