Everything Is Flammable

For 20 years now, Bell has been making comics that create marvelous depths out of everyday moments, sometimes with low-key fantastical turns, like a woman who turns herself into a chair so she won't be a bother. The turn in Everything Is Flammable, her first book-length story, is crushingly real: her mom's house has burned down, and Gabrielle, barely scraping by in New York, has to travel to remote northern California, where her mom is barely scraping by, to deal. Their efforts, their anxieties, their failures, and their small successes (often thanks to the help of friends who are scraping by too) build into a surprisingly affecting whole; imagine if Roz Chast had been raised by screwed-up, dirt-poor hippies.