TIN MAN

A melancholy tin woodsman and a troubled teenager help each other through bad patches in this debut graphic novel.

Expanding on a self-published comic released in 2017, Madson connects Solar, who has abandoned both engineering college plans and the spacecraft she was helping her little brother, Fenn, build in the garage to hang out with sociopathic boyfriend Merrick, and funnel-topped Campbell. Campbell is struggling to understand what feelings are all about ever since he left the Tin Forest to get his clockwork heart. Adolescent readers confronting life-altering changes and decisions of their own will have no trouble identifying with Solar and Campbell, who, even when surrounded by others, look lonely and introspective in the precisely drawn, palely hued art. Initially drawn together by their fondness for Fenn, whose hurt and sense of being betrayed by his once-idolized sister haven’t stopped him from working enthusiastically on the rocket, the two become fast friends united by a mutual loss of certainty about what life has to offer them. But along with including among his various borrowings from the Wizard of Oz books a massive climatic whirlwind for drama, the author casts sneering, violent Merrick as such a thoroughly rotten apple that Solar’s eventual breakaway comes as an easy choice that points the way (Oz-like) to a tidy, happy ending. Nearly all the lanky human figures in the atmospherically wintry settings read as White.

There’s plenty of heart, and not just the mechanical kind, in this spare, sensitive friendship tale.