The nine stories in Mark Jowett's Tubers are thematically linked by subways, not just as a means of getting from one place to another but as a zone in which to find intriguing characters. Taking the Paris Métro, the London Underground and New York's MTA system as his muses, Jowett probes the turbulent lives of an assortment of characters. Each city gets three stories, one of which draws upon Jowett's background in the indie music industry, all of them supplemented by two-page illustrations by Matthias Lechner.
These stories often have a violent bent to them, like the one about the confrontation between a man dressed up as Van Gogh's self-portrait and a deranged goalie on their way to the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, but sometimes the weirdness goes in a different direction, as when a teenage photographer becomes a serial voyeur for a couple who like to have sex on the Métro. Lechner's pictures work with tight color spectrums; one spread might be dominated by reds and blues, the next by oranges and yellows. Tubers comes with a 45 RPM single; the "Tweety Bird" song actually plays a role in the eponymous story, though its cute, poppish tone is at odds with the story's fraught tensions. (You can download MP3s for all of the stories; most tend toward mood-setting electronica, while a few offer direct commentary.) Though the quality is uneven and O. Henry himself would blush to dare some of these trick endings, when Jowett gets deep enough into his characters' heads, the results can be arresting. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com