Seek You by Kristen Radtke

One of the standard kinds of nonfiction is the "here's a trend; what does it mean?" book. It can be serious or tabloid-y; breezy or deep; based on research or vibes. But I don't think it's been presented in comics form much, if at all.Kristen Radtke, though, seems to be carving out that as her niche. Her first book, 2017's Imagine Wanting Only This, was largely a memoir - a genre very common in graphic books for the last thirty or so years, post-Maus - but also an examination of what it means to want things, and how we know what we want.Her second book came out four years later, and had many of the same elements in a different mix: less memoir, more research, more rigor. Seek You feels like a book that could have been done in prose, possibly by someone like Mary Roach, but the comics format adds depth and focuses attention in ways that prose can't. (Every format has its strengths; the same story can be told well in opera, film, or lyric poetry but it won't be told well the same way.)Seek You is about loneliness, in particular the oft-remarked "epidemic of loneliness" in American life. Radtke's touchstones include scientific research (especially the monkeys of Harry Harlow), ham rad...