In Jillian Tamaki’s graphic short story Half Life, a young woman called Helen tries on a previously too-small dress to work out whether or not she has lost weight. And, yes, it seems that her friends, half-jealous and half-admiring, were right. Ta-dah! She really is smaller. Before the mirror in her guest bedroom, she performs a delighted little twirl.
After this, though, things begin to get weird. She is visibly shrinking – and fast, too. In the street, she is mistaken for a child; at home, she can only stir the pan on her hob if she stands on a chair. Her sister, keen to protect her ever more miniature dignity, gamely stitches her a new wardrobe of doll-sized clothes but, alas, she doesn’t get to wear them for very long. In the next frame, we find her sleeping in a match box, and in the one after that, she is living in a special glass enclosure designed by doctors to prevent her being devoured by an insect or swept up on a passing bit of pollen. No one knows what has caused this condition, but in all likelihood, it won’t be long before Helen is invisible to the human eye.
As I read Half Life, I kept thinking of Roald Dahl’s The Twits, another blackly funny story in which a woman believes she is shrinking. However, the Eisner award-winning Tamaki isn’t playing her tale for laughs alone. She’s also asking a more serious question, which is: just how small, literally and metaphorically, are females expected to be? (Answer: very.) Tamaki’s short comics, as they appear in her aptly titled new collection, Boundless, all have this surface lightness; they’re never anything less than droll. But something sharper and darker is simultaneously at work below. Fleeting as they are – most can be read in as long as it takes to order and receive a latte – each one is as indelible as it is singular.
In 1. Jenny, a woman becomes obsessed with the version of herself she finds on a “mirror Facebook”, while in Darla! a middle-aged TV executive reflects on the “sitcom-porno” he made in the 1990s and its unpleasantly ironic fascination – “a little too winky winky” – for a new generation of hip young men. Bedbug describes the hours and days before a couple call in the pest killers, a decision that will come to stand, for one of them at least, as a symbol of their marriage (when the wife insists on their buying a new bed, it isn’t only for reasons to do with critters); Sex Coven is about a mysterious computer download, and the cult that builds around it. Each one is so beautifully told that after a while you begin to feel that Tamaki, whose last book, SuperMutant Magic Academy, was a New York Times bestseller, is capable of almost anything. And perhaps she is. To those thinking of entering the Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story prize: truly, these are models of the form.
• Boundless by Jillian Tamaki is published by Drawn & Quarterly (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
