Antoine Orand’s Sébastien is a compact color comic about a solitary game of darts gone awry, but do not let its ostensibly mundane narrative and shortness fool you into thinking that it is somehow simplistic or superficial. Far from it — packed with delightfully effective experimentation, this staple-bound booklet upends numerous comic conventions, from color to format to spacing.

In a reversal of the tonal balance typical of comics, this work’s risograph-printed pages concentrate color into vibrant yellows and oranges that flood and vivify the background gutters, while the panels instead center around cool, desaturated blue-greens. In a sophisticated play with pacing, the panels also skillfully map time across space, extending moments and breaking up movement across gutters for humorous and immersive effect. The end result is a visual pull into the usually neglected gutter space, a lingering experience that replicates the attentiveness and hesitation of dart-throwing. Yet another of Orand’s achievements is his inventive conflation of panel and motion, structure and gesture, with the panel frames buckling and curving into slick motion grids that mirror and amplify the trajectory and speed of the thrown dart. Sure to refresh and charm any comic aficionado, Sébastien is also a promising introduction for the uninitiated.