Little sisters can be sweetness and light, pesky and sarcastic, or Bad-Seed-level psychopaths. Sibling relations are a venerable topic of YA. Addison doesn’t hear those conversations, so connecting with her little sister is hard.

(Neither have any of the kids she escaped with, the sole surviving group of the event.) Lexa communicates only in a psychic link she shares with her rag doll, Vespertine, who was changed by the Spill into something more than a doll. The problem that Addison faces in preserving what’s left of her family culture is that her younger sister, Lexa, hasn’t said a word since the night of the Spill. So when a family is shattered, the leftover members are like survivors of Atlantis or Krypton. Only the people inside it really understand the rules and customs. Every family is its own world, after all. The older sister, Addison, is left with the task of raising and providing for Lexa, which is in some ways like trying to keep a culture alive. It’s about two sisters, Addison and Lexa, who’ve lost their parents and hometown in an event called the Spill. Then things start getting weird.Spill Zone is about what we’re left with after our family is destroyed. Highly illegal, but after all a girl has to do what she can to get by. But Addison sneaks in to take photos of the bizarre phenomena that occur throughout the spill zone so she can sell them to collectors. Nobody in or out (even supposing there were people who could get out). It's been three years and the town is still in quarantine. Addison's parents were working in the hospital and so, like everyone else, didn't make it out in time.

Addison was out of town at the time but her sister had another kind of luck, she and a school bus full of kids somehow made it out but never spoke again. And now everything's straight up nuts there. Three years ago, Poughkeepsie (which I only know of through Looneytoons) was destroyed in some sort of toxic mix-up disaster involving a nuclear and a nanobot production facility. Hilary Sycamore (the colourist) is absolutely on fire here. In any case, this book would not likely survive being B&W because its use of colour is so integral to what it is, to what it is doing.

Like with Asterios Polyp only not quite so much. It's one of those books where the colourist really matters. Genre notes: disaster recovery, post-minor-apocalypse Daily Graphic Novel Recommendation 163 Spill Zoneīy by Scott Westerfield, Alex Puvilland, and Hilary Sycamore

Spill zone 2