As a serious cartoonist, one secretly hopes to create “That Book”: a book that can be passed to a literary-minded person who doesn’t normally read comics; one that doesn’t require any explanation or apology in advance and is developed enough in its attitude, humanity and complexity that it speaks maturely for itself. Comics have come a long way in the last 25 years, finding a grown-up audience with the memoirs Maus, Persepolis and Fun Home, the cartoonists of these works writing about real human life in a flexible visual language that for decades was a medium of puerile adventure pamphlets and daily newspaper gag-administration. But for some reason, serious comics fiction doesn’t appear to have announced itself in the way that serious comics autobiography has. It’s not for lack of trying; along with the equally important experimental art-cartoonists (who are just as, if not more, obscure), we comics-novelists can list dozens of our fellow cartoonists drawing their lives away under the influence of writers such as Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and Zadie Smith. I’m not talking about comics “for” adults, but comics about adults.

New Yorker illustrator Adrian Tomine: 'My inner voice says 'You suck!'' Read more

Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying may finally be That Book, and I’m amazed and heartened by it. Tomine began his career as a formidable teenage prodigy, first self-publishing his sophisticated mini-comic Optic Nerve before shifting it to the flawless roster of the Canadian publishers Drawn and Quarterly, then becoming a regular cover artist for the New Yorker. His 2007 graphic novel, Shortcomings, was a complicated and emotionally nuanced work that made the rest of us cobwebbed cartoonists look up and take notice. Since then, Tomine has married, had two daughters and continued to produce Optic Nerve, the pages of which have previewed the stories in his latest book as he has completed them. But Killing and Dying is no hastily cobbled collection of short pieces assembled simply because they’re done; it’s the most mature and sharp work of Tomine’s career.

Over six stories that vary in length, visual approach and narrative tone, Tomine subtly deploys conceits and approaches specific to his plots, balancing the basic cartoon qualities of facial simplification, background information and colour against each other to suit the particular timbre of each piece. From the densely packed eponymous fifth story to the seemingly light-hearted “Hortisculpture”, Killing and Dying is a varied but consistent bundle of actual, real-life content delivery. A desperation for understanding runs throughout, not only in the way Tomine presents his characters but the way they treat one another. In “Go Owls”, a drug-dealing alcoholic sports fan offers his abused girlfriend the opportunity to hit him back “fair and square”. A mother tries to make sense of a culture and a husband in a letter to her child in “Translated, from the Japanese”. In “Hortisculpture”, when an exasperated wife reassures her gardener-cum-artist husband that he is talented (he’s not), her desperation is laid bare: “I just love you and want you to be happy.” Empathy rolls quietly through this book, sometimes dipping so low beneath the action you’ll fear it might be lost, then suddenly raising the characters so high above their lives you’ll feel it constrict your throat.

There’s a certain alchemical balance required when planning a comics story, unpredictable yet based on a few measurable quantities – such as how characters are drawn, move and act around one another – which can either open up avenues of possibility in the author’s mind or set up roadblocks and shut down all dramatic throughways. Clearly, Tomine has found the former passage, especially in “Amber Sweet”, a story about a girl frequently mistaken for an internet porn star. Here we see an all-too-rare use of the unreliable narrator in a visual medium that, until only very recently, has unimaginatively taken things at face value. The spaces between Tomine’s panels connect with the mature cartoonist’s electromagnetic spark; he knows exactly which facial expressions and gestures to string together as his characters try to convince others of their authenticity or aims.

It’s the reader, however, who must make the largest connections, such as between the narrator of “Amber Sweet” and the sudden appearance of a daughter in another story. Tomine’s omissions are not devious or artsy, but the work of a confident writer mirroring how we conveniently edit out events and people from our memories to suit the narratives we wish had happened. The cumulative leanness and efficiency of these stories have a sharpening effect on one’s own mind.

Tomine is impressively assured in his shifts between people and their varying socioeconomic circumstances. Shrewd portrayals of race are dropped like little bombs, with phrases such as “that Oriental was really on to something!”, “You speak English?”, and “Wrong black dude!” exposing characters’ prejudices without condemning them. Tomine seems always to try to find the good in someone, whether it’s that alcoholic drug-dealing sports fan or the suffocating, constricting father of a suffocated, constricted and stuttering daughter who, unpromisingly, wants to try her luck as a standup comedian. This fifth story, “Killing and Dying”, is the collection’s finest, and may even be the finest short story ever written/drawn in comics. The reader goes through emotions of sympathy, revulsion, love, anger and frustration for all three of the characters as Tomine crams more real, actual human life into 22 pages than most novelists get into 200. Just like life, the best stories don’t provide “closure” but open outwards, and “Killing and Dying” does just that. Few works of art in any medium have brought tears to my eyes, but the last four panels of this one do. It’s a story that gets down so deeply to the heart of where stories come from that there’s no way to get back out without tearing something inside. It will also make you want to hug your child or your spouse. And that, of course, is the best story of all.

• Chris Ware’s latest book is Building Stories (Jonathan Cape).