This past September, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, the graphic novelist Nick Drnaso signed books at the kiosk of his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly. The kiosk’s vertical supports, its horizontal banner, and the table where he was sitting formed a squat rectangular panel, with his upper body at its center. Drnaso (pronounced “dur-nass-oh”) has small dark eyes, a wan complexion, and a narrow black mustache that seems to have been sketched in by a fine-nibbed pen. He was wearing a black shirt. His hair, which is thinning, was hidden beneath a black baseball cap.

Drnaso, who is twenty-nine, was promoting “Sabrina,” his graphic novel about a young man in Chicago who is devastated by his girlfriend’s sudden disappearance. Did Sabrina just leave him, or was she kidnapped or murdered? He flees the mystery, and the attendant media frenzy, seeking refuge with an old buddy in Colorado Springs. Strangers learn of awful news before he does. The Internet first denies him the privacy of his grief, and then, when the fringe weighs in, upends his certainty about Sabrina’s fate. “Sabrina” depicts an eerie world of orderly tract homes, tidy parking lots, and empty streets, where roiling emotions have been displaced onto computer screens, and where powerful people make reckless pronouncements based on bottomless skepticism.

Drnaso, who lives in Chicago, has spent many hours in the darker corners of the Internet. “I have a morbid curiosity in me,” he said. But “Sabrina” is not autobiographical. He told me that he had followed the advice that the celebrated graphic novelist Chris Ware once gave to aspiring cartoonists: throw out your yearbooks. “They are not reference material,” Ware warned. The breadth of vision displayed in “Sabrina” impressed Zadie Smith, who had started reading Drnaso on Ware’s recommendation. She has called it “the best book—in any medium—I have read about our current moment.” “Sabrina” is the intimate story of one man’s suffering, but it also captures the political nihilism of the social-media era—a time when a President can dismiss the murder of a journalist by saying of the perpetrator, “Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.”

When I arrived at the book fair, Drnaso was chatting with an older man who had just bought all the remaining copies of “Sabrina” at the kiosk. The book, which in July became the first graphic novel to be long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, had been sold out in bookstores for months, and the copies available at the festival had come directly from Drawn & Quarterly’s main office, in Montreal. The man had piled his trove into a photocopy-paper box lashed to a hand trolley with a bungee cord; though he almost certainly planned to resell the books, he kept assuring Drnaso, “They’re for friends.” Drnaso, with an unreadable smile, said that he believed him. He signed each one with a spare portrait of one of the book’s characters.

Drnaso is as composed as his panels, which are rendered in crisp, almost rigid lines. He had only complimentary things to tell me about other cartoonists, and insisted that he wasn’t bothered by the fact that Drawn & Quarterly, which specializes in indie comics, had greatly underestimated the demand for “Sabrina.” “I don’t care in the least,” he said. “I never thought there was some sales goal I needed to hit.” He is so modest that, at one point, he offered an apology for his modesty, observing that “self-deprecation can be a little bit overbearing on the person who is forced to listen to it.” The only time I saw him express an impolite emotion was a few weeks after the book fair, when we were in a minor car accident on Milwaukee Avenue, in Chicago. He was taking me on a tour of Logan Square, a fast-gentrifying neighborhood about which he has “mixed feelings.” It is not far from where he lives with his wife, Sarah, and their three cats. We had just eaten a meat-heavy breakfast at a favored diner—“It does the job,” he commented—when a minivan rear-ended us. Drnaso’s car had barely budged, but he was clearly upset. “What the fuck was that?” he said.

Within seconds, though, his emotions had been contained, and he assured the other driver that he would not contact his insurer. “People have let me slide once or twice, and you’re always grateful,” Drnaso explained, as we headed off. “No one wants to deal with insurance.” He noted that, after a fender bender, “usually I end up being the one to apologize—‘I’m sorry my car got in the way of your cell-phone use.’ ” Drnaso’s unfailing courtesy, with its suggestion of a current of hidden anger, finds a visual correlate in his work. He draws his characters in a way that initially suggests minimal emotion: their eyes are dots, their mouths small semicircles. But this aesthetic makes it all the more wrenching when the reader detects a flicker of anguish on one of the placid faces.

Drnaso grew up in Palos Hills, a suburb southwest of Chicago. He went to the local grade school and high school, and disliked them both. When he was around ten, a teen-age boy, a neighbor, sexually molested him multiple times. Ashamed, Drnaso told no one. He had never been an extrovert, but after the assaults he grew withdrawn and depressed. He could never predict when something would revive his memory of the trauma. One day, in a high-school health class, he watched a video on sexually transmitted diseases, and he became fixated on the idea that he had been infected by his abuser. “It was the typical process of blaming yourself,” he told me. “At that point, I hadn’t so much as kissed someone.”

Drnaso remembers this as a time when he mostly tuned others out. He listened to music all day long, with a preference for the indie-folk songwriter Will Oldham, and sometimes even went to sleep with his headphones on. He gave pot and alcohol a try, but neither eased his anxiety. “I discovered cigarettes when I was seventeen,” he said. “That was a great relief.” (For a few years, at least, until he became “terrified of the health effects” and quit.) His older brother was into heavy-metal music, and Drnaso began to join him at concerts and record stores, developing a love for splenetic bands like Acid Bath and Agoraphobic Nosebleed.

The drab tonalities and the deliberate slowness of “Sabrina” challenge a genre that leans toward the overheated. Nick Drnaso, “Sabrina” / Courtesy Drawn & Quarterly

Drnaso began drawing, inspired, in part, by the phantasmagoric album covers of the heavy-metal bands he liked. A close friend was also into cartooning, and he tended to draw comedic panels; Drnaso gravitated toward much bleaker stories, tales of high school as a crucible of humiliation and failure. They bore the mark of Todd Solondz, the director of “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” an abject coming-of-age comedy that Drnaso admired, and of R. Crumb, the counterculture cartoonist. Drnaso assimilated both Crumb’s uncorked adolescent anger and the heavy cross-hatching that expressed it. Drnaso told me that he regrets this early work, which he considers facile in its darkness. When I asked to see some of the drawings, he said that he had destroyed them all. He startled me with the intensity of his renunciation: “I hate the person I was then.”