Cartoonist Mark Kalesniko returns to the industrial British Columbia town of Bandini for his third graphic novel, Mail Order Bride. After the thinly veiled autobiography of 1995's Alex and 1997's Why Did Pete Duel Kill Himself?, the former Disney animator dedicates his newest tome to a slightly more conventional narrative about the awkward marriage of a meek 39-year-old comic-shop owner and the bright young woman whose passage he paid from Korea. When the story begins, Monty Wheeler is an emotionally stunted virgin whose apartment is crammed with toys, games, and memorabilia. The tall, refined Kyung Seo doesn't quite match his mental model of a petite, docile Oriental wife, but he still displays her proudly to his family and friends as his "ornamental." As with Kalesniko's previous comics work, Mail Order Bride is told with about three times as many wordless frames as panels with dialogue. The expressive figure drawing, the choice employment of repeated imagery, and the artist's skillful pacing serve to make connections between Monty's collector's mentality and his attempts to keep his own wife preserved on a shelf (in traditional dress, no less). Kalesniko louses up an already none-too-subtle bit of commentary by having Kyung Seo fly into a rage at the book's climax, shouting, "You love a fantasy! I'm just the Oriental doll stuck between the troll doll and Barbie!" in a piece of overstatement that almost sinks Mail Order Bride's elegant graphic design. Fortunately, ridicule of arrested adolescents is not Kalesniko's sole objective. By the time the marriage of contrivance begins to fall apart, the plot has acquired a couple of strong new threads, spun from Kyung Seo's growing confidence and her decision to attend classes at a local art school. Kalesniko pricks the pretensions of scholarly aesthetes who jump at the opportunity to fetishize her exoticism in their own art projects, and he allows his leading lady to express an unappealing arrogance as she realizes that she can push Monty around. Then the tale dissolves into the same melancholy ambiguity that has marked all of the artist's projects to date. Kalesniko is less celebrated than contemporaries such as Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, and Joe Sacco, perhaps because the stories he tells are less ambitious and multi-tiered. But his nuanced linework has virtually no equal in the medium: The clean brushstrokes of his faces and the unruly mess he makes of human hair say as much about the collision of fantasy and reality as any word balloon in the book.