Under the Gutter: Graphic Novel Book Club

Gael Kaldera is a self-styled “junkyard dog” who runs with his crew the Metadoggoz: a squad of teenage dirtbags living in the techno-megalopolis, the Metastation. With no place to crash after losing his friend’s guitar, he drops a tab of “metadoggo” at a late night rave with his friends and everything goes sideways. Strobing lights, teeming dance floors and endless skyscrapers form an eerie, futuristic backdrop for this daring, imaginative exploration of race, class, and belonging through the lens of youth culture and science-fiction.

In Metadoggoz, Franco-Vietnamese cartoonist Bérénice Motais de Narbonne constructs an uncomfortably familiar dystopia in which Gael and his friends slip in and out of our “real” world in search of something better. Each shepherded by a guiding spirit, they navigate the indignities of daily life: homelessness, mental illness, violence, and yearning.