Don’t call Ron Tanner’s new illustrated novel dystopian. It’s not. Though Kiss Me, Stranger centers on a nameless city run by a megalomaniacal president in the midst of a civil war, the enduring message is a rumination on hope and family. You’re not supposed to enjoy dystopia as much as Kiss Me, Stranger makes you.

Tanner, who serves as a professor of writing at Loyola University (note: This writer took a class he taught), builds to this point in the story’s short, 168-page run. (The book totals 184 pages, with extra illustrations and such.) Written during a troubling divorce, the book is an obvious metaphor but doesn’t descend into cliché, thanks to a great deal of brilliantly subtle humor. It’s evident in the opening sentence: “Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact, which I grated meticulously as if it were hard cheese.” Tanner’s wit is also evident in a series of more than 50 illustrations, which he did himself.

Stranger’s pictures are no mere scribbling in the margins; it’s more apt to say that the book is animated rather than illustrated. Tanner’s drawings provide a unique insight into the way that the narrator, Penelope, and her 14 children see their warring world—which, in turn, helps you fully understand their development. The drawings also provide a humorous reprieve from the characters’ bleak circumstances, switching the atmosphere between despondently dark and playfully light.

This humor is very honest about the dynamic of a family with nothing but each other. Forced out of their run-down rowhouse by a vengeful metal collector, the family must bind together in the city’s landfill while they wait out the war’s end, often dining on paste and government-issued cheese simply to fill their stomachs. Without humor, they wouldn’t survive.

With Kiss Me, Stranger Tanner uses the writing and illustration to make his very real and palpable cast of characters come alive: You develop a genuine concern for their fates. Many dystopian novels fall apart by harping too hard on parables without allowing the humanity of the characters to surface. Despite the fact that Kiss Me, Stranger is, as Tanner admits, an anti-war novel, that agenda never obscures the plot. In fact, they work concurrently—two cogs in a perfect machine. How exactly was this machine built? City Paper sat down with Tanner to find out.

City Paper : So this is your first novel, correct?

Ron Tanner: Yes it is [laughing] my first published novel. I’ve got some other ones I’m sitting on but, yeah, this is my first published novel.

CP : Why did you decide to do Kiss Me, Stranger as an illustrated novel?