The best $4.5 that you can spend this year will be on a copy of David Colliers's Surviving Saskatoon, a comic book account of the wrongful persecution and conviction of David Milgaard in Saskatoon in 1971 (when Milgaard was declared innocent in 1999 he was Canada's longest serving prisoner). Collier lived in Saskatoon at the time of murder that Milgaard went to jail for, and this is a story of Saskatoon and the inertial forces of civic culture as much as it is the story of David Milgaard (Collier's subtitle is "Milgaard and Me"). This is comic book art at its finest: every panel works, every page works; the story is textured, thick, utterly compelling. I couldn't put it down. Published by Drawn and Quarterly, Box 4856, Montreal H2V 4S8.