This new version of Absence is the business; certainly more accessible than the original, if, inevitably, less personal and singular - readers won't quite inhabit Andy Luke's world to the same degree as with the original. The fine-tuned cartooning of Stephen Downey is lovely, though - the resultant loss in intimacy but gain in clarity and polish is a worthwhile compromise to reach a wider audience with a valuable message. (Though it remains striking, the one sequence I definitely prefer in the original is the oblique quality of the helmeted drift into seizure, which possesses slightly blunted edge in Downey's depiction.)