E-Mail This Article to a Friend BY THE BOOK Karl Stevens’s Guilty pleasure BY MIKE MILIARD

Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes deal with deadening suburban ennui. Joe Sacco applies pen and ink to dangerous international hot spots. But only Karl Stevens has given Boston’s twentysomething hipsters their own graphic novel.

Stevens’s self-published Guilty unfolds in real locales around town: sidewalks in Allston (where he lives), Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum (where he works), the Cellar bar in Cambridge (where he drinks). And it shows us a world most of us know well: one of indolence and lust, of beers and smokes and soda-bottle bongs. Stevens renders these quotidian scenes in beautiful black and white, recasting hundreds and hundreds of photographs as gorgeously alive drawings, stringing them into a simple but resonant narrative. As he does, his eye lingers on tiny, telling details: a video-game controller dangling lazily from a stoner’s hand, a ballpoint pen being fidgeted with nervously.

Downstairs in the Cellar, over pints of Guinness — just like the two half-empty glasses that decorate his book’s end papers — Stevens, a sometime Phoenix illustrator, explains that he "hadn’t really done anything like this before. Nothing that was really published, and definitely nothing this size." He says Guilty originally existed as a short story, just 24 pages. But when that work was submitted to the Xeric Foundation, a nonprofit established by the co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to offer financial assistance to struggling artists, it yielded Stevens some cash assistance. "Once I got the grant, I decided that it was better to do a book," he says. "I wanted to expand on these characters."

Guilty’s shaggy-dog story follows a loser-ish lug, Mark, after he has a chance encounter with an ex-fling, Ingrid, and tries to set up an ultimately disastrous round of reunion drinks. Along the way, we meet their friends and co-workers — each of whom was drawn from photos of Stevens’s friends and co-workers. "Ingrid is Christina, my girlfriend," he explains, flipping through the pages and pointing out panels. "Mark is my friend Andy. That’s my friend Ben; I’ve known him for six years. That’s Christina’s roommate, Colleen." And there’s Stevens himself, sneaked into a few scenes — "just like Hitchcock!" — sitting impassively on the sofa, sipping a Sam Adams. Still, Stevens insists that Guilty is no roman à clef. "It’s all pretty much fiction," he says. "Any time I run into an ex-girlfriend, I try to ignore them. I’m a bastard."

Stevens spent "hours upon hours" photographing his pals. (Persuading them to pose wasn’t hard; he just bought ’em beer.) Then he went back to the drawing board, so to speak, transforming his photos into delicate line drawings, breathing with intricately inked cross-hatching, on 11" x 17" panels. He says he tried to strike a balance between making his subjects look lifelike and making them ever-so-slightly stylized. The challenge, he says "was to not make it look like bad acting." Perhaps surprisingly, his influences were not so much contemporary graphic novelists as "the old masters, the artists that I love and respect. I want to carry on that tradition." Dürer? Leonardo? "Sure, sure," he says. "Right down the list. Rembrandt. All the big names in the canon." It might be tempting to scoff at Stevens’s comparing himself to those titans, but the curator of the Fogg print department bought all of Guilty’s original panels, and there’s a chance they’ll one day make it into the museum’s collection.

Next up for Stevens is something even bigger, a veritable epic where each chapter is about 70 pages (as long as Guilty in its entirety). He sees it as a story about a couple’s fading relationship, augmented with an interlocking plot involving four different sets of characters. He’s already started drawing, and is constantly taking photographs. He shows me some stills on his digital camera — turning away momentarily to "make sure there’s no nude photos of ‘Ingrid’ on here" — speeding through image after image of coursing traffic, Cambridge cityscapes, a guy drinking beer. This time, the drawings will be done with fluid brushes of gouache and watercolor, not etched laboriously in pen and ink. "I gotta get away from cross-hatching," Stevens says. "That almost drove me crazy."

Guilty is available for $9.99 from Million Year Picnic and the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Comicopia in Boston, and New England Comics in Allston.