Here in Hades

A confession: Every week, I submit an entry to the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest. It’s not that I believe I’m in the class of Bruce Eric Kaplan -- the magazine’s noted cartoonist, writer for both “Six Feet Under” and “Seinfeld” -- but that his humor and dark cynicism have always seemed so effortless. Surely even I could come up with a winner.

In “Edmund and Rosemary Go to Hell,” Kaplan clearly debunks that vision: Viewing life and then distilling it for graphic humor is challenging, particularly when the goal is more sentimental than acerbic.

Kaplan entrusts this cartoon world to cat-parents Edmund and Rosemary (who were also featured in 2005’s “Every Person on the Planet”), a stultified Brooklyn couple flummoxed by a loud cellphone conversation, “violent, crazy, drug addicts” masquerading as teenagers who do “nine million things at once” and, blight of all blights, coffeehouses filled with people calling themselves writers. And then there’s the traffic, big-box chains that fail to provide their workers health insurance and Edmund’s extended family.

The only conclusion Edmund can make, based on the overwhelming evidence, is that we are all in hell, a fact confirmed by a bureaucrat who gives the couple a winning lotto ticket to salve the pain.

Edmund and Rosemary search for a way out with a kind of stubborn middle-class sweetness. The result is a picture book for adults seeking affirmation: It’s all worth it, whatever it is. Saint-Exupery knew that when he wrote, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” a sentiment Kaplan echoes with both words and the twinkle of gestures found in the shadows of his pen.

Kaplan’s spare drawings, which have always taken advantage of the weight of white space and subtle line movements to convey personality, provide a welcome bit of soul here amid an uncharacteristic lack of cutting societal critique. Although “Edmund and Rosemary Go to Hell” does not reach the hilarity of Kaplan’s single-panel efforts, it succeeds in drawing a world where being in love is heaven enough.