Sort of a ‘yes, and…’ style story in mini-comic form from Ben Sears, but that works because Sears’ art is delightful, and he’s somehow able to create quite a bit of relative stakes within that ‘yes, and’ing.

“Relative” does a lot of heavy lifting there, since it’s about whether or not a cat and bird are gonna get some food. But since I found myself so wrapped up in that quest that the final panel made me smile – I mean, the stakes must’ve been legit then, yeah?

We start far afield from that, though, which is kind of the ‘yes, and’ vibe: The Sweeper, given its title, seems to be about the ‘bot tasked with doing overnight sweeping along the streets of Ben’s tech-geared Double+ future world. An employee of Apple City Municipal Upkeep closes up shop for the night, and hands a dutiful bot an extendable broom, waves so long, and lets said robo get to it. Which it does, with a whistle and expressive appreciation for the treasures it finds and pockets. It also picks up some friends: the cat and bird duo, and then we switch over to their food hunt, as accompanied by our sweeper.

Done up in light-blue on off-white, Sears’ humans and round and square figures have a kind of Wallace and Gromit design. The 2015 / mini-comic edition of the Double+ world is fairly stripped down in comparison to the massive amount of detail Ben often puts into fuller works, but he knows when to give us grounding with backgrounds, and when it works to just slap The Sweeper on a solid color background.

The story, as per ‘yes, and’ is ultimately slight, and wandering, but the benefit of the short length is that you can, indeed, get “swept up” – sigh – in those relative stakes very easily.