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Skyscrapers of the Midwest doesn't refer to architectural history or a coffee-table overview of skylines. The cover is sleight-of-hand from illustrator and cartoonist Joshua Cotter, who grew up in rural Middle America: The skyscrapers in his achingly-rendered tale of childhood anguish are grain silos and water towers.

Cotter's created an episodic journey through the lives of two young brothers, anthropomorphic catlike beings who negotiate growing up in an increasingly capricious and cruel world. From an adult perspective, the stakes vary wildly. Some passages concern life-changing moments like a grandmother's death; others offer heart-rending episodes of smaller grief, yet equally tragic to a young boy, like his beloved stuffed T. Rex doll being kidnapped and thrown to the (imagined) wolves by bullies. With deft insight, Cotter reminds us how those little losses can devastate.

Originally a self-published mini-comic venture that grew into four intermittently published issues from AdHouse Books, this collected volume makes it easy to trace the development of Cotter's illustrative style. About halfway through, his heavily rendered line work becomes more precise and beautiful. It's also fun to observe how he plays with form. Cotter apes Sunday comic strips, satirizes school yearbooks and presents ball-busting heartbreak with a splash-page-happy send-up of 1990s-era Marvel and Image Comics.

Thankfully, while there's enough pathos in these pages to give Chris Ware a run for the trauma crown, Cotter aims for balance by also depicting moments of joy -- sometimes in fantastical passages that recall Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. As the book winds down, he delivers a message via a character's fever dream that is both comforting and profound. Afterlife visitations are an overused trope, but this nonlinear fugue gets it just right. Then, with a pitch-perfect conclusion, Cotter steers away from the misanthropic edge Skyscrapers flirts upon, but he doesn't indulge in over-sentimentality either.