XTC69

By the creator of Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists, this sarcastic sci-fi send-up opens as Commander Jessica Campbell and her all-woman team of space explorers land on Earth, left vacant after a long-ago apocalypse, to locate “males for our own planet to breed with.” They find a cryonic chamber and free... another Jessica Campbell, a chip-munching slacker from the 21st century who can’t tell them anything about her planet’s understanding of quantum physics but can expound at length on the Harry Potter series. Together they set back off into space in search of men, but are none too pleased with what they discover. Campbell’s simple, thickly inked black-and-white artwork, complete with details like a cutaway diagram of the spaceship, gives her graphic novel the feel of a children’s book. But the content, with its cast of radical female separatists exploring planets and fighting space bros, is closer to the material found in feminist underground comics of the 1960s. Despite the nudge-nudge title and suggestively-shaped spaceships, there isn’t much raunch; the subversion is found in cheerful machismo-bashing and the book’s refusal to take itself seriously. This oddball escapade delights from opening salvo to closing quip. (May)