Poet and memoirist Kercheval (Space) makes a vibrant graphic debut in this gathering of loosely connected reveries on family history. Pithy, introspective vignettes recall a childhood sidelined by illness and a back brace, and marked by her parents’ WWII wartime traumas. Kercheval’s father maintains a haunted reserve, while her mother, who served on a ship transporting wounded soldiers “who had lost limbs. Or their minds,” lapses into drinking and depression. Kercheval writes with a musing, inquisitive voice but also embroiders her accounts with fairy tale flourishes. The description of the dozens of antique clocks displayed in her friend Jackie’s house gives way to a journey through a Narnia-like door to a distant forest; elsewhere, there are pricked fingers and glass coffins. When Kercheval’s mother later struggles with Alzheimer’s, she too braids fantasy and memory, recalling a fearsome wolf that once saved her from appendicitis. Kercheval’s arresting, mostly full page pastel illustrations possess a dreamlike quality reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall (with nods to Cocteau). These evocative personal allegories unearth the knotted roots feeding a very particular family lore. Readers will be beguiled. (Sept.

Reviewed on 09/20/2024 | Details & Permalink

Massie (All My Ghosts) draws on his own teen years playing in a grunge band in this mellow graphic novel set in a small Appalachian town in the 1990s. Mark forms a band called Magnesium Mama with a group of friends and fellow alt-rock fans at his high school. In between gigs at the Bistro, the town’s only venue, they deal with the familiar troubles of aspiring musicians, including relationship drama (drummer Phil, rowdy and perpetually single, warns that lead vocalist Jay’s girlfriend will become “our own Yoko”). But the conservative backwoods setting adds an extra dimension to their rock rebellion: Mark hides his Nirvana tapes by labeling them as Christian rock band Jars of Clay, punk-styled bass player Dave is targeted with homophobic harassment, and a school brawl breaks out between the “grungies” and the “rednecks” (who listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd). Between the music, the kids pull raunchy pranks, smoke pot, go camping, find and lose love, and slowly grow up. Mark starts making minicomics and discovers that art and music help him deal with depression: “When that nothing feeling hits... I just make something.” Massie’s loose, upbeat art has just enough of a rough edge to make it feel right for a story about grunge rock. This bittersweet blast from the past will strike a chord with recovering high school outcasts. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/20/2024 | Details & Permalink

With sparse text and an abundance of color, Booth (Things to Do Instead of Killing Yourself) paints her psychological landscape in an idiosyncratic collection full of humor and catharsis. A self-proclaimed loner who doesn’t like to feel “trapped,” Booth struggles in relationships, weighing the “burdens of solitude” against the “burdens of codependence.” “I think my sexual preference is ‘attracted to anything capable of giving me attention,’ ” she declares, depicting herself swooning before not just humans of varying genders, but also an alien, a cat, and a plastic bag blown by the wind into her face. She grapples with depression, anxiety, and anger, and copes by drinking and binge-eating. Five years after getting sober, she laments, “Healing is a slow thing and I feel impatient,” over images of her collecting trash from her yard. The vignettes depict the process of self-discovery as painstaking, nonlinear, and open-ended—but also funny and oddly beautiful. Those qualities are keenly evident in Booth’s depictions of herself—wide-bodied, messy-haired, and clothed in whimsical prints—in a series of fantastical naturescapes. Brisk and satisfying, this marks Booth as an ideal tour guide through rough times. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/30/2024 | Details & Permalink

The crusading journalist who inspired George Orwell’s Animal Farm searches for a story and finds hell in this propulsive if uneven nonfiction graphic narrative scripted by Gaslit Nation podcaster Chalupa (Dictatorship). In 1933, bright-eyed Welsh journalist Gareth Jones goes on a fact-finding mission to the Soviet Union. Once in Moscow, Jones finds that nobody is willing to go on the record about the Communists’ mysteriously funded “spending spree” on “new tanks and planes [during a] global economic collapse” or why New York Times correspondent William Duranty—depicted as a monstrously craven Soviet dictation machine—was murdered when he started asking the same questions. After sneaking away from his minder to Ukraine, Jones uncovers grim evidence of the Holodomor famine. Chalupa’s script delivers the horrors of what Jones found (including roving bands of cannibals) in a short but pulverizing sequence. The thicket of obfuscation Jones battles to bring this story to the world is nearly as damning as the inhumanity he witnessed. Unfortunately, Rodriguez’s art can feel staid in some sections. Still, this is a rousing yet haunting portrait of journalistic idealism. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/30/2024 | Details & Permalink

A world-weary cop is forced out of retirement to settle old scores once and for all in this stylish dystopian mystery from Van Poelgeest (Little Bird) and Filipe (Stranger Things: Tales from Hawkins). In a Blade Runner–inspired future world, burly former police detective Bennie Strikman has fled gritty Toronto and wants nothing more than to raise his son in their tranquil cabin in the heart of the Canadian wilderness. But an attack on the government’s clandestine Keeper Program forces him back into service and into the moody urban fray. Naturally, things don’t go as planned—and it turns out Strikman’s got secrets of his own, including mysterious psychic abilities. As he reconnects with old colleagues and lovers in classic noir fashion, each new revelation pulls the grizzled veteran further into a web of intrigue and deception. Though Van Poelgeest and Filipe generally hit familiar story beats, they breathe new life into the “one last job” trope. Van Poelgeest’s hardboiled plot provides the perfect backdrop for Filipe’s atmospheric artwork, complemented by the masterful colors of painter Patricio Delpeche. The result is a polished if well-worn neo-noir gem. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/30/2024 | Details & Permalink

Buttercup (Real Realm) weaves edgy social commentary into a playful time warp in this enchanting and vivacious first volume of their ongoing Afrodiasporic sci-fi/fantasy webcomic. Eugenne, a nonbinary apprentice midwife, brings their new partner, Albertx, to meet another pair of lovers and complete their ambitions for a polycule. As a bonus, they lay out chamomile tea, blunts, and candles for a moon worship ritual. At the gathering, Eugenne has a vision of a group of midwives from 3,000 years ago donning armor to protect a village under attack while a woman gives birth. Thus begins a series of visions Eugenne exeriences over the following days, all of ancient warrior midwives. After a complicated delivery with their own patient, a trans man, a distraught Eugenne begins to find they can tap into a cosmic force and “warp the umbra,” manipulating the physical world (and ultimately people’s emotional reality) by changing objects’ volume/density and place in time and space when faced with threats, mainly from cisgender men. A mysterious figure monitors Eugenne and their partners as they question this awakening, hinting at plot points to unfold in future volumes. Buttercup assembles a delightfully diverse cast of queer characters, who chatter in dialogue truncated like chat messages (complete with emoji). The muted color palette, transportive wordless sequences, and realistic midwifery details blend into an adventure that’s equal parts authentic and mystical. Fans of the magical girl genre will be seduced by this mash-up of Sailor Moon and Nnedi Okorafor. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/30/2024 | Details & Permalink

French cartoonist Larcenet (Ordinary Victories) captures the darkness and harsh beauty of McCarthy’s novel in this elegiac adaptation. As in the original, an unnamed man and his son travel through a chilly postapocalyptic world where society and life itself seem to be disintegrating. They scavenge for supplies they can carry in an old shopping cart and avoid other people as much as possible, as their road is littered with marauders, cannibals, and thieves. “Are we still the good guys?” the boy repeatedly asks, but as the father’s desperation deepens, he finds it harder to answer in the affirmative. Larcenet’s tactile inks, gently tinted in sepia tones, lend the tale the feel of old photographs or woodcuts. He strips the dialogue down to the bare bones and tells the story through images: vast decayed landscapes, close-ups on weathered faces, and lingering shots of roadside corpses and now-meaningless billboard ads and product packaging. The back matter includes Larcenet’s letter asking McCarthy for permission to adapt the novel, where he promises that he has “no other ambitions but to draw your words.” His work bears this out, flawlessly evoking the tone of the original. It’s a worthy companion to McCarthy’s chilling classic. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/30/2024 | Details & Permalink

Through elegant yellow and black illustrations, Harms’s powerful English-language debut traces the ecosystems that pollinators inhabit—and exposes the dangers that threaten their existence. A series of overlapping geometric panels shows a single bee’s voyage from a small flower petal to a thriving hive, charting a “mental map of signposts” along the way. Harms contrasts this micro view with the larger systems that bees help sustain, which have been decimated by human behaviors. For example, global travel has spread bee-killing mites across the world, climate change has created dry spells that stall nectar production, and pesticides—no matter how they’re regulated—eliminate colonies in droves. Suddenly, Harms’s bursting yellow panels disappear and a colorless, desolate landscape demonstrates a gray future without pollinators. The solution, according to Harms, is no less than “a new world” where humans collectively respect and commit to a holistic, ecological mindset. Like the bee’s journey, that new world starts with a small step: planting a few seeds. Readers will be convinced by this firm and vibrantly drawn warning call. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/30/2024 | Details & Permalink

Mardou (Sky in Stereo) documents her therapeutic treatment in this frank and clear-eyed memoir. In 2015, 40-year-old British expat Mardou’s seemingly contented life with her American husband and young daughter begins to unravel when she’s wracked by intense anxiety, accompanied by bouts of acne. Though initially skeptical of therapy (“I’m British. We don’t do therapy. We do sarcasm and alcoholism and football hooliganism”), she finds a skillful practitioner and begins to reconcile her suppressed memories of family traumas. These center on her complicated relationship with her Jehovah’s Witness mother, who was raped by a family member at age 13; her rageful father’s sexual abuse of her stepsister, Gail (for which he was imprisoned); and Gail’s subsequent abuse of Mardou, when they were both young girls. Working first through cognitive behavioral therapy and later with a therapist who specializes in the internal family systems method (where one talks to the “parts” they’ve developed “as coping strategies to get through life,” such as the “managers” who “protect our image” or the “firefighters” who “quash painful feelings via compulsions”), Mardou hopes to “break the line” of the “legacy burden” before it passes down to her daughter. Mardou convincingly charts her evolution from therapy cynic to take-charge advocate, and her sharply expressive graphics and neat lettering keep her text-heavy story fluid and immediate. The result is a potent testament to the power of reckoning with the past. Agent: Anjali Singh, Anjali Singh Agency (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/30/2024 | Details & Permalink

A girl seeking death finds eternal life instead in this unexpectedly playful goth fantasy debut from Fall Out Boy bassist Wentz, with cowriter Klein and artist Sterle (The Modern Witch Tarot). Ash, a snarky teenage rock fan struggling with depression, attempts suicide in imitation of her favorite emo musician, but the knife with which she stabs herself turns out to be an enchanted artifact that renders her immortal. In her efforts to become mortal again, she tracks down Liv, the witch who sold her the blade, and the two head into an underworld of urban witchcraft. Their supernatural investigation uncovers evidence that Greg, a psychiatrist who’s dating Ash’s mom, may be experimenting with a risky, untested antidepressant. Meanwhile, Ash finds reasons to live after all. Ash’s relentless sassiness can be grating, but her sardonic reactions have their moments: “So all these spellbooks... Nobody thought to put this on a server yet?” Serle’s expressive art gives the characters life, and their world of New York City apartments, coffee shops, concert venues, and out-of-the-way magic shops feels lived-in. Emo fans should take note. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/30/2024 | Details & Permalink