Cute, inviting artwork and a friendly narrative voice ease manga readers into this fearless and often harrowing memoir. Pesuyama, drawn as a cartoony figure with a pageboy haircut and deeply shadowed eyes, endures relentless sexual harassment while working as an art assistant to a manga creator identified as “X.” The pressure-cooker atmosphere of a manga studio, where the art team works 15-hour days and sleeps and showers in the office, provides plenty of opportunities for predatory behavior. “The rowdy kid in class was stomping bugs, and everyone else was just watching,” Pesuyama recalls. Seven years later, as the #MeToo movement triggers a shift in Japanese attitudes toward sexual harassment, Pesuyama confronts their trauma and delves into the childhood experiences that shaped their complex experience of gender. The script leaps from one weighty issue to another, with Pesuyama exploring sexuality, gender identity, and the visceral pain of violation. The loose, accessible linework turns frantic and jagged when Pesuyama depicts their internal anxieties. Brutally direct yet intimate and unpretentious, this comes across like a revealing conversation with a close friend. (June)

Reviewed on 06/02/2023 | Details & Permalink

This icily spare graphic novel from Landry (Shit and Piss) features a protagonist who pursues an enigmatic quest in utter isolation. The nameless, prematurely old retiree (he “cashed out” early) spends his days in a remote mountain cabin. He scratches out diary entries which refer obliquely to a long-running project, for which he hikes through vast, snow-covered mountain ranges to a mysterious cave. Flashbacks reveal he once lived in these same woods with his wife, who later decamped for civilization to take care of her sister. The contrasts show just how much narrower the man’s life has become, but while he seems entranced by his wife’s letters, his love of the wilderness supersedes his love for her. Landry’s black-and-white art makes lyrical use of negative space, rendering the mountains with magisterial effect. Unlike many tales of self-separating loners, this maintains a profound emotional through line, mostly through the letters: “I could punch and kick and kiss you all at once,” the protagonist’s wife writes. Landry depicts the costs of separation from society with piercing visual poetry. (June)

Reviewed on 06/02/2023 | Details & Permalink

A man on a tedious business trip discovers his dark side in this taut thriller from reliably top-notch noir duo Brubaker and Phillips (the Reckless series). Jonathan Webb is a foreign rights rep attending a book show in Paris who spends sleepless nights contemplating his outwardly successful but inwardly staid home life. On one of his nocturnal wanders, he comes across a masked gathering (“sex and drugs... violence... but with a veneer of class”) reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut. Webb slips in using a fake persona and meets Rainer, a European man of mystery who seemingly lives the exciting life that Webb is only pretending to inhabit. Losing his grip on reality, Webb falls deeper and deeper into Rainer’s chaotic lifestyle (more steamy soirees alternate with getting punched up in alleys by toughs)—but when one of his own authors get involved, Webb realizes he’s let the fantasy go too far. Brubaker’s sharp dialogue (“I thought the night had peaked when I blew up a cop car, but maybe it was just beginning”) pairs perfectly with Phillips’s atmospheric rendering of the moody Parisian milieu. Details are choice, from industry gossip between patrons milling around at a banal hotel bar to a trippy psychedelic epiphany, with moody coloring done by the illustrator’s son. It’s not the most original tale ever told, but Brubaker and Phillips tell it in crackling, effortless style. (June)

Reviewed on 06/02/2023 | Details & Permalink

Angoulême audience award winner Bischoff’s English-language debut is an exhilarating if sometimes disturbing graphic biography of writer and artist Anaïs Nin (1903–1977). “My lies are protective, life-giving,” says Nin, whose deceptions include affairs, clandestine meetings, and a secret diary full of explicit erotic fantasies. While married to the loving but naive Hugo Guiler, Nin begins to explore different sides of herself, including the obedient wife, the sexual taboo-breaker, and the passionate devotee of sensuality. After obsessive affairs with the novelist Henry Miller, several psychotherapists, and even (unsettlingly) with family members, Nin vows to reject conventions to “write like a woman” and instead “express the inexpressible.” Bischoff is careful to not reduce Nin to her liaisons, which are drawn across a romantic, curlicue depiction of 1930s Paris, but instead delves into how her sexual exploration helps free her as a writer. Bischoff’s combination of charcoal and rainbow color palettes echo Nin’s double life, while the immersive splash pages blend reality and fantasy. The stunning visuals elevate the titillating but respectful narrative. It’s a nuanced, gorgeously drawn portrait of a beautifully complicated figure. (June)

Reviewed on 06/02/2023 | Details & Permalink

“Ignition. Flashover. Max heat. Decay,” opens this taut, suspenseful thriller scripted by Batman regular Snyder. Firefighter Ruby Ma Ning—“Ma” to her friends—and her team, Crew 513, have become intimately familiar with the stages of wildfire’s life cycle. The women are participating in the Forestry Firefighter program, in which incarcerated inmates earn two dollars a day battling fires. Ma is not imprisoned herself, but has thrown herself into the job following a tragic personal loss, and she is incredibly protective of her team. While Crew 513 contends with California’s historic Arroyo Fire, their newest recruit, a white-collar criminal named Brooks who is mere months into her 60-year prison sentence, realizes they’re stationed near her former employer’s safe house. Inside sits a cache of servers that contains up to $2 billion in untraceable cryptocurrency. After sleeping on it, Crew 513 decides to risk everything for a heist that, like wildfire, could clear the way for a new start—but could also spiral out of control. Sherman’s gritty artwork, enhanced by colorist Ronda Pattison’s vibrant palette, sets the tone for a moody, atmospheric suspense plot. Fans of well-researched situational crime dramas, such as Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber’s Whiteout and Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal series, should take note. (May)

Reviewed on 05/26/2023 | Details & Permalink

Dunlap-Shohl (My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson’s) delivers an unsettling if bemused account of Alaska’s precarious place in the nuclear arms race. Siren towers studded the Anchorage skyline during the author’s childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, reminders of the hazards of U.S.-Soviet tensions. More perplexing was the patrolled compound—likened to a “top-secret lair of an evil genius from a James Bond movie”—that housed nuclear-armed Nike Hercules missiles, deterrents to aerial attack. While the anticipated Soviet bombers never materialized, atomic catastrophe loomed nevertheless, from uranium leaks following a 1964 earthquake to nuke tests on the island of Amchitka. Harebrained political maneuvers threatened the state as well, such as a federal proposal to carve a harbor into the state’s northern coast using nuclear blasts. The folksy reportage meanders at times, but each narrative dogleg introduces another confounding close call. Dunlap-Shohl’s twining, jittery cartooning (reminiscent of Jules Feiffer in places) underscores the galling absurdity of his childhood environs. This eye-opening chronicle of the domestic perils of the Cold War will resonate for any reader apprehensive of nuclear weapons. (June)

Reviewed on 05/26/2023 | Details & Permalink

This essential graphic account of the fight for certain animals to achieve legal “personhood” from animal rights activist Wise (Rattling the Cage) and married cartoonists the Machados (Cyberbunk) opens with the story of Happy, an Asian elephant captured in Thailand and sold to the Bronx Zoo,where she lives in isolation. The Nonhuman Rights Project (founded by Wise) argues that because she demonstrates autonomy, under the legal doctrine of habeas corpus, Happy should be granted “bodily liberty” and moved to a sanctuary where her well-being takes priority. The New York agricultural industry—wary that such rights would extend to other animals—lobbies against the cause. The authors acknowledge that “even today’s animal welfare laws provide greater protections than the legal rights historically held by married women, children, and enslaved humans,” but argue convincingly that greater rights should be afforded to all. With artwork resembling courtroom sketches, the Machados excerpt legal documents and depict human and nonhuman heroes with sober realism. Images echo throughout, as if to show how the same scenario might be viewed from different legal and moral angles. It’s a thought-provoking and inspiringly hopeful manifesto. (June)

Reviewed on 05/26/2023 | Details & Permalink

Oscar-winning actor and screenwriter Curtis teams up with filmmaker Goldman and artist Stevens (Penny) for an environmental horror story with ambitions as vast as the Southwestern sky. The desert town of Catch Creek is built around Cobalt Energy, which has long mined the area for oil and uranium. Cynthia Butterfield, a persuasive, folksy talker (who incidentally looks exactly like Curtis), inherits Cobalt from her father and tries to rebrand it as a green company, launching an experimental water purification process and promising locals she hopes to “rebalance the world.” Her efforts don’t impress Nova Terrell, an activist whose own father was killed in an industrial accident. Nova’s visions of a Navajo deity called the Changing Woman start to come true, as the earth rises horrifically up against humanity through a series of natural disasters, including deadly ice, fissures, and giant hailstones. The narrative began as a screenplay but works excellently as a graphic novel, with care taken to portray Catch Creek as a community with a complex network of needs, responsibilities, and unpaid debts. Stevens’s photorealistic watercolor art contributes to the realism, including brief but shockingly bloody moments of gore. The arc can overreach in its pursuit of big ideas, however; it’s sometimes tricky to track the busy plot and large cast. Still, fans of thoughtful, character-driven horror will find plenty to dig into. (July)

Reviewed on 05/26/2023 | Details & Permalink

The afterlife is a sword-and-sorcery Valhalla in this underdeveloped launch to a dark fantasy series. Struggling San Francisco artist Walt is hit by a BART train and wakes up in the thick of a high-fantasy battle, complete with monsters, armored knights, and winged fairy-like folk. Grink, his gnome-ish guide, informs him that he’s dead and has been recruited into an eternal war, fighting in the forces of a powerful fairy queen called the Catha. “The end after end—never ends,” Grink warns, and that’s all the explanation Walt gets as he’s thrust into a party of questing warriors. Between flashbacks to Walt’s pedestrian past and glimpses of Grink’s conversations with other guides, readers get hints that things aren’t entirely what they seem. But most of the first volume is consumed by conventional Dungeons and Dragons–style battles and miniquests. Sunando C.’s sturdy, confident fantasy art, saturated in vivid color, keeps the action peppy, but the script often seems to be spinning its wheels in anticipation of plot twists down the line. Still, fans of hack-and-slash and role play games may be willing to stick around to find out if this dungeon crawl goes any deeper the next time out. (May)

Reviewed on 05/19/2023 | Details & Permalink

Goux (Shadow of the Batgirl) spritzes up a familiar tale of directionless 20-somethings with sincere emotion and eye-catching visuals. Bobbie, a recent college grad, dreams of a music career but has trouble even working up the nerve to land a gig at the Pig’s Knuckles, the bar where she works long shifts and swats off obnoxious barflies. She’s hung up on her ex, she drinks too much beer, and her roommate Clara is looking for an excuse to kick her out. “There’s so much I want to do,” Bobbie frets, “but when it comes to doing it I just... can’t.” When she adopts a strange, shaggy dog, caring for the unruly stray becomes the ultimate distraction from her unfinished business, dominating her life and filling her dreams. Goux’s curvy, fluid art, tinted like red roasted bar peanuts, wiggles around the page, as the narrative slithers between real life—often depicted with collage layouts suggesting bleary nights and repetitive daily tasks—and an eerie otherworld of dreams, nightmares, and fantasies. Though the story line doesn’t strike particularly novel insights into the travails of young adulthood, Goux’s combo of winsome art and innovative layouts makes for an appealing stroll down a well-trod narrative path. (May)

Reviewed on 05/19/2023 | Details & Permalink