Mundt’s soapy sapphic fantasy debut, serialized on Webtoon, draws readers into the drama of rival witch clans in New Orleans. Camille, a teenage witch raised in a hidebound aristocratic family that specializes in blood magic, botches a crucial coming-of-age ritual and gets stalked by a demon. With her woodpecker familiar at her side, she departs her strict, sheltered life and searches for answers about the forces she’s unleashed. Along the way, she discovers secrets about her past and meets new friends like Jazmin, a warmhearted plant witch; the flirtatious Nyra, who comes from the family Camille blames for her mother’s death; and Dendro, a flower demon curious about the mortal world. She also begins to embrace her lesbian sexuality, which puts her at odds with her duty to carry on her family’s bloodline. “My world has gotten so much bigger in such a short amount of time,” she marvels. Mundt’s stripped-down art is unexceptional, with backgrounds loosely dabbed into place, though it improves throughout this first volume, developing more lively character expressions and body language. Romantasy fans who binge shows like True Blood and The Magicians will have no trouble falling under Mundt’s spell. Agent: Stephanie Winter, PS Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Panchaud’s idiosyncratic debut, an Angoulême award winner, tracks a London adolescent’s life after it’s upended by an unlikely windfall, mapping the consequences through pictographs and navigation iconography. A fortune teller’s prediction persuades Simon Hope, a 14-year-old bullied for his weight, to steal from his father and bet the money on a long-shot horse at Royal Ascot. He wins a staggering £16 million—but at a terrible cost. He returns home, ticket tucked in his shoe, to a crime scene, his mother in a coma after being assaulted. A topsy-turvy quest to untangle this mess takes him to Liverpool and back, through run-ins with detectives, biker gangs, and even a beached whale. Apart from some dry humor mined from working-class eccentrics, the value proposition is the visual language, which draws on the syntax of training manuals. Characters appear as colored dots tracked across bird’s-eye schematics; fistfights play out in diagrams. This clinical presentation complements the story’s deadpan script and adds winking emphasis to its more unlikely plot turns, but the book fumbles the emotional stakes of Simon’s ordeal, and lapses into neatly diagrammed but often superfluous digressions. The experiment is audacious but the effect is a bit like reading assembly instructions for a suspense story. (July)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

The new ghoul in town discovers the secret nightlife of monsters in this rollicking, blood-spattered horror comedy from McClaren (the Black Cloak series). Ashley Moore, a community college student, wakes up in the woods with no pulse, no memory of the past several hours, and a craving for raw meat. “Dear diary, am I a freaking zombie?” she asks herself. Googling “How do you know when someone is clinically dead?” proves unhelpful, but soon she discovers a rough-and-tumble underworld of fellow “creepies” in her backwater town. After getting tangled up in drama at a monster bar, she forms a found family with her lycanthrope classmates Motley and Harrison. Meanwhile, a fearsome creature stalks the forest at night—and Ashley fears it might be her. McClaren’s cute, funny-faced characters and slapstick action provide an offbeat contrast to the scares, and she adeptly depicts Ashley’s trauma as she processes her new supernatural status. In a clever visual touch, the monster characters shift subtly between human and inhuman in response to their situation, with Ashley growing more gnarly as the story progresses. This mash-up of mumblecore dramedy and gorehound horror slays. Agent: Jessica Mileo, InkWell Management. (July)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

The anarchic, antisocial Gen Xers of Eisner winner Bagge’s 1990s Hate series squirm through a present-day reunion that’s equal parts raunchy and reflective. Buddy and Lisa, former Seattle slackers with a tumultuous, on-off relationship, now live in the relatively cheaper Tacoma with their underemployed adult son, Harold. Buddy’s sister Babs has just broken up with her latest fiancé, his brother Butch collects guns and follows QAnon-style conspiracies, his mom has gone MAGA, and his old roommate Stinky is (still) dead. Buddy himself has mellowed but retains his knee-jerk nihilism: accused of supporting Trump, he shoots back, “I always vote for nobody! He’s my main man.” Bagge intersperses flashbacks to the ’90s, ingeniously contrasting the contemporary narrative’s full color with the familiar black-and-white of the original comics. Throughout, Bagge’s art jiggles with trademark elastic charm. His animated, rubber-hose-limbed characters vibrate on a frequency midway between the aggro exaggeration of Robert Crumb and the emotional expressiveness of Charles Schulz. The volume concludes with an off-putting chapter collecting off-color Stretchpants strips, a gross-out character who has made a fortune by squashing people under his butt for money. Still, fans who have been following the main Hate characters through their ups and (mostly) downs won’t want to miss out on encountering this crew again. (July)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Austrian German Kummer’s English-language debut offers a magical and unpredictable fusion of fantasy, science fiction, crime thriller, and drama. In a high-fantasy world of knights, castles, and quests, Sir William awakens from a 30-year slumber to find the realm reduced to a radioactive wasteland. Advanced technology from “a ‘harder’ place” has been materializing in this world, to its detriment, though people see the items as magic: binoculars are “eyes of foresight,” a flying car is an “iron mare,” and a nuclear blast is a “tree of fire.” Pursued by a demon and by his own checkered past, Sir William sets out to save the world, while the princess he loved becomes queen and tries to rebuild her kingdom. But that’s only the beginning of this twisty tale, which skips around in time, space, and reality to piece together William’s story, little by little, revealing darker and more emotionally complex layers. Kummer’s clean lines and bold neon colors propel the proceedings, lending a streamlined Hergé-esque simplicity to tangled plots and unexpected settings. Fans of genre-benders like Nimona and The Mushroom Knight will want to explore Kummer’s weird worlds. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cunningham follows Billionaires with an edifying graphic biography of Elon Musk. The simply drawn, linear narrative opens with Musk, born in 1971, in his youth in South Africa during apartheid. He was a precocious child, and when his parents separated, he chose to live with his wealthy but abusive father. Through a pattern of scientific and entrepreneurial inspiration, coupled with recklessness and poor interpersonal skills, he builds his fortune during the Wild West of the internet. Encounters with hardship—crashing a car with Peter Thiel in the passenger seat; almost dying from malaria; and losing his first child to SIDS—fail to foster his empathy. He takes Tesla from financial chaos to profitability (benefitting from government Zero Emissions Vehicle credits) and accepts massive government loans. Musk’s courtship of Trump emerges as part of his bumpy Twitter takeover—and leads to him declaring himself “Dark Gothic Maga.” As Cunningham points out, Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman, was a leader in the mid-century technocracy movement, which had “more than a whiff of fascism.” In flat colors, Musk himself is portrayed as a space race–obsessed “longtermist... a logic that inevitably leads to an indifference to current global issues.” It’s a disturbing allegation that Musk has forsaken his own humanity as he’s chased power in the guise of innovation. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pride of Baghdad creators Vaughan and Henrichon reunite to usher readers into front-row seats to an audacious, explicit, and chaotic apocalypse. Killed in a mass shooting at a movie theater, Val discovers that she and her fellow ghosts have one form of entertainment in the afterlife: watching the living, particularly in coitus. “Another evening, another ten million new episodes,” she quips decades later as she follows the New Yorkers of the future with the passion of a soap opera fan, taking in high-tech sex and deadly underground gladiator matches. This idyll of lust and violence is interrupted when nuclear war breaks out, inspiring Val and a ghostly Black cowboy named Sam to embark on a final mission: find an orgy to watch as the world ends. From these narrative elements, Vaughan spins a saga on the nature of voyeurism and obsession, drawing parallels between the ghosts’ absorption of mortal lives and audiences watching movies, pornography, and TV news. If these concepts never quite coalesce into a clear statement, Henrichon renders them prettily, filling pages with richly detailed, sexually frank images of a futuristic, haunted New York City. The ghosts appear in color, the living world in black-and-white, adding to the sense that the characters are drifting through three-dimensional movies. It’s an eye-popping show. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

A lifelong insomniac, Burdock (Queen of Snails) finds herself caught in a “frustrating loop of anxiety, sleeplessness, and fatigue” in this thought-provoking graphic narrative. The volume is organized in sections titled after the four elementts: “Air,” “Fire,” “Earth,” and “Water.” In “Air,” Burdock is diagnosed with moderate sleep apnea and takes up the didgeridoo to improve her breathing. In “Fire,” she examines menopause and its accompanying hot flashes, drawing a line from the production of “healthy” seed oils to the mass production of cotton in the 1800s, an industry that relied on enslaved labor. Throughout, she weaves examples from contemporary medicine with historical and cultural analysis. She observes, for example, that “obesity is most often a symptom of health issues rather than being the main cause,” and as such is fueled by inherited trauma, stress, and lack of access to healthy food. “Everything is connected,” she adds. Humor is key to Burdock’s delivery, including a koala co-narrator and a beauty contest–styled Miss Information who dispels nutritional myths. By the time the conclusion rolls around, Burdock has found a routine that works for her, though the space and privilege to exercise, journal, and meditate every day is not available to everyone. Throughout, Burdock’s expressionistic comics art (e.g., a bed becoming a monster) enlivens the analysis. Restless readers would benefit from putting this on their nightstand. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Mauro, film and game art designer, debuts with an ambitious if formulaic saga of a robot’s quest into his past. On a decrepit future Earth abandoned by the elite, amiable scavengers Kai and Max dig up battered mechanical Huxley. Out of commission for a millennium, the amnesiac but voluble bot chases after visions of an ethereal woman and an electric blue humanoid figure. Meanwhile, the trash pickers tag along, convinced he’s full of lucrative salvageable tech. He’s also pursued by an indestructible hunter robot with its own secret agenda. The proceedings unfold in the vein of 2000 AD’s future tales, setting the stage for a dramatic climax that spurs on a 2001: A Space Odyssey–like evolution of man and Earth. Mauro’s imaginative artwork lends an eerie grandeur to this run-down world, and there’s a satisfying effect to his deployment of sci-fi tropes (including the tidy revival of dead characters). Unfortunately, the visuals are undercut by inconsistently sized lettering and speech bubbles, with dense chunks of cliché-riddled text in amateurish typeface. It’s a mixed bag. (June)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Chancellor’s uplifting follow-up to Hardcore Anxiety finds the bipolar author rocking his demons away, striving to be a good husband, and attempting to recover the wild freedom and sense of community of his early punk fandom. He discovered the Clash and the Ramones as a bullied early aughts teenager, and went on to play in many bands. Here, he blends intimate personal stories of moshing, maturing, and mental health with rousing celebrations and mini-bios of his heroes, such as 7 Seconds, Gorilla Biscuits, the Minutemen, and the Violent Femmes—whose inclusion symbolizes how Chancellor fought off becoming a “bitter aging punk” who polices genre boundaries. Chancellor draws himself haunted by that possibility, represented by an Ebeneezer Scrooge–like worst version of himself, an on-point warning for diehards of any evolving art scene. He also learns to finally do the dishes—and gets ready to become a father. Chancellor’s thick-lined, bulbous character drawings charm, but their inherent humor doesn’t detract from the urgent emotional storytelling, especially in inventive sequences where he self-harms with a drawing pen, spirals on his wedding day, or takes a test to determine if he has ADHD. It’s a sweet mix of humor and bite, a little like a punk rock Judd Apatow. (June)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink