Metropolis director Rintaro goes behind the scenes of the golden age of anime in his expansive and impassioned debut manga. Born in 1941, Rintaro is captivated by movies from an early age, particularly the first animated “manga film” he sees in a temple converted to a theater: “How is that possible? Drawings that move?” Despite discouragement from adults who warn him against chasing his dreams in Japan’s struggling postwar economy, he finds work as a teenager at some of the country’s earliest animation studios: first Toei, “founded to become the Walt Disney of the East,” then Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Productions. Later, he works on anime adaptations with manga artists Leiji Matsumoto and Katsuhiro Otomo and launches his own studio, Argos. Rintaro’s crisp, lively art evokes period detail and clearly unpacks the ins and outs of animation. He excels at capturing human movement, including movement through time—with an amusing flourish, he draws himself aging and adopting the fashions of the decades. Some aspects of his personal life remain discreet (he manages to get married and divorced mostly off-panel), but a through line is his fraught relationship with his father, a barber who once dreamed of going into the movies himself. This meticulous portrait of a life in animation glows with love of the art form. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

This sweetly melancholy debut fantasy from And the Witch Went into the Forest webcomics artist Sanho transports readers to a charming bakery that serves the recently deceased. As the intro explains, souls need baked goods to safely cross the plains of Purgatory, thus “the final present for those departing is achingly sweet.” At Breath’s End, the boundary between life and death, baker Margot and her assistant, Miro (a classic ghost draped in a sheet), consult with the loved ones of the departed and create perfectly matched funeral cakes for their final journey. In the two stories in this volume, their clients include a sickly teenager befriended by an aspiring mystery writer and a vampire trucker whose night-shift schedule made it hard for her to spend time with her daughter. The characters’ gentle adventures take place in a world both familiar and populated by supernatural beings, anthropomorphic characters, giant plants, and fantastic devices like the kitchen appliance Margot uses to add sound as flavoring to cakes. Sanho’s elegant, flowing linework, tinted with spot color in shades of pink and red, has a storybook feel with touches of classic shojo manga. The characters have delicately drawn faces, and the food looks delectable. It adds up to a cozy and slightly bittersweet treat. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this candid but occasionally rambling gustatory memoir, comedian and New Yorker cartoonist Campbell (Murder Book) nibbles away at her food obsessions. A picky eater from an early age, Hilary survives as an adult on packaged snacks and childhood “safe foods” like buttered pasta. “I’m so bad at feeding myself I honestly think I’d be better off as a dog,” she confides to friends over cocktails and bar bites. Her relationship with a foodie sparks culinary arguments that seem cute at first—“A wine salesman who loves to cook meets a cartoonist whose ideal meal is popcorn and cheap wine?”—but sour over time. She flashes back through a fraught youth that includes periods of anorexia and bulimia, examines the eating habits of her parents and grandparents, and queries friends about their nostalgic memories of childhood snacks. Darker revelations are lightened with humorous asides, including “recipes” for Oreos and milk, a handful of peanuts, and sardines on saltines (a favorite of her father’s). Campbell’s wobbly, animated art, black and white with bursts of color, conveys the tremor of her anxieties. She hits on funny observations, but skips around in topics enough that it can be hard to keep up. The result is sometimes sweet, sometimes salty, yet not quite filling. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

The Housemaids filmmaker Negi and artist Bocardo (The Hexiles) transmute the horrors of colonialism into a grotesque phantasmagoria. In 1896 Bombay, an experimental bubonic plague vaccine transforms the Indians used as test subjects into monsters with warped bodies and unknown powers. The British supervisors test and toy with the mutants, and their activities are documented by William Wallace Hooper, an eccentric photographer who calls his camera “the perfect violence machine.” When a starving mutant named Izna joins in the sadomasochistic games at the camps, they turn strangely intimate, drawing out the inner desires of the colonists and their victims alike. Izna is searching for her mother, who taught her that “in our family, monsters are things to be evoked, not feared,” and she comes to embrace her own monstrosity as her hunger turns supernatural. Bocardo’s showstopper art, reminiscent of Bill Sienkiewicz (who draws the cover art), evokes horror with hallucinatory collages, warped faces and bodies, and bloodlike spatters of ink. This is a dark delight. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

Portuguese cartoonist Mosi debuts in North America with an affecting character study of a teacher whose grief collides with the wildlife invading an unnamed coastal suburb in Portugal. Following a devastating personal loss, Júlia and her newly unemployed brother, Joel, live together in their grandmother’s beach house, beset by nagging restlessness. When Júlia finds her vegetable garden ravaged, she fixates on the notion that a mongoose is to blame. This theory is met with skepticism, but Júlia, emboldened by internet research, sees her preoccupation become entangled with intrusive thoughts and visions. Her overbearing mother visits and alternately berates her to “get up” and tells her that healing isn’t a straight line: “The obstacles we face aren’t walls, or barriers. They’re stairs.” Júlia leans into her work with her students, running, and schemes for capturing the elusive garden pest (poison, traps, a scarecrow), but can’t distract herself from pain: “I remember, and feel everything all at once.” Mosi subtly parallels Júlia’s self-protective detachment with muted, stripped-down cartooning, save for a few haunted flashback sequences with added gray wash, and the depictions suspend judgment on the existence of the mongoose. It’s a generous and perceptive portrait of displaced grief. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this intricate, wildly inventive graphic memoir from Eisner nominee Tyler (Soldier’s Heart), grief is a physical place populated by odd but helpful guides. Carol is hit by an “anvil of sorrow” when her mother, sister, and multiple friends die in quick succession, and she enters a “long residency in Griefville.” Griefville is depicted as a “dolorous thicket” inhabited by “Clorins,” humanoids with long pointy fingers and screwhead eyes. She acknowledges the many types and stages of grief with reverence and explores a “legacy” of mourning through scenes of ancestors dealing with loss, leading her to realize: “I’m not the first to go through this.” But a voice counters that even tough loss iscommon, “That does not diminish your situation. It connects you.” The particulars of Carol’s personal losses emerge more than a third of the way through the volume, as she trudges through the indignities of daily life while caring for her cancer-stricken sister; meanwhile, her mother’s decline means dealing with her domineering father. In the third section, Carol’s adult daughter and her boyfriend—both ostensibly sober—move in with her to weather a bad economy. But Carol quickly gets entangled in the boyfriend’s drug problems and financial schemes, generating grief in and for her relationship with her daughter. Detailed and often dreamlike, Tyler’s pen and ink illustrations are punctuated with occasional, muted washes of color. In Tyler’s capable hands, grief is not exactly beautiful, but it is specific and transformative. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Making their comics debut, husband-and-wife filmmakers David Ian and Rebekah McKendry join forces with artist Jenkins (Hairball) for a feverish horror yarn that never quite catches fire. FBI agent Miranda Diaz pulls into Barstow, Calif., an isolated desert town that seems to consist mostly of trailers and Quonset huts, in search of a missing fellow agent. With the help of Sheriff Papa Dodd (who looks exactly like Willie Nelson) and his multitalented assistant, Starr, she investigates the eccentric locals and uncovers a demonic infestation. A satanic ballet instructor runs a side hustle to exploit the fruits of hell, selling to people eager to be possessed (“With a demon by your side,” she promises, “you can rise all the way to the top”). Meanwhile, slacker Eli is accidentally possessed and becomes the focus of a rival Christian cult. Then the Hail Satan motorcycle gang rolls into town. There’s plenty of potential in the setting and the setup, but there’s not enough space to develop each member of the expansive cast, and the goals of the rival groups of demons and humans remain murky. Meanwhile, Jenkins’s art is uncharacteristically wobbly with blotchy shading. Despite clever ideas and local color to spare, this feels underbaked. Agent: Bridget Smith and Valentina Sainato, JABberwocky Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

One of the quintessential 1980s manga, Hojo’s bold action classic transports readers to a seedy Tokyo of handsome rogues, tough dames, and street fights. Ryo Saeba is a “sweeper,” a private eye who will stoop to anything, including murder, to close a case. Yet this dangerous dude turns into a goony letch around women, groping his beautiful clients and usually getting beaten up in return. The manga hits its stride when he teams up with Kaori Makimura, a plucky young woman who values Ryo’s lessons on navigating the mean streets, but refuses to take his nonsense. Together they battle human traffickers, busjackers, PCP-numbed assassins (“This angel dust will turn you into a super soldier!!”), and other over-the-top criminals. Hojo draws in a gritty seinen manga style, but the characters’ faces erupt into cartoon exaggeration to sell a gag and dial the energy up to 11. It’s an adrenaline-spiked cocktail of hard-boiled action, slapstick comedy, cheesecake, melodrama, and raunchy jokes (“mokkori,” the sound effect indicating arousal that accompanies Ryo’s “small soldier standing to attention,” per the translator’s notes, is the manga’s catchphrase). The translation plays up the tough-guy one-liners: “Old wounds start aching on days like this,” Ryo reflects, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Readers jonesing for retro ’80s thrills will be blown away. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Trail runner and radio producer Mayer (The Race That Changed Running) teams up with artist and filmmaker Windrestin for a bracing comics debut that follows fictional extreme athlete Sam Hill as he competes in the Tor des Géants, a real five-day, 200-mile race through the mountains of the Aosta Valley in Italy. The narrative picks up in the present day as Hill makes his third attempt to successfully finish the race. Though he basks in the majesty of the landscape and the camaraderie of fellow racers, he grapples throughout with the daunting challenges of heat and cold, treacherous climbs and descents, and exhaustion-induced hallucinations. Along the way, he experiences intense self-doubt and physical pain: “I hated the race. I hated my body.... And I hated myself.” But with steely determination and the help of other participants—notably Frankie, an eccentric fellow runner he meets on the trail (she sticks her tongue out at him and declares, “Ciao, amigo”)—Sam endures. Windrestin’s art elegantly captures the action, from the sweeping beauty of the wild terrain to Sam’s surreal visions of dragons in the sky. The result is a hypnotic and inspiring tale of a man overcoming adversity. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

French historian De La Croix makes his English-language debut with a sweeping if uneven graphic history drawn by Spanish cartoonist Cifuentes (H.G. Wells: The War of the Worlds) that surveys the war to end all wars from within the smoke-filled-rooms of participating heads of state. The perspective focuses on the leaders who initiated the war (Hitler), happily joined in (Mussolini), made doomed deals to halt it (Chamberlain), sacrificed millions of lives not to lose it (Stalin), and, relatively late in the game, united to end it (Churchill and Roosevelt). The creators synthesize vast historical details (alliances, advancements, motivations, conflicting national interests) into a brisk narrative without getting bogged down in minutia. The text is admirably streamlined, and the pointedly unflashy and occasionally stiff art convincingly renders these leaders in meeting after meeting. Meanwhile, the consequences of their decisions are glimpsed in vivid splash images of bombings, troop landings, massacres, and, as the war grinds on, devastated cities. Inevitably, some epochal events get rushed through. Rather than dramatize life and death in Hitler’s concentration camps, for example, the creators invite readers to gape at the obscene opulence of the rooms in which Nazi brass plotted the murder of millions of Jews. Despite a few flaws, it’s a noble and accessible approach to history. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink