These linked vignettes by Vila (Milky Way) capture in astringent detail the backbiting and resentments triggered by the Covid pandemic. Across a dozen stories set in the Italian suburb of Padua, the cartoonist follows a loose network of 20-somethings—roommates and neighbors, frenemies and exes—who navigate interpersonal turbulence in the pressure cooker environment. In one entry, husky Fabio’s stealth purchase of a bag of Twinkies becomes a cruel running joke on a camping trip with his girlfriend’s friends. In another, Irene unleashes her lockdown rage on a jogger flouting quarantine restrictions outside her window. While climate anxiety and the war in Ukraine rumble in the background, Vila zeroes in on micro-indignities and transgressions: forgotten masks, faked negative Covid tests, cranky pod-politics. Characters slide into one another’s stories, if only in passing conversation, as Vila maps a tangled social web. Later episodes tilt toward the speculative, imagining a fresh crisis on the heels of lockdown. A versatile stylist, Vila pivots from impersonal, tightly gridded sequences to harshly lit close-ups that revel in the pores, stubble, and ruddy complexions of his characters’ all-too-human features. The result is a claustrophobic tableau of petty grievances and global catastrophe that’s unsparing, sardonic, and painfully recognizable. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

For this entry in the Absolute line, which reimagines the backstory for classic heroes, Camp (the Ultimates series) and Rodriguez (the Defenders series) offer a fresh and resonant take on Martian Manhunter, the perennial Justice Leaguer. FBI agent John Jones shares a mind with a green entity with one ruby eye. The alien’s “Martian Vision” reveals the thoughts and feelings of everyone around him in tendrils of swirling, psychedelic smoke. “Breathe in, BREATHE IN,” exhorts the Martian, whom John glimpses in myriad forms emerging from the background of page designs. The playful storytelling dazzles, as the Martian’s mercurial appearances prove a continual pleasure and surprise—while the familiar plot of a hero overwhelmed by humanity’s needs is enlivened by Rodriguez’s kaleidoscopic urban smoke-scapes. (Many pages would look great displayed on head-shop walls.) John acclimates to his dual-mind state, relying on Martian insights to solve crimes and bring to an end active-shooter standoffs. Along the way, he endures both a heat wave viscerally captured in Rodriguez’s scalding yellows and a blackout that finds citizens’ shadows encouraging wrongdoing. Unorthodox layouts force readers to untangle layers of reality, and it’s a joy. Comics fans whose bottom line is beauty and spirited formal invention will relish this celebration of the narrative freedoms offered by the form. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

London-based cartoonist Gullen faces cancer with a determined grin in her roughly drawn but spirited graphic memoir debut. After a painful lump on her breast turns out to be malignant, she finds herself on the NHS conveyor belt through chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery. “Why do I have a cancer welcome pack???” her bushy-haired avatar recoils, peering over an oversized surgical mask rectangle. With snarky humor, she juggles cancer treatment with raising her daughter, Rosie, who she takes to play dates and the park between hospital appointments; picking out “Fashion During Chemo”; and asking sex advice columnist Dan Savage if bondage is still safe (“If I can’t have sushi, at least let me have some light BDSM”). She compares entering treatment to becoming a mother: “Once you’re in, there’s no going back.... But I chose parenthood. I didn’t choose this.” Strength and support comes through human connections with doctors, fellow patients, and her Quaker worship group. Gullen’s sparse, naive art isn’t always up to the task of dramatizing her experiences, but she livens up the pages by literalizing ideas (she envisions a vacuum biopsy sucking up her breast like a vacuum cleaner) and through simple but effective visuals like the word PAIN radiating from her body when something goes wrong. Readers navigating medical hardship will appreciate the chummy humor on display here. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this cheeky and sweetly sex-positive tell-all, debut author Yoshioka shares candid anecdotes from her time as a behind-the-scenes staffer at a male escort service. Referred to the Honey Time agency by a friend, Sono is initially shocked but soon acclimates to the raunchy talk and businesslike bustle around the office. She makes friends with her no-nonsense female coworker Saori and gets to know the escorts, mostly good-natured guys who like to satisfy women (as they point out, the money isn’t all that great). Full penetrative sex is illegal, but Sono helps the escorts practice happy-ending massages and is told that “hot perverts tend to rise to the top of the rankings!” She also learns that good sex work, like good sex, is about empathy and communication. “What exactly are we selling here for 90 minutes at 15,000 yen?” she asks herself, and the answer turns out to be different for every client, whether it’s a married woman who hopes satisfying her husband’s desire for a threesome will paper over her marital problems or a 28-year-old virgin with self-esteem issues. Yachinatsu’s cute, flirty artwork brings the characters to bubbly life and is equally adept at steamy eroticism and flustered comedy. There’s more than enough sultry fun here to keep readers laughing, gasping, and turning pages. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

A giant knot of dogs hovers over the city of Business Park in this exuberant, Pynchonesque satire from Huffman (Cover Not Final). The absurdist tale of corporate overreach opens with a power couple’s meet-cute at a heated city council meeting (convened in the Town Hall-Taco Bell) and races through their nuptials to their inexplicable invention of the Hypermutt. Designed seemingly only to foil logic and a corporate board “scared of the vision,” a dog that folds in on itself and “becomes all dogs,” until it is “the idea of a dog,” this genetically volatile, multiheaded creature subsumes every canine it encounters, until the “writhing mass” blots out Florida in satellite images. Megacorporations—themselves the mongrel products of unlikely mergers—monetize catastrophe with protective domes and “support prongs” to hold up a sky that’s become a “thick blanket of dog.” Huffman layers in fresh intrigues: a kidnapping, ESP research, even an interlude set in a feudal past. The result is breathlessly discursive, coherent page-to-page but perplexing as a whole. Like Pynchon, Huffman has a flair for character names—Caressa Vignette, Vernon Smilth, Councilman Burg—but it’s his stylized, almost baroquely cartoony figures that steal the show. His cubist spin on mid-century comics illustration syncs lithe linework and ingenious use of negative space to the frenzied pace of the story. The result is a deliriously inventive send-up of corporate hubris. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Former The Nib editors Mirk (Guantanamo Voices) and Harris (Be Gay, Do Comics) deliver a handy-dandy how-to for aspiring and established creators of fact-based comics. The various types of graphic nonfiction are helpfully broken down: graphic journalism, history comics, personal essay, etc. Each chapter offers spot-on tips and advice on topics including time management, research, and interviewing subjects, including that “all sources are fallible” and to “think about whether your sources represent the diverse reality of the world.” There’s also plenty of space devoted to the nuts and bolts of drawing, layout, and page design. Among their nuggets of wisdom, Mirk and Harris urge artists to use visual metaphors to jazz things up: “Just because it’s nonfiction doesn’t mean it isn’t creative... push yourself not to be literal.” Interviews and sidebars include an expansive array of expert viewpoints from more than a dozen accomplished creators, including Thi Bui, Malaka Gharib, Sarah Glidden, Maia Kobabe, Joe Sacco, Whit Taylor, and Josh Trujillo. Harris’s appealing—and not-overly-literal—drawings keep the proceedings lively. Full of sound advice and brimming over with energy, humor, and passion, this will make an indispensable addition to the bookshelves of comics creatives of all stripes. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Science journalist Funneman (Electric Context) partners with Dutch children’s book artist Brouwers for an appealing and informative comics primer on the omnipresence of electricity. They approach the phenomenon not simply through lightning and magnetism, but from the unexpected charge between bees, trees, and within the human body (and up to the cosmos). At the outset, Funneman’s friendly avatar roams across fields as he discusses the communication patterns of insects, including bees’ ability to detect and influence electric fields. He goes on to delve into how electricity is “like currency for bacteria” and can be used to cure infections, and explores the “neurobiology” of the slow electrical connection running between tree roots. Additionally, dogs can sniff out buried bar magnets, seals have a kind of “radar mustache” in their whiskers to “unerringly” navigate sharp turns in the water, and chickens can see magnetic fields. As for humans, “we have more than 37 trillion cells in our body [and since] 1933, the electric activity of cells has been well-documented.” While the account is dense with information, the concepts are clearly explained through the combination of Funneman’s snappy voice and the cartoony but still artful comics, diagrams, and visual metaphors by Brouwers. This will appeal to fans of such pop science comics as The Hidden Life of Trees and Insectopolis. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Teixeira (A Quick and Easy Guide to Coming Out) combines folksy wisdom, queer romance, and a touch of horror into this affecting drama. Lamont, a young closeted gay man of color, returns to his rural hometown after the death of his father, a right-wing, fearmongering motivational speaker whose grim empire Lamont has no desire to inherit. Instead, he moves in with his kindly aunt Latoya, who raises chickens and brews herbal teas, and flirts with a blonde horseback-riding goat farmer named Coyote. But getting back to nature is hard for Lamont, who was raised to believe that “basically everything in the forest wants to kill you.” His fears take the symbolic form of wolves that stalk him in the woods and in his room at night, and he comes to realize that if he wants to build a future, he can’t run away from the past they represent. Teixeira’s simple, chunky-lined art lays out scenes with the flattened perspective of murals or stained-glass windows. The darker passages are lightened by romance, whimsical scenes of nature, and illustrated recipes for Auntie Latoya’s teas that use the fruits of the land. The result is an intimate and thoughtful tale about working up the courage to face one’s fears. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

The buddy cop trope gets a sizable makeover—literally—in this playful series opener by Rose (the Corollary series) and King (Jenny Zero). The narrative takes place in an alternate present where giants emerged from below Earth’s surface 40 years prior. After a short but bloody war, they now live in the sovereign state of Brobdingang, strictly segregated from humans. As the story kicks off, detective Gyant must partner with Captain Tamaki, an irascible human, to solve murders that target both the giant (Huge) and human (Doll) communities. Gyant discovers a giant’s body deep below a dark lake, and he and Tamaki realize they’ve stumbled into something more than a murder case—someone’s trying to start a new war. Then a giant skeleton emerges from the surface of the moon and begins falling toward Earth, setting off fears of a global extinction event. Through intricate and imaginative worldbuilding, Rose fashions a truly sinister crime and motive, while King’s art cannily juxtaposes the massive and tiny members of the cast, with rich, earthy color work across expansive panels and double-page spreads. Fans of the Fables and the Dresden Files series will get a kick out of this. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

An ad hoc cadre of militant cinemaniacs register their distaste for the consumer-capitalist status quo in this hilariously snarky collection of the Instagram webcomic by Gelgud (House in the Jungle). The slightly daft crew of an arthouse theater in an unnamed small town include a self-proclaimed witch, a humanoid duck, and the manager, who hasn’t been outside in seven years. The workers banter about Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and kvetch over customers and critics—until, led by Bertie, a firebrand who issues Marxist-Leninist diatribes like a late-1960s Jean-Luc Godard character, they storm the booth to “seize the means of projection!” (The pun neatly encapsulates the book’s goofy, knowing humor.) The thin strand of plot follows the chipper revolutionaries as they argue over how best to avoid “zombie consumerism” while staying “devoted to Brechtian principles,” but the narrative mostly bops between escapades—which is no bother because it’s all so funny. Film critic-turned-cartoonist Gelgud’s looping caricatures achieve an appropriate mix of ardent and self-satirizing. This one will be snapped up by cinephiles who might, in between Agnes Varda retrospectives and complaining about Letterboxd, wonder if they could hijack the Criterion Closet van. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink