In this rambunctious murder mystery set in 1990s Turkey, Samancı (Dare to Disappoint) contrasts a playful and vibrant visual style with deadly serious themes. For university students Ece and Meltem, the only escape from the cramped dorm room they share with six other women is diving into the nearby Bosphorus Strait. But after the two see a car driven by a university acquaintance splash into the water, they become entangled in a murder plot involving corrupt nationalist politician Aslan Adam, the car’s owner. The two meet with Adam, who offers them a generous reward to retrieve a safe full of American cash from the bottom of the Strait. Convinced they have a magical ability to make things happen with the power of their combined stares, the two women try to use their “Medusa’s gaze” to find the treasure and thwart Adam’s plans for political takeover. Whether or not they double cross the politician becomes a life-threatening decision. The bright colors, cartoonish art, and silly internal dialogue lend a whimsical tone to the high-stakes action. It’s a winning escapade. (May)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink

This uneven coming-of-age graphic autofiction from Good (The Way Around) and artist FLuX entices with its “inspired by true events” premise but varies in its execution of the story’s emotional beats. David is a half-Yanomami, half-American boy whose Indigenous mother met his anthropologist father in the Amazon. For the first five years of David’s life, the family moves back and forth between countries. David struggles with his “double life” in the New Jersey suburbs, where he’s bullied for his biracial appearance (“You look like one of those Indians from that movie... The Last Mohican,” jokes a “token jerk”). His mother, Yarima, ultimately abandons the family, in order to return to live with her tribe in the rainforest. David’s father, Kenneth, rarely acknowledges Yarima’s absence, while David descends into a years-long identity crisis that spirals into self-harm and alcohol abuse before he turns his life around following a drunk-driving accident. Chapters alternate between David’s story and a mostly dialogue-free retelling of Yarima’s life in a paradisal landscape drawn in eye-popping colors by FLuX. In David’s sections, black-and-white art—where characters outlined in white appear as flat cutouts—magnifies the bleakness of his adolescence but can drag in its replay of trauma. A fleeting family reunion in the book’s final pages seems anticlimactic. Though this has its moments, it never quite soars. (May)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink

Dahm (The Harrowing of Hell) spins a dark fable featuring a meek deliveryman toting an enormous box. When he shows up at the door of a looming mansion, the deliveryman finds a riotous party underway and becomes hopelessly lost while searching for “the resident,” who needs to sign for the package. Grotesque, violent performances unfold in circus rings as the party organizers call out sinister-sounding events like “the Snapping Hour.” As in a bad dream, the deliveryman is forever breaking unwritten rules, stumbling into rituals he doesn’t understand, and getting roped into cryptic conversations as he remains irrationally devoted to making his delivery. With thick, flowing lines and a palette of sunset colors, Dahm creates an impossibly vast interior space filled with glittering ballrooms, dank cellars, back rooms where the staff labors to keep the party going, and even an underground lake with a fleet of ships. This confirms Dahm’s reputation as a craftsman of wholly original, deeply felt fantasy. (June)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink

Cartoonist Sweeney debuts with a candid portrait of life with a disability, drawn in delicate brushstrokes and natural colors. Born in Moldova in 1994, Sweeney showed early signs of Bruck syndrome, which causes fragile bones and joint contractures. After her birth parents place her in an orphanage, she’s adopted by an American family and grows up in New Jersey, where she’s wracked with searing joint pain and frequent bone breaks. Through a series of short chapters illustrating various stages of her life, Sweeney shines a critical light on the ableism she’s forced to contend with, including a lack of affordable transportation, an expensive and out-of-touch healthcare system, and even the high hospital counters she can’t see over when sitting in her wheelchair. Yet despite these challenges and her constant physical pain, Sweeney finds peace among her friends, with her boyfriend (“It feels good to lean on someone”), smoking marijuana, and in nature. It’s a revealing visualization of a rare, “depersonalizing” condition and how Sweeney finds “drops of disabled joy whenever I can.” Sweeney’s subtle and elegant art reflects the nuance of her moment-to-moment struggle. Fans of Ellen Forney’s Marbles will want to add this to their list. (July)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink

Video game designer Mechner uses alternating color palettes to distinguish between his, his father’s, and his grandfather’s timelines in this illuminating debut. Scenes from his Jewish grandfather Adolf’s unfinished memoir about living through WWI and WWII unfold in parallel to Mechner’s more quotidian struggles to keep his marriage together after he moves his family to France in 2015. Interwoven with this present-day migration story are vignettes recounting how Adolf’s life in Austria is upended by the Nazis. He’s forced to join the military and ultimately leave his son Franz behind as he migrates to Cuba in search of safety in 1938. Franz and his caretaker flee first to France and then to Havana, where they’re reunited with Adolf. Drawn in loose line art, the narrative jumps between time periods freely and rapidly to reveal the intertwining of generations. The alternating story lines can be hard to follow, but what emerges is an affecting ensemble portrait of one family’s experience with war and dislocation. Fans of Maus will want to take a look. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Dhaliwal (Cyclopedia Exotica) conjures a sly and cutesy fantasy world in this tale of finding the strength to face the past. In Chamomile Valley, an amnesiac young service witch named Singe is rescued after being burned at the stake and left for dead when her magic dried up. With Yew-Veda, a witch doctor, and Bufo Wonder, a witch who’s accidentally turned himself into a toad, Singe sets out to recover her magic and her memory. The trio is pursued by the demons Disgust, Doubt, and Despair, and aided by the Smoke Witch, the collective spirit of burned witches past. The format blends blocks of text with comics and illustration, and in a gimmicky design quirk, certain repeated words appear to burn, glow, wiggle, and drift away. Recipe spells are scattered throughout, ranging from chamomile tea to a self-love potion (actually chocolate-covered strawberries). Touches of whimsy lend to the middle grade fantasy vibe, though the pacing is uneven. It adds up to a charming albeit jumbled potion. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

The sprawling trade debut from Pidge collects their ongoing Ignatz-nominated comics series about the trippy adventures of an expanding universe of tangentially connected characters. The cast includes Addy, who’s left to cope when her omnipotent superhero friend Jeff self-destructs; Addy’s girlfriend Lilah, a witch investigating monsters in Arizona (“Magic’s so... complicated out west,” she complains); Soe, around whom water and ice keep materializing; Casimir, an alien renegade who winds up working at a truck stop “on the outer rim of the Perseus arm”; and Otis, a robot exploring Buddhism after the death of his human husband. Their linked stories are populated with humans, aliens, animal people, and uncategorizable beings. Pidge’s chunky line art, drenched in neon colors, recalls early webcomics, 1960s psychedelic cartoonists like Vaughn Bodē, and such underground animators as Sally Cruikshank. Though rough and rambling, this cockeyed series will hook readers nostalgic for classic underground comics. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Indie cartoonist Mejias’s energetic trade debut, an Angoulême award winner, depicts 20th-century Puerto Rican history in striking woodcut panels. The bulk of the account takes place in 1950, as members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist movement launch an uprising against U.S. control of the island. After Griselio Torresola meets with revolutionary leader Pedro Albizu Campos, he travels to Washington, D.C., to assassinate President Truman but bungles the job. Back on Puerto Rico, several deadly conflicts occur, including a successful raid against a police station in the village of Utuado and a counterattack by the police. Mejias finds surreal moments of beauty amid the carnage. In one such scene, Griselio experiences a ghostly visitation from the unlikely duo of Gandhi and Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, who speak to him “in words he could understand.” In another, a young boy picks mangoes in a grove. Mejias’s painstakingly hand-carved woodblock art results in vibrant, detailed scenes that lend a poetic touch throughout. This impressive work of art brings history to full and fascinating life. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

A businessman’s past comes back to haunt him in this stunning psycho-horror manga by Norikazu, which was originally published in 1986. Plagued by visions of a shadowy, faceless woman, Tetsuo recalls suppressed memories of his brief and tumultuous friendship with Kimiko—an infirm teenage girl whose obsessions with old movies and violence prove to be a deadly combination when she manipulates Testuo into donning the guise of a vindictive Frankenstein monster and lashing out against those who have wronged them. When their role-play crosses the line from mean-spirited pranks to mayhem, the results shatter both of their lives. Kawashima’s suspenseful thriller is cinematic and beautiful, full of the indelible imagery—an eerily calm seascape, a discarded mask, a featureless face—that established him as one of the leading names in Japanese horror comics. It’s a must-read for fans of Junji Ito and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Kaneko (Bambi and Her Pink Gun) outdoes himself with this gonzo sci-fi reimagining of Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga series Dororo. In Kaneko’s hands, the feudal Japanese setting of Tezuka’s original becomes a futuristic dystopia with a Soviet brutalist aesthetic. In the aftermath of a war between humans and androids known as Kreachers, Doro, a snarky child thief, runs afoul of the gang lords who rule a snowbound city. He falls in with Hyaku, a young woman dressed in animal hides who’s out to retrieve body parts she believes were stolen from her by Kreachers. The story is packed with wall-to-wall action, stunningly and gruesomely rendered: explosions, bloody assassinations, wild animal attacks, underground cyborg surgery, a fight on top of a speeding semitruck. But beneath the bloodshed is a deceptively well-structured story about injustice, revenge, and the blurred lines between organic life and technology. Kaneko is heavily influenced by American artists like Coop, Frank Kozik, and Charles Burns, as Frederico Anzalone notes in his introduction, and there are even elements of Will Eisner in the book’s rambling cityscapes. It’s a blast of pure cyberpunk energy. (July)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink