This season’s comics promise a stellar lineup, including webcomics sensation Kate Beaton’s long-anticipated memoir, the Fantastic Four reenvisioned by hero-artist Alex Ross, and comedian Steve Martin’s graphic memoir.
Top 10
A Career in Books: A Novel About Friends, Money, and the Occasional Duck Bun
Kate Gavino. Plume, Aug. 2 ($20, ISBN 978-0-593-18548-3)
Gavino (Last Night’s Reading), a former editorial assistant turned lit scene portraitist, delivers an insider send-up of entry-level publishing that PW’s star review called “quill-sharp [and] delightful.”
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Kate Beaton. Drawn & Quarterly, Sept. 13 ($39.95, ISBN 978-1-77046-289-2)
The humorist behind the bestselling Hark, a Vagrant comics gets serious in a “masterpiece memoir” (per PW’s starred review) of her time working Northern Canada’s oil sands, revealing the human and environmental costs of the fuel industry.
Esther’s Notebooks
Riad Sattouf, trans. by Sam Taylor. Pantheon, Jan. 24 ($30, ISBN 978-0-593-31692-4)
Sattouf (The Arab of the Future) interviews his neighbor’s daughter over two years, when she’s 10 to 12, and draws their conversations as snapshots of contemporary youth.
Fantastic Four: Full Circle
Alex Ross. Abrams ComicArts, Sept. 6 ($24.99, ISBN 978-1-4197-6167-6)
Launching the MarvelArts line, Eisner winner Ross revamps a classic Jack Kirby story line in his first solo full-length graphic novel, hotly anticipated by mainstream comics fans. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
I Thought You Loved Me
MariNaomi. Amble, Nov. 8 ($28.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-61294-249-0)
Influential queer/feminist cartoonist MariNaomi (Dirty Produce) blends comics and collage in obsessive scrapbook fashion in this study of a Gen X ex-friendship.
Men I Trust
Tommi Parrish. Fantagraphics, Nov. 22 ($34.99, ISBN 978-1-68396-650-0)
Parrish follows up his Lambda Award–winning The Lie and How We Told It with a painterly graphic novel about an unlikely friendship between a sex worker and a single mother.
The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night
Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. Abrams ComicArts, Oct. 11 ($24.99, ISBN 978-1-4197-5870-6)
The smash hit Monstress team reunites, ordering up gore and thrills when Chinese American twins learn their parents are far less human than they appear. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions
Steve Martin and Harry Bliss. Celadon, Nov. 15 ($30, ISBN 978-1-250-81529-3)
Martin shares backstage bits from movies including The Jerk and Roxanne, drawn by New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss, following their bestselling A Wealth of Pigeons.
Where Black Stars Rise
Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger. Tor Nightfire, Oct. 18 ($17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-250-75017-4)
A Lebanese psychiatrist attempts to help a schizophrenic patient obsessed with Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow, only to discover real terrors lurking in Brooklyn back alleys.
Who Will Make the Pancakes: Five Stories
Megan Kelso. Fantagraphics, Oct. 11 ($29.99, ISBN 978-1-68396-670-8)
Ignatz winner Kelso collects 15 years of comics short stories that probe identity, politics, and motherhood, including “Watergate Sue,” a Nixon-era family tale serialized in the New York Times.
Comics & Graphic Novels
AbLaze
Laura by Guillem March (Aug. 5, $19.99, ISBN 978-1-950912-64-3). The Spanish artist known for such superhero series as Batman and Justice League muses in this indie-styled character study of 20-year-old Laura, on why the boy she loves doesn’t love her back, what that means about her, him, and the nature of “true love.”
Abrams Comicarts
Phenomena: The Golden City of Eyes by Brian Michael Bendis and André Lima Araújo (Sept. 13, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-4197-6169-0) teams up Eisner winner Bendis (cocreator of superheroes Miles Morales and Jessica Jones) with Araújo (A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance) to conjure a future where three young adventurers travel a phenomenally transformed Earth. 50,000 announced first printing.
Queenie: Godmother of Harlem by Elizabeth Colomba and Aurelie Levy (Jan. 17, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-4197-5774-7) portrays the larger-than-life history of mobster Stephanie Saint-Clair, who emigrated from Martinique to New York City and rose to rule 1930s Prohibition-era Harlem and defended herself against rivals and racism.
Andrews McMeel
Sensory: Life on the Spectrum: An Autistic Comics Anthology, edited by Rebecca Ollerton (Sept. 20, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-7476-6), includes 30 comics by autistic contributors, covering receiving diagnoses, how to best explain diagnoses to friends and family, ways to connect with the autistic community and allies, and self-care tips.
War and Peace: The Graphic Novel by Leo Tolstoy, Alexandr Poltorak, and Dmitry Chukhrai (Sept. 27, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5248-6498-9) adapts the 19th-century classic Russian novel contrasting military strategy played out across freezing battlefields and the marital and philosophical warfare swirling in grand ballrooms.
Archaia
I’m Still Alive by Roberto Saviano and Asaf Hanuka (Oct. 11, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-68415-442-5) delves into the early life of journalist Saviano, who has lived in hiding for 15 years since publishing his exposé Gomorrah on the Cammora mob’s control and corruption of his native Naples, in a graphic memoir drawn by Hanuka (The Divine).
Arsenal Pulp
Postcards from Congo: A Graphic History by Edmund Trueman (Sept. 27, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55152-895-3) details the fractured history of the Democratic Republic of Congo, from colonialism through civil war and contemporary dictatorship, highlighting the cultural and resource wealth of the region against its exploitation by global powers.
Avery
The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law That Changed Women’s Lives by Kelcey Ervick (Sept. 20, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-53918-7). The goalkeeper whose 1980s coming-of-age was defined by playing soccer tells her story within the larger phenomenon of girls’ advancement in organized athletics following Title IX.
Avery Hill
Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis by Tom Humberstone (Sept. 8, $20.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-910395-69-1) volleys out a graphic bio of world championship player Suzanne Lenglen (1899–1938), depicting the French athlete’s winning streaks on the court and the journalistic frenzy that surrounded her fashion choices and personal life.
Birdcage Bottom
Yesterday: Diary Comix by Brother Malcolm (Sept. 17, $15 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-73315-098-9) brings together in one volume Malcolm’s indie minicomics, capturing anecdotes and dreams, and touching on deeper topics in politics, as well as lighter fare, in drawings about sex, astrology, and magic.
Bold Type
Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game by David Kushner and Koren Shadmi (Sept. 13, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56858-876-6) reunites the team behind the graphic history Rise of the Dungeon Master to play out the history of Atari, told through the launch of Pong.
Boom! Studios
Regarding the Matter of Oswald’s Body by Christopher Cantwell and Luca Casalanguida (Aug. 1, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68415-845-4) digs into the rumor that Lee Harvey Oswald’s grave does not contain his actual body (and why), and introduces an oddball cast of conspiracy theorists.
Conundrum
Kwändüˉr by Cole Pauls (Sept. 20, $25 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77262-077-1) collects family and community tales in comics form by Pauls, winner
of Canada’s Indigenous Voices Award, including Northern Canada history
lessons, as well as drawn instructions on how to do the Knuckle Hop, a traditional indoor game, or speak Southern Tutchone.
Drawn & Quarterly
Acting Class by Nick Drnaso (Aug. 16, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-77046-492-6) follows up Sabrina, the first graphic novel longlisted for the Booker Prize, with this tale of a surreal ensemble cast who meet in an acting class run by a mysterious guru. PW’s review called it “a provocative portrait of the search for connection and meaning in modern life.”
Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981–2016 by Geneviève Castrée, edited by Phil Elverum, trans. by Aleshia Jensen (Oct. 4, $99.95, ISBN 978-1-77046-618-0), collects the life work of Castrée, a rising star cartoonist who died young, including previously unpublished art and photographs, arranged by her widower Elverum.
The Joy of Quitting by Keiler Roberts (Oct. 25, $24.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-77046-622-7) continues Roberts’s series documenting domestic foibles and the humor and existential crises discovered in small moments with small children (especially as they inevitably begin to grow bigger in their britches), featuring such highlights as lice infestation and toilet talk.
Fantagraphics
Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere by Liniers (Aug. 23, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-68396-556-5) presents 20 years of the Argen-
tinian cartoonist’s quirky comic strips, ranging from chatty creatures and history gags to a blind date with Chthulu, with a foreword by The Simpson’s Matt Groening.
The Reddest Rose: Romantic Love from the Ancient Greeks to Reality TV by Liv Strömquist (Dec. 13, $22.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68396-459-9) opens by querying why Leonardo DiCaprio tends to date much younger women, before launching into a centuries-deep exploration of the quandaries of romantic love.
First Second
Now Let Me Fly: A Portrait of Eugene Bullard by Ronald Wimberly and Brahm Revel (Jan. 3, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-62672-852-3) memorializes the life of Bullard (1895–1961), the first African American fighter pilot in WWI, who flew for France and whose bravery surmounted persistent racism.
Graphic Mundi
Queen of Snails by Maureen Burdock (Nov. 29, $25.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63779-036-6) weaves together memoir and family history by German immigrant Burdock, unpacking generational trauma and cultural conflict in the relationship with her inconsistent mother and Nazi-sympathizing grandmother.
Icon
Class: A Graphic Guide by Laura Harvey, Sarah Leaney, and Danny Noble (Nov. 15, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-78578-691-4) gives the concept of social class a comics explainer, covering such concepts as gentrification, elitism, and educational access, and touching on major thinkers alongside personal anecdotes of class differences.
IDW
The Rocketeer: The Great Race by Stephen Mooney (Jan. 24, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68405-944-7) sends the superhero careening into the skies once more, on the eve of war, in a miniseries volume published on the 40th anniversary of the first appearance of the solo jet-propelled stunt pilot.
Image
Die, Book 1 by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans (Nov. 8, $59.99, ISBN 978-1-5343-2344-5) reunites a group of 40-something friends who were transported into the universe of a role-playing game in their teens in the 1990s and lost one of their crew, and now must dive back into its horrors.
It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood (Nov. 15, $12.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5343-2386-5) follows up The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott with a more inward-looking graphic memoir as Thorogood catalogs six months of her existence in a chaotic personal time, trying to thread her life back together.
Iron Circus
Wine Ghost Goes to Hell by Sage Coffey (Oct. 4, $12 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63899-105-2) goofs on the antics of a ghostly vino-guzzling fashionista who helps newcomers to death navigate literal Hell.
Magnetic
Giantess by JC Deveney and Nuria Tamarit, trans. by Dan Christensen (Sept. 20, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-951719-61-6). When a family adopts an unusually large baby, and she begins to grow into a fantastical giant, the community and the child must navigate prejudice.
Mariner
Love & Vermin: A Collection of Cartoons by the New Yorker’s Will McPhail by Will McPhail (Oct. 11, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-358-34622-7) packages the first collection of the cartoonist’s gags, featuring laughs about awkward social encounters, conniving pigeons, and the misadventures of Lady No-Kids.
NBM
Algorithmic Reality by David Sánchez and Damian Bradfield (Nov. 15, $17.99, ISBN 978-1-68112-306-6) teams up tech entrepreneur Bradfield (cofounder of WeTransfer) with cartoonist Sánchez to build an allegorical graphic novel set in a dystopia where the data surveilled from ubiquitous digital devices rules as the highest currency.
New York Review Comics
All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson by Charles Johnson (Oct. 11, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-68137-673-8) collects the National Book Award–winning novelist’s expansive body of political cartoons, which take aim at racism, poverty, and other social ills, including work first published in his college years.
Nobrow
Nowhere Girl by Magali Le Huche, trans. by Jessie Aufiery (Sept. 6, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-913123-19-2), recalls the cartoonist’s coming-of-age through an anxiety-ridden adolescence in the 1990s and her unlikely, but healing, fandom for the Beatles.
Oni
Dancing on the Volcano by Floor de Goede, trans. by Laura Watkinson (Oct. 25, $29.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63715-088-7), poses the question of whether distance makes the heart grow fonder in a travelogue/long-distance romance, as de Goede tours the world without his boyfriend (but can’t stop thinking about him).
It Took Luke: Overworked & Underpaid by Mark Bouchard and Bayleigh Underwood (Oct. 11, $19.99, ISBN 978-1-63715-084-9). In 2028 Los Angeles, an exterminator wants to quit the hustle of vermin hunting and hopes to reunite with an ex, but when a disturbing creature abducts a coworker, things take an unexpected direction.
Pantheon
Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed (Jan. 10, $35, ISBN 978-1-5247-4841-8). Deriving its title from a saying that translates from Arabic as “your wish is my command,” this work imagines a Cairo where wishes are sold at the corner kiosk, but discount desire-fulfillment comes with unintended consequences.
Princeton Architectural Press
My Body Created a Human: A Love Story by Emma Ahlqvist (Sept. 20, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-64896-155-7). Ahlqvist reflects in her debut graphic memoir on the oddities and amazements of pregnancy, birth, the postpartum period, breastfeeding, and becoming a mother.
Scribe US
Our Members Be Unlimited: A Comic About Workers and Their Unions by Sam Wallman (Nov. 3, $24.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950354-99-3) rallies for workers’ rights in a journalistic comics account of past and present struggles in global and local labor organizing, including recent battles fought in Amazon warehouses and with the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance.
Seven Stories
Bear by Staffan Gnosspelius (Jan. 17, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-64421-231-8) features a bear with a cone on his head, which he can’t escape or distract from until he hears music played by a sympathizing fellow creature, in this wordless adult picture book designed to illustrate the experience of depression.
Silver Sprocket
Be Kind, My Neighbor by Yugo Limbo (Aug. 10, $39.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-945509-92-6) sets a puppetry art–inspired cast in motion as a vagabond musician stumbles into a town plagued by murders and possibly ruled by a cult.
Soft Skull
Shotgun Seamstress: An Anthology by Osa Atoe (Nov. 29, $40, ISBN 978-1-59376-739-6) packages into one volume the full run of the influential Black punk zine independently published from 2006 to 2015, retaining its photocopied layouts with spreads covering Black, queer, outsider figures such as the band Death, Poly Styrene, and Brontez Purnell.
Stanford Univ.
Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa by Aomar Boum and Nadjib Berber (Jan. 24, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5036-3291-2) reveals in a historical graphic novel how Hitler’s fascism infiltrated the Vichy regime in North Africa, through the story of a Jewish journalist who flees Berlin to Algeria only to be imprisoned in a series of labor camps.
Street Noise
Look Again by Elizabeth A. Trembley (Sept. 20, $20.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-951491-18-5) turns on a traumatic moment, when Trembley came across a dead body on a walk with her dog, with a Rashomon-like narrative in which the various viewpoints are all Trembley’s, as her memory of the event gets processed over time.
Surely
Homecoming by Kaitlin Chan (Jan. 10, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-4197-5518-7) celebrates the coming-out stories of Chan and the group of friends she met after she moved from more buttoned-up Hong Kong to Taipei and discovered its vibrant and open queer community, reflecting a progressive generational shift in Asia regarding LGBTQ rights.
ten speed
It Won’t Always Be Like This: A Graphic Memoir by Malaka Gharib (Sept. 20, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-984860-29-3) follows up I Was Their American Dream to render Gharib’s teenage summers traveling from America to Egypt, as she found her place in her father’s new family and two cultures.
Tin House
A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings by Will Betke-Brunswick (Nov. 15, $18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-953534-45-3), a graphic memoir of illness, loss, and gender discovery, depicts Betke-Brunswick’s family as anthropomorphized penguins as they bond through the 10 months of their mother’s terminal cancer treatments, during which the artist came out as transgender.
Titan Comics
The Man Who Fell to Earth: The Official Movie Adaptation by Dan Watter and Dev Pramanik (Oct. 25, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-78773-701-3) retells as a graphic novel the 1976 film featuring David Bowie as an alien entrepreneur trying to save his home planet from ecological devastation by building wealth on Earth, until he catches the attention of the feds.
Top Shelf
Edmund White’s a Boy’s Own Story: The Graphic Novel by Edmund White et al. (Nov. 8, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-60309-508-2) adapts White’s dry-humored coming-of-age novel about growing up queer in the repressive 1950s American Midwest, with cowriters Brian Alessandro and Michael Carroll, and drawings by Igor Karash.
F.A.R.M. System by Rich Koslowski (Nov. 1, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-60309-515-0) pitches a bush league system for wannabes who might have superpower potential, but haven’t yet cracked into the hero big-time. As they quest to fly with the pros, they have to slog through costume design training and marketing seminars.
TUTTLE
Halina Filipina: A New Yorker in Manila by Arnold Arre (Sept. 6, $14.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-80485-544-0) pairs unlikely lovers in a romantic comedy tour of street life in the Philippines, as a savvy half-Filipina New Yorker seeks out her roots in Manila and falls for a local film critic.
uncivilized
First There Was Chaos: Hesiod’s Story of Creation by Joel Priddy (Oct. 11, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-941250-52-5) summons the voices of the primordial formless who flailed about before the Greek gods, leading to the birth of Aphrodite.
Vault
The Last Book You’ll Ever Read: The Complete Series by Cullen Bunn and Leila Leiz (Sept. 20, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63849-108-8). After a novelist reveals the horrifying truth about humankind, and anyone who reads her unfortunate bestseller, Satyr, becomes a violent killer, her readers set out to get her. 30,000-copy announced first printing.
West Margin
A Fade of Light by Nate Fakes
(Oct. 11, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5131-3499-4) is a graphic memoir centered on Fakes’s stepdad, Ron, who came into Nate’s life in the 1990s and brought light into their family—until progressive dementia caused Ron’s own light to begin to fade.
