Manic, funny, and complex, this staggeringly inventive collection from Madden (Ex Libris) detonates any remaining assumptions readers might hold for the traditional comics medium. Madden employs his knowledge of comics technique across a gallery of formal experiments that range from sagas (the exquisite “Bridge,” about a madness-inducing multi-generational quest) to witty one-pagers (“A History of American Comics in Six Panels”), and a wordless, noirish adaptation of Julio Cortázar’s “The Continuity of Parks.” Madden’s mostly black-and-white drawing is similarly free-range, pivoting from crowded street scenes to Hergé-style goofs, and introducing occasional wispy color wash for one-page haikus (“Julie has seen my other/ sketches on Tumblr”). The more avant-garde elements are grounded by a spirit of wistful romanticism and playful eroticism, which are best displayed in longer pieces, like “U.S. Post Modern Office Homes, Inc.,” wherein an office worker discovers her boss is a former porn star, and “Drawn Onward,” a twisty ouroboros that turns a stalker scenario on its head. A detailed afterword unpacks all the techniques and “constraints” Madden used to create these pieces, but some comics fans may prefer to just read and reread the results without worrying too much about how the magic got made. This has the feel of an instant classic. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

A grief-stricken son discovers he can revisit his past in this wry graphic novel from American Book Award winner Johnson (Incognegro). Johnson sets a mordant tone early on—protagonist Devin tries to drop a rose into his recently deceased mother’s grave but instead falls onto her coffin (“My mother is dead. And I’m sitting on her”). A jobless washout lacking purpose now that his role as caregiver is finished, Devin hides in nostalgia rather than dealing with selling the family house. He’s rattled, though, when an especially vivid childhood memory seems to transport him back to his late-1970s youth. Through internet sleuthing he discovers an underground community of people who “backflash.” Devin strikes up an unusual bond with Marcos, a bodybuilder who trains him to use physical items with strong nostalgic associations to trigger backflashes. Though Devin simply hopes to mend his heartbreak, bringing adult perception to events he did not fully understand as a child has unexpected consequences—among them, that he picks up clues to track down his deadbeat dad. Well-paced art by Lieber (Who Killed Jimmy Olsen?) emphasizes the comedic aspect of Devin’s muddleheaded confusion and arrested adolescence without tipping into slapstick. The narrative ends abruptly, but Johnson raises psychological and philosophical questions that will linger in readers’ minds. Comics fans who dug Memento and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind should check this out. Agent: Gloria Loomis and Julia Masnik, Watkins/Loomis Agency (for Johnson)(Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bolton, a graphic designer, debuts with a striking portfolio of reflections about human connections and failures to connect. The collection is divided into three sections—“In Public,” “In Transit,” and “At Home”—that reflect how people’s actions and their meaning change according to context. Bolton’s cool, diagrammatic art, suggesting a sort of instruction manual for life, contrasts with the brashly heartfelt text written over these scenes. In the title piece, for example, the narrator’s description of a rare loving exchange with his father appears over impersonal images of trees and power lines as seen from a car window. Other interludes capture simple, familiar moments—a teenager chewing gum to hide the alcohol on her breath (“Peppermint”), a woman acknowledging the practical gestures of love from her husband (“Range Life”), a feuding couple talking past each other at the store (“Furniture Shopping”)—with restrained, static digital art that seldom shows faces. The effect is distancing but also imbues the stories with a certain universality; it’s easy to project one’s own experiences onto these glimpses of other lives. The story “Ghosts” discusses the relief of “talking with someone about mundane things” in times of trouble, an attitude that sums up the volume as a whole. These delicate tales capture the vitality of everyday. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Italian comics writer Botton (Quentin Tarantino: A Graphic Biography) captures Audrey Hepburn’s trademark charisma in this sunny, if surface-level, graphic biography of the actor, who died in 1993. Discovered at age 20 by the novelist Collette, who declares Hepburn to be the perfect lead for the Broadway production of her novella Gigi, the doe-eyed European beauty gets whisked to America—and faces few obstacles to stardom: “I just pretended to be someone else, like little girls do when they play, and I won an Oscar,” she says. In no time, despite her “Dutch accent... or strange face,” Hepburn’s swept to the top of the 1950s Hollywood box office, starring in Roman Holiday, Sabrina, and Funny Face. Her personal life is rockier, and the narrative portrays her three marriages and efforts to have children as an ongoing struggle and search for love. Later in life, she becomes a UNICEF ambassador, leveraging her fame to support global poverty relief. Botton breezes through it all with excellent research but minimal insight. The main draw is Giacchetto’s expressive art, which ably depicts Hepburn’s bright elegance, Hollywood’s midcentury glamour, and a closetful of spectacular fashion ensembles. Film fans ought to pick this up simply to bask in Hepburn’s glow. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

This lush, sensuous body horror collection from Franklin (The Hills of Estrella Roja) electrifies with its chilling depictions of decay and regeneration. Spooky and satisfying folktales include “No Bones Nancy” and “Fruiting Bodies,” which evoke American murder ballads and campfire yarns. Connoisseurs of viral “creepypasta” style internet fare will appreciate entries like “#plantmom,” where a murderous fern takeover unfolds through a series of increasingly bizarre Instagram posts. Another social media plot turns nasty in “Contest Winner,” the graphic novella that closes out the collection. As the story unfolds, the reunion of a group of friends in West Texas—where “it’s so quiet it feels like the end of the world”—slow-burns into a desert nightmare. The mostly black-and-white art takes occasional excursions into color, and Franklin’s intimate chamber pieces recall the blood-soaked melodrama of Emily Carroll and Junji Ito, as well as Stephen Gammell’s illustrations from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. Though the vignettes are not explicitly interconnected, the often-queer themes and repeated visual and thematic elements suggest a shared universe—where mysterious plants and fungi act both as metaphor and looming threat to the existential joys and terrors of the human body. It’s a tantalizing new entry in the queer horror canon. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

This uneven Christmas-killer whodunit from Eisner winner Tynion (the Something Is Killing the Children series) and Hixson (the Children of the Woods series) centers on Michael, a gay comic writer burnt out on superheroes,who finally decides to tackle a self-publishing project featuring his true passion: serial killers. He meets with Randall Olsen—a gay man imprisoned more than 50 years ago for killings committed by a masked Santa known as the Deviant Killer. Randall hopes he’ll be portrayed as wrongly imprisoned, but Michael doesn’t pick up on his hints. Instead, they talk about queer life in the 1970s versus today, and Michael finds himself seen and understood by Randall in a way that unsettles those around him—especially the detective with the scars to prove that the Deviant Killer was real. The detective’s suspicions grow as a copycat killer begins to wreak havoc. Tynion again proves his chops at scripting authentic queer characters, but while themes of homophobia, trauma, and LGBTQ intergenerational community adorn the plot, the conceit still lands as less than original. Still, Hixson’s a fantastic artist, and his page design and frantic lines set this apart from other Christmas-killer fare. Readers will hope the next volume better lives up to the series’ potential. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Drawing on his YouTube channel and eponymous podcast, Jonathan “MrBallen” Allen adapts reputedly true (or at least documented) horror stories from around the world to satisfyingly chilling effect. The entries take readers to a valley in Canada’s Northwest Territories with a history of unexplained deaths and disappearances, through a reputedly haunted ghost town in Spain, into the middle of a Siberian tiger attack in Russia, and on the hunt for the man-eating Beast of Gevaudan in 18th-century France, among other escapades. MrBallen’s lurid narration brings to mind old EC horror comics: “It doesn’t matter how far he goes. It doesn’t matter how fast. Somewhere out there in the forest... the man is lurking.” Mutti’s lush art excels at creating eerie atmosphere, shocking the reader with moments of gore, and making the supernatural and mundane menaces feel equally plausible. Most of the tales take place in the great outdoors, and the art successfully evokes shadowy forests, snowbound mountains, blistering deserts, and isolated cabins. This spooky collection of campfire tales will appeal to horror and true crime fans. Agent: Byrd Leavell, UTA. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Harvey Award winner Gendry-Kim (The Waiting) delivers a poignant semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a couple who love dogs, in a small town that often does not. Yuna and her husband, Hun, move from Seoul to the countryside for their anxious dog Carrot’s benefit (after dosing Carrot with Prozac doesn’t do the trick). There they meet their new puppy, Potato, as well as a series of other dogs whom they briefly befriend. Not everyone sees dogs as family members, though, in this alternately welcoming and insular rural community. One monsoon day, Yuna and Hun catch their neighbor slicing up charred dog meat. Later, they encounter a truck soliciting dogs for processing—the local industry of turning canines into medicine or soju is an “open secret.” (In the afterword, Gendry-Kim acknowledges that earlier generations faced food scarcity, and expresses concern that her narrative could fuel stereotypes.) After they rescue yet another dog, Choco, from a neglectful neighbor, Yuna and Hun later see Choco’s former cage occupied by a new dog, lending the narrative’s final pages a wistful tone. In Gendry-Kim’s windblown pen-and-ink illustrations, the dogs often loom over landscapes or dwarf the narrator, indicating the outsize place they occupy in their humans’ hearts. It’s a clear-eyed ode to the complications of living with both pets and people. Agent: Nicolas Grivel, Nicolas Grivel Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

A Christmas morning spirals into an ordeal rife with lust and brutality in this surreal graphic novel from Simmons (Black River), which collects the comics he’s serialized for decades. Teenager Jessica leaps out of bed with visions of the holiday presents awaiting her downstairs, but her effort to join the celebration just a few rooms away is thwarted by a litany of strange encounters with the denizens of the Oz-like family farm. There’s a toy-size jazz combo performing in the shower, murderous thundercloud-like wraiths, a naked man shadowing her, and a talking tortoise-chicken. The weirdness snowballs further when Jessica’s grandparents give her a talisman and send her on a quest to save the farm—and all the “friends of the house” who also call it home. As the imperturbable heroine traverses secret passages into this expansive mini-universe and steeps herself in arcane lore, the tone swerves from whimsy to malevolence, with bursts of grisly violence and graphic sexual interludes. (“It may be difficult to clear my mind of all the death I saw today... so much blood,” Jessica reflects). Absurdism is built into the dream logic of the story, while an ambient dread and hints of domestic trauma trend ever more horrific. Simmons’s loose linework and wide-eyed cartoon figures belie the narrative’s transgressive tilt. Indie comics fans will relish this enigmatic mash-up of Lewis Carroll and Jim Woodring. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Disney animator Airriess (The Princess and the Frog), an associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute, debuts with a standout graphic adaptation of Antarctic explorer Cherry-Garrard’s account of his 1910–1913 expedition to the South Pole. This terrific first volume in a four-part series introduces dozens of characters and immerses readers in early 20th-century life aboard the whaler Terra Nova, recounting its journey from Cardiff to the pack icebergs surrounding Antarctica. Especially thrilling is an extended sequence of a savage storm that almost sinks the boat before its crew reaches the continent. Interspersed with the high seas scenes are vignettes of everyday life onboard, with well-researched nautical and scientific details. There’s also room made for lighter moments, such as the traditional hazing of crew crossing the equator for the first time. In another memorable episode, penguins are brought on board and served as a Christmas treat. Airriess’s distinctive character designs, sweeping tropical and polar vistas, and well-chosen anecdotes form a sweeping, majestic saga that achieves the rare feat of being both educational and entertaining. Readers will eagerly await the rest of the adventure. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink