Tung (Everything Is OK) looks back with compassion at her teenage struggles with body image in this achingly resonant autofiction. Growing up with a mother who makes comments about her weight (“First you tell me to eat and now you’re calling me fat for eating,” Debbie snaps at a family meal), a supportive but naturally thin older sister, and piggish male classmates, Debbie begins to fixate on her looks. The hyper-skinny aesthetic of the early 2000s doesn’t help; watching Bridget Jones’s Diary with friends, she panics that she’s shaped like “fat” Renée Zellweger. Debbie begins to starve herself, and her interest in athletics changes from enjoying sports to punishing herself with grueling exercise regimens. Her extreme weight loss causes exhaustion, skin problems, and hair loss—ironically triggering even more body anxieties. “I felt invisible but also extremely visible,” she recalls. “My failures were magnified.” Tung describes how she pulled herself back from disordered eating while reflecting on the toxic messages that mass—and, now, social—media sends to teens. Her cute, accessible art softens the painful edges of the story and makes the cartoon Debbie feel like a trustworthy friend. This empathetic work offers an accessible introduction for younger adult readers to a persistent social issue. Agent: Laurie Abkemeier, DeFiore and Co. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This fizzy series of short comics by alt-manga artist Takano first ran in a Japanese women’s lifestyle magazine in the 1980s and ’90s and remain a delight. Ruki, a cheerful, childlike Tokyo woman, skips through her days oblivious to the hyper-capitalist Japanese bubble economy around her. She works from home and spends most of her time enjoying small, simple pleasures: reading children’s books at the library, napping on the train, cooking on an old-fashioned hibachi grill. “I don’t mind if people see me having fun!” she asserts. Her friend, Ecchan, who blows her paychecks on fashion and gets flustered around good-looking men, tries to introduce Ruki to high living, without success; when Ecchan dresses Ruki up for a classy soirée, Ruki complains, “I look just like my dead grandmother.” Takano captures her charming characters in impeccably posed body language, and a style suggestive of European clear-line cartooning. She takes full advantage of the opportunity to work in color, giving each two-page installment its own palette. Ruki’s gently funny adventures have the appeal of iyashikei (“healing”) manga, but Takano’s exceptional cartooning skills and attention to human detail elevate them to a category all their own. Like the café drinks that Ruki and Ecchan commiserate over, it’s a small, perfect treat. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Orlesky’s darkly romantic debut, first serialized online, conjures a gritty Weird West where centaurs gallop across the American frontier and sphinxes take out bounties. Evander Rook, a cynical, scarred centaur and soldier of fortune, crosses paths with fast-talking human opportunist Asa Langley, who works for an East Coast steel baron and hopes to strike it rich in the Wyoming Territory. “Asa was crazy enough to eat the devil with horns on,” Evander complains, but as they travel together, the two become partners, lovers, coconspirators, and deadly enemies. An epigraph from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian foreshadows the book’s bitterly elegiac tone, though it’s hard to miss the influence of Annie Proulx and Brokeback Mountain as well. The fantasy elements coexist within a realist American West of sunsets and smoke-filled skies, a troubled land being parceled out in “deals made so low under the table it was closer to romance than business.” Orlesky drapes desert vistas, frontier towns, and foreboding industrial zones in warm sepia tones and organic textures that the characters, human and inhuman alike, seem to inhabit naturally. Pulled off with attention-demanding originality, this cross-genre epic will rope in fans of historical fiction and romantasy that doesn’t guarantee a happily ever after. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This subtle yet searing graphic novel from Eisner and Lambda award winner Lai (Stone Fruit) takes its title from the nickname ironically bestowed on the main character, Lucy, by her best friend, Trish. In fact, Lucy is anything but a “loose cannon”; quiet, cagey, and hyper-responsible, she divides her time in Montreal over a summer heat wave between restaurant work and caring for her ailing grandfather. Trish, a sharp-tongued struggling writer, takes for granted their long friendship, which stretches back to when they were coming up in small-town Quebec as “the only two gay Chinese Anglophone teens in all of Lennoxville.” Lai cannily employs overlapped or cropped speech bubbles to show how stifled Cannon feels. Charlotte, a new server at her restaurant, becomes someone Cannon can open up to, and a romance blossoms. Cannon and Trish’s friendship reaches a breaking point when Cannon discovers that Trish is borrowing Cannon’s own family story to jump-start her new manuscript—about a mother who cedes the care of her abusive father to her overworked daughter. After Cannon finally explodes, a healing process begins with Trish (“Nothing you want is obvious, Cannon”), her mother, and herself. Lai expertly develops fulsome characters in fluid, emotive black-and-white art. Cannon envisions hovering blackbirds when she’s overwhelmed by emotions, and splashes of red flood the simply drawn backgrounds during heightened scenes. Lai’s embrace of her characters’ vulnerability makes for a satisfying emotional feast. Agent: Alessandra Sternfeld, Am-Book. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/22/2025 | Details & Permalink

One of modern history’s most flamboyantly dysfunctional families comes to gossipy life in this irresistible biography from Pond (The Customer Is Always Wrong). Born to an aristocratic but insolvent English family in the first decades of the 20th century, the six Mitford sisters grow up sharp-witted, strong-willed, and eccentric. “Deborah, as a child, spent many hours in the family chicken house practicing the exact expression of a hen about to lay an egg,” Pond notes in one of countless bizarre anecdotes. In adulthood, the sisters become a novelist and historian (Nancy), a Communist and muckraking journalist (Jessica), a duchess (Deborah), a poultry breeding enthusiast (Pamela), and Nazi sympathizers (Diana and Unity, whose personal connections with Hitler were scandalous at the time). “They each had a talent for shaping entertaining narratives and for making their lives seem epic,” Pond writes, “which they were.” Pond intermittently compares the Mitfords’ soap-operatic lives with her own upbringing in Southern California in the 1960s and ’70s, dreaming of glamour and longing for even one sister. Her witty art, drawn in inky blue, imbues the characters with personality, and the ingenious page layouts comment on the subject matter: the sisters’ finishing school days, for example, are represented with machinery processing girls for the marriage market. It’s an off-kilter trip through the 20th century that readers won’t want to miss. Agent: Paul Bresnick, Bresnick Weil Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

Set in a literal cola war, this laddish corporate-espionage thriller from writers Johnson (Superman: Red Son) and Palmiotti (the Harley Quinn series) and artist Santacruz (Cell Block Earth) revels in execution-style shootings and pinup-style nudity. In a soulless corporate near future, a battle unfolds between Osaka’s Popso Furious and Fizz-One sodas, which are helmed by previously conjoined twin brothers. Jon Pyle’s a glib killer working off a debt to Fizz One’s cola-garch. In the opening pages, he gets woken up from beneath a pile of naked women by one of a set of twin sisters who are assigned to escort him on his next assignment. After his résumé of international assassinations in the name of the soda biz is recapped in quick, quippy scenes (“I made a silencer out of a cola can. Cool, right?”), the mission gets underway. At times, the wordy script crowds the panels, though the familiar dueling warlords plot offers Santacruz opportunity to wild out with knife duels, car chases, brothel showdowns, and the inevitable kidnapping of Jon’s love interest: the Popso scientist behind an amusingly mundane yet game-changing cola innovation supposedly worth billions. It’s all so over-the-top that it vaults past satire and into absurdity. There’s fizz in this giddy nihilism, but nobody would claim it’s good for them. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this arresting collection of political cartoons, Sabaaneh (Power Born of Dreams) plucks heart-stopping moments from the tumult of the war in Gaza. Each one-panel comic offers his interpretation of clips from videos Palestinians posted to social channels, many of which he reports have since been censored. The works are drawn in India ink to give “permanence” to this fleeting form of media, Sabaaneh writes. A still of a grieving parent saying “Marah loved painting” becomes an image of a girl touching a pencil to an approaching missile, while another parent’s question—“How did a ten-year-old threaten them?”—is illustrated with a boy aiming a kite at a plane dropping bombs. Sabaaneh’s cartoons vibrate with sorrow and rage, though some land with an unexpected gentleness when capturing families’ attempts to comfort each other. In one such image, abstracted figures represent a sister consoling a younger brother “trembling in fear after the bombing.” The thickly inked art recalls Peter Kuper and Eric Drooker, but the angular figures bent over in pain most strongly evoke Picasso’s Guernica, which Sabaaneh cites as his model, though the off-the-shelf font for the translation doesn’t frame the sophistication of the art as well. The book ends with a longer piece illustrating the final phone call of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed by a tank. By freezing these moments so beautifully in time, Sabaaneh refuses to let readers look away. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

The messy personal, creative, and business tensions that shy young filmmaker George Lucas battled to complete the first Star Wars movie get wrangled by Hopman (Girl Rebels) and storyboard artist Roche into a similarly rousing quest narrative. A rebellious underachiever from Modesto, Calif., who preferred comics and hot rods (one of which he crashed) to studying, Lucas found his calling in film school. But despite obvious talent, he lacked the confidence of friends Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola (whose “loud, impulsive” style made him the model for Han Solo). Hopman gives short shrift to Lucas’s early career, zooming in on the near catastrophe of Star Wars. Saddled with a distrustful studio, disgruntled crew, and his script that nobody understood, Lucas nearly lost control of the film and his health. Hopman maintains an upbeat verve, however, positioning the obsessive and touchingly naive Lucas as a dark horse it’s impossible not to root for. Roche’s fluid, expressive art, given depth by dramatic shading and pops of color, generates momentum. Along the way, Hopman effectively threads in production trivia about Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher’s secret on-set affair, the foley studio behind the now-iconic sound effects, and more. This is pop culture history of the first order. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bunn (the Harrow County series) and Mitten (The Alternates) draw readers into an enticing folkloric world in this dark fantasy series opener. Teenage sisters Sommer and Winter travel to Sweden as their father, a fantasy novelist, chases inspiration for his next book. When both their parents are kidnapped by shadowy elven beings, the siblings set out to rescue them and descend into the Autumn Kingdom, a decaying underground fairy realm that requires mortal sacrifices. “The world rots,” a changeling warns them. “Like meat in the sun.” As they push deeper into the underworld, slaying monsters with the help of a conveniently unearthed giant sword, their adventures eerily parallel the plot of their father’s book series about two rival warrior queens known as the Doomed Sisters. Mitten’s artistic background includes stints on Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and B.P.R.D. series, and the influence shows in his daring designs for the Kingdom and its weird inhabitants, which range from a gigantic half-lion, half-millipede to tiny carnivorous pixies. The human characters are just as skillfully rendered. With plenty of mysteries left to explore, readers will be eager to follow Sommer and Winter further into the shadows in future volumes. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

The Kwong brothers (Indigo) spin up a relentless action-adventure fantasy. Years after Zhehe City broke a peace treaty and destroyed neighboring Aye-Shan City, a shaman named Ling aims to set things right by finding the only person who is able to rebuild what’s been lost—the “City Builder” of Aye-Shan. It turns out that the City Builder has died, but his grandson, Ocean, joins Ling on a quest to find the city’s guardian beast, accompanied by the children of the last survivors. As they make their way across a wasteland studded with twisted rock formations and crumbling stone ruins, the Holy Mother of Zhehe sends her army to annihilate them—and wipe out all memory of Aye-Shan. “Can history be rewritten so casually?” Ling wonders. The script moves too quickly for readers to catch up to its worldbuilding, but it’s peppered with choice fantastical details, such as Ocean’s use of different musical instruments to bend the elements to his will. The lush, mostly black-and-white art lands like a cross between fantasy manga like Berserk and vintage Metal Hurlant comics. Though the frenetic pace can be frustrating, it’s a bold burst of imagination. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink