Ignatz nominee Mendes (Freddy Stories) delivers a gut punch of a family saga that finds moments of hardscrabble transcendence in the Depression-era dairy fields of America’s Northeast. The Catheresque story follows headstrong Edie from a tomboyish childhood on the outskirts of a U.S. Air Force base, where she lives with her parents in a shack insulated with newspaper, to her adolescence on her grandparents’ modest farm, where she wanders fields of clover and encounters turtles, grasshoppers, and herons. Edie’s visceral compassion for animals is a defining trait. In one early scene, she performs burial rites for a rabbit over the protests of the neighborhood boys who trapped it. Such cruelties are all too familiar to Edie, a regular witness to her father’s brutal drunken tirades against her mother. Edie’s laconic but devoted grandparents—and the Arcadian routines of the farm itself—offer refuge from deep-seated traumas, but alcoholism, chauvinism, and abuse persist beyond the fence line, testing Edie’s grit and resolve. Mendes imbues her homespun cartooning with an attentiveness that at times evokes Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl photographs, while ink washes add weather-worn depth and, quite often, the foreboding charge of a gathering storm. Unsentimental and quietly devastating, this portrait of resilience is a feat of rough eloquence that leaves an indelible impression. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

From Australian cartoonists Milton (Animals Rule This Land) and Lang comes a goofy space opera spoof that upturns the cliché of Earthlings as ambassadors of an enlightened culture. À la Spaceballs, explorer Vega Ulysses is an incompetent braggart and blowhard returning from a 12-year trek to strange new worlds having botched every single mission. Worse yet, he’s left his house keys behind. As Ulysses retraces his journey, he catalogs his misadventures: Weekend at Bernie–ing an alien tribal leader he assassinated, accidentally burning down the forest on a planet whose residents feel their trees’ pain, and being put on trial by robotic aliens for the “most heinous crime” of placing things inside their box-like heads (naturally, Ulysses cooks popcorn and dunks a basketball in them). By the time Ulysses returns to Earth after encountering a Jack Kirby–styled God, he’s learned nothing at all. The colorful cartoony art leans into the ridiculousness with sight gags playing on Milton and Lang’s outrageous alien worlds. Fans of lighthearted sci-fi like Futurama and Star Trek: Lower Decks will get a kick out of this. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Interdisciplinary Native American artist Luger delivers a daring work of speculative fiction set in a future in which the wealthy and non-Indigenous have fled the Earth they ravaged. This audacious hybrid work, which adapts a vintage Army wilderness survival manual, alludes to the difficult work of thriving that follows for those left behind. Luger’s fruitful defacement of the original text dazzles and provokes; there are black-ink redactions with stray advice about soup and salamanders peeking through, and “Act like the Natives” scrawled over the top of the former military script. Also featured are mysterious figures, often in furs and elaborate horned headgear, layered over vintage sketches of bear traps, bamboo beds, edible roots, and banded snakes. Bursts of poetry (“We are vessels to hold and to share, to protect and keep safe”) serve as a challenge to non-Indigenous ideas about “survival” itself. The Army manual assumes an adversarial relationship to nature, but Luger makes a persuasive case that “union is the natural order.” This singular act of creative destruction, more thought experiment than narrative, rises like a flower out of rubble. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

This exuberant travelogue from activist and artist Collins (Drawn) offers a front-row seat to conservation efforts in some of Earth’s most vulnerable and remote ecosystems. Combining typewritten texts, ink drawings, field notes, and photographs, he chronicles assisting recovery efforts in the aftermath of Nepal’s devastating 2015 earthquake; documenting encroachments on “uncontacted” peoples in remote Brazil; observing oil drilling on federal lands in the Arctic Circle; and scaling ancient sequoia trees to gather foliage samples for conservation research. Collins grounds each retelling in affectionate profiles of the researchers and activists he tags along with on expeditions that straddle the line between climate activism and ecotourism (his extensive rock-climbing experience comes in handy). He adopts the motto “observe, find a connection, and draw,” and the resulting art drawn on site lends a fantastical sense of wonder to the accounts. A certain X Games swagger seeps into descriptions of projects involving paragliders and crossbows, but an introspective humility anchors Collins’s yearning to plug his creative skill set into social justice and human rights efforts. A paean to seeing as practice, this delivers an impassioned portrait of the hard work of environmental activism and the fragile beauty at stake. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

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