Journalist Lackman and artist Pinson debut with a beguiling biography of Maria Lani (1895–1954), who managed to con her way into fame if not fortune in 1930s Europe. Born Maria Geleniewicz in a deeply antisemitic region of Poland, she lives through the gradual demise of her family due to pogroms, violence, bankruptcy, and other calamities. When she meets career con man Max Abramowicz, the pair scheme to exploit Maria’s natural charm and beauty, attempting to woo German director Max Reinhardt into making her a star. The plan fails, but in 1928 they travel to Paris claiming she’s a rising actor, where artist Jean Cocteau falls under Maria’s spell and has her sit for him. With Cocteau’s help she poses for 50 portraits by legendary artists like Bonnard, Chagall, Matisse, and Soutine. Subsequently, “all of Paris develop[s] Maria-mania,” and a group show of the portraits becomes a gallery sensation. Abramowicz hatches a scheme to steal the art, but as Paris falls to the Nazis, Lani’s fortunes fall precipitously. Lackman’s elegiac narrative pairs beautifully with Pinson’s heavily crosshatched drawings, which twist into grotesquery in scenes of bigotry and bloodshed. This tale of ambition, art, and deception sheds light on a fascinating figure and her era. (June)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

The spectacular first volume of Dahm’s long-running webcomic ushers readers into an instantly immersive fantasy world. In the year “855 of the Blue Age,” a girl named Vattu is born into a nomadic tribe of diminutive, musical people called “fluters.” As Vattu grows up, she develops a contentious relationship with Vanni, a boy shunned for being disabled but who eventually becomes the tribe’s priest. Then soldiers from the militaristic, Rome-like Empire of Sahta conquer the fluters’ territory and take Vattu as a slave, sending her on a journey beyond her people’s hunting grounds and “almost to the edge of the world.” In bold brushstrokes and rich, organic colors, Dahm creates a fully realized world of competing intelligent species, sweeping vistas, labyrinthine cities, and tantalizing details like the faceless warrior War-Man and enormous animal skeletons half-buried in the earth. The first volume is packed with adventure, but also enough mystery and worldbuilding that the story’s horizon seems to stretch on forever. This epic deserves a place on the shelf next to Jeff Smith’s Bone series. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Veteran artist McMillan debuts with a quirky career-spanning collection of his surreal 1970s comics that showcases his restless creative energy and outside-the-box ethos. Throughout, he explicitly eschews commercial considerations: “I don’t have to become an artist like everyone else. Once you call yourself something... there you go! Into the dumper!” In his autofiction strips, McMillan similarly presents an innate aversion to the status quo (and a particular passion for mountain climbing). In one episode, he recalls his 1956 stint in the army, when he used a weekend pass to board a random bus with the goal of “intentional disorientation,” thus establishing a penchant for the “absolute pleasure of... existential fog” and making it thereafter a “lifelong priority.” In the arch and cartoony “Close Calls I Have Known,” he narrowly escapes a terrier running after his bike, getting caught peeping into a girl’s window, and the dreadful fate of taking an assistant manager position in an office. Intermittent photos of his sculptures showcase more of his playful whimsy. The scrawled lines of his early underground comix evolve into stylized and topsy-turvy perspectives in the 1990s and beyond, but his affinity for surrealism remains. Adventurous readers will enjoy the wit and weirdness of McMillan’s phantasmagorical funhouse. (July)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Gehrmann (The Jungle) lights Tudor England ablaze in this adroitly drawn biography of Mary I of England. Though Mary is the eldest surviving child of King Henry VIII, her gender and the king’s numerous affairs and marriages complicate the line of succession. The princess’s education includes royal skills like archery and falconry, and she begins to act as a ruler before she’s in her teens—even as her father disinherits her in favor of her younger half siblings Elizabeth and Edward. Mary’s strong will and loyalty to the Catholic church earn her as many enemies as supporters. “This woman is as cunning and ruthless as her father,” a nobleman warns. “A dangerous, stubborn heretic.” Gehrmann renders the late-medieval setting in watercolor dappled detail, paying careful attention to clothing, food and drink, palace interiors, city squares, and Tudor architecture. She evokes the atmosphere of conflict and paranoia in which Mary learns to survive and, as she grows older, to use and abuse her power. The characters are sketched with lively charm; Mary has a thoughtful and expressive face, while Henry VIII looks less like the iconic figure in his portraits and more like a fallible, stubble-faced dad. Readers of all ages will find this accessible history a royal treat. (July)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Weiner, creator of the Critical Survey of Graphic Novels series, and scholar and artist Mazur (Lunatic) turn the oft-told story of comics pioneer Eisner and his bootstrapping ethos into a humorous and heartwarming chronicle. The ups and downs of the artistic life and career of Eisner (1917–2005) are set against the backdrop of family struggle and his never-ending effort to better his work and the industry. Eisner beats the pavement of Depression-era New York City to sell his cartoons and skills to syndicates, then founds his own studio to keep control of his creations, writing and drawing several series under different pen names. It’s also the saga of the rise of comics art in America, peppered with informative asides on 1930s printing techniques and the origin of the comic book and its studio system. A highlight is incisive portrayals of the industry personalities that surrounded Eisner, including Bob Kane, cocreator of Batman; studio partner Jerry Iger; and comics titan Jack Kirby. The fluid, quick sketch art sets a brisk narrative pace, bathing the black and pastel inks with brilliant primary colors to represent the gaudy but effervescent hues of contemporary books and comics. This glowing portrait of a bygone era will be a lift to comics creators and fans. (July)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Emblematic of the defiance, irreverence, and care that inform this graphic history by Ignatz winner Passmore (Sports Is Hell), the “arms” of the title refer to both weapons and an embrace. In 2020, a young man named Ben watches on his phone as Philando Castile is shot by police, despite disclosing that he has a firearm in the car. Ben’s beret-and-dashiki-wearing father encourages him to study “the canon of the Black radical tradition,” which he proceeds to do Quantum Leap–style when he is teleported to 1900s Louisiana and witnesses “Anarchistic Negro Desperado” Robert Charles shoot white police officers who are harassing him (“This triggerin,” Ben says). Tracing a path from Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalism through the Black Power movement, Sanyika Shakur, and Black Lives Matter, Passmore pokes at the sanctity of civil rights icons, including Martin Luther King Jr. (“Cue the sad gospel music”), but he doesn’t idealize radicals, either. Rather, he offers a rollicking survey course in a history that has often been reduced to slogans or erased altogether. As a friend of Black Liberation Army activist Assata Shakur says, “The whole white world doesn’t want us to know we ever fought slavery.” The cartoonish art has a daring quality that leavens the text’s treatment of more heady topics. Passmore’s sharp humor and refusal to blindly parrot any prescribed narrative make for a necessary reckoning. Agent: Chad Luibl, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Mundt’s soapy sapphic fantasy debut, serialized on Webtoon, draws readers into the drama of rival witch clans in New Orleans. Camille, a teenage witch raised in a hidebound aristocratic family that specializes in blood magic, botches a crucial coming-of-age ritual and gets stalked by a demon. With her woodpecker familiar at her side, she departs her strict, sheltered life and searches for answers about the forces she’s unleashed. Along the way, she discovers secrets about her past and meets new friends like Jazmin, a warmhearted plant witch; the flirtatious Nyra, who comes from the family Camille blames for her mother’s death; and Dendro, a flower demon curious about the mortal world. She also begins to embrace her lesbian sexuality, which puts her at odds with her duty to carry on her family’s bloodline. “My world has gotten so much bigger in such a short amount of time,” she marvels. Mundt’s stripped-down art is unexceptional, with backgrounds loosely dabbed into place, though it improves throughout this first volume, developing more lively character expressions and body language. Romantasy fans who binge shows like True Blood and The Magicians will have no trouble falling under Mundt’s spell. Agent: Stephanie Winter, PS Literary. (Jul.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Panchaud’s idiosyncratic debut, an Angoulême award winner, tracks a London adolescent’s life after it’s upended by an unlikely windfall, mapping the consequences through pictographs and navigation iconography. A fortune teller’s prediction persuades Simon Hope, a 14-year-old bullied for his weight, to steal from his father and bet the money on a long-shot horse at Royal Ascot. He wins a staggering £16 million—but at a terrible cost. He returns home, ticket tucked in his shoe, to a crime scene, his mother in a coma after being assaulted. A topsy-turvy quest to untangle this mess takes him to Liverpool and back, through run-ins with detectives, biker gangs, and even a beached whale. Apart from some dry humor mined from working-class eccentrics, the value proposition is the visual language, which draws on the syntax of training manuals. Characters appear as colored dots tracked across bird’s-eye schematics; fistfights play out in diagrams. This clinical presentation complements the story’s deadpan script and adds winking emphasis to its more unlikely plot turns, but the book fumbles the emotional stakes of Simon’s ordeal, and lapses into neatly diagrammed but often superfluous digressions. The experiment is audacious but the effect is a bit like reading assembly instructions for a suspense story. (July)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

The new ghoul in town discovers the secret nightlife of monsters in this rollicking, blood-spattered horror comedy from McClaren (the Black Cloak series). Ashley Moore, a community college student, wakes up in the woods with no pulse, no memory of the past several hours, and a craving for raw meat. “Dear diary, am I a freaking zombie?” she asks herself. Googling “How do you know when someone is clinically dead?” proves unhelpful, but soon she discovers a rough-and-tumble underworld of fellow “creepies” in her backwater town. After getting tangled up in drama at a monster bar, she forms a found family with her lycanthrope classmates Motley and Harrison. Meanwhile, a fearsome creature stalks the forest at night—and Ashley fears it might be her. McClaren’s cute, funny-faced characters and slapstick action provide an offbeat contrast to the scares, and she adeptly depicts Ashley’s trauma as she processes her new supernatural status. In a clever visual touch, the monster characters shift subtly between human and inhuman in response to their situation, with Ashley growing more gnarly as the story progresses. This mash-up of mumblecore dramedy and gorehound horror slays. Agent: Jessica Mileo, InkWell Management. (July)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

The anarchic, antisocial Gen Xers of Eisner winner Bagge’s 1990s Hate series squirm through a present-day reunion that’s equal parts raunchy and reflective. Buddy and Lisa, former Seattle slackers with a tumultuous, on-off relationship, now live in the relatively cheaper Tacoma with their underemployed adult son, Harold. Buddy’s sister Babs has just broken up with her latest fiancé, his brother Butch collects guns and follows QAnon-style conspiracies, his mom has gone MAGA, and his old roommate Stinky is (still) dead. Buddy himself has mellowed but retains his knee-jerk nihilism: accused of supporting Trump, he shoots back, “I always vote for nobody! He’s my main man.” Bagge intersperses flashbacks to the ’90s, ingeniously contrasting the contemporary narrative’s full color with the familiar black-and-white of the original comics. Throughout, Bagge’s art jiggles with trademark elastic charm. His animated, rubber-hose-limbed characters vibrate on a frequency midway between the aggro exaggeration of Robert Crumb and the emotional expressiveness of Charles Schulz. The volume concludes with an off-putting chapter collecting off-color Stretchpants strips, a gross-out character who has made a fortune by squashing people under his butt for money. Still, fans who have been following the main Hate characters through their ups and (mostly) downs won’t want to miss out on encountering this crew again. (July)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink