A lifelong insomniac, Burdock (Queen of Snails) finds herself caught in a “frustrating loop of anxiety, sleeplessness, and fatigue” in this thought-provoking graphic narrative. The volume is organized in sections titled after the four elementts: “Air,” “Fire,” “Earth,” and “Water.” In “Air,” Burdock is diagnosed with moderate sleep apnea and takes up the didgeridoo to improve her breathing. In “Fire,” she examines menopause and its accompanying hot flashes, drawing a line from the production of “healthy” seed oils to the mass production of cotton in the 1800s, an industry that relied on enslaved labor. Throughout, she weaves examples from contemporary medicine with historical and cultural analysis. She observes, for example, that “obesity is most often a symptom of health issues rather than being the main cause,” and as such is fueled by inherited trauma, stress, and lack of access to healthy food. “Everything is connected,” she adds. Humor is key to Burdock’s delivery, including a koala co-narrator and a beauty contest–styled Miss Information who dispels nutritional myths. By the time the conclusion rolls around, Burdock has found a routine that works for her, though the space and privilege to exercise, journal, and meditate every day is not available to everyone. Throughout, Burdock’s expressionistic comics art (e.g., a bed becoming a monster) enlivens the analysis. Restless readers would benefit from putting this on their nightstand. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Mauro, film and game art designer, debuts with an ambitious if formulaic saga of a robot’s quest into his past. On a decrepit future Earth abandoned by the elite, amiable scavengers Kai and Max dig up battered mechanical Huxley. Out of commission for a millennium, the amnesiac but voluble bot chases after visions of an ethereal woman and an electric blue humanoid figure. Meanwhile, the trash pickers tag along, convinced he’s full of lucrative salvageable tech. He’s also pursued by an indestructible hunter robot with its own secret agenda. The proceedings unfold in the vein of 2000 AD’s future tales, setting the stage for a dramatic climax that spurs on a 2001: A Space Odyssey–like evolution of man and Earth. Mauro’s imaginative artwork lends an eerie grandeur to this run-down world, and there’s a satisfying effect to his deployment of sci-fi tropes (including the tidy revival of dead characters). Unfortunately, the visuals are undercut by inconsistently sized lettering and speech bubbles, with dense chunks of cliché-riddled text in amateurish typeface. It’s a mixed bag. (June)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Chancellor’s uplifting follow-up to Hardcore Anxiety finds the bipolar author rocking his demons away, striving to be a good husband, and attempting to recover the wild freedom and sense of community of his early punk fandom. He discovered the Clash and the Ramones as a bullied early aughts teenager, and went on to play in many bands. Here, he blends intimate personal stories of moshing, maturing, and mental health with rousing celebrations and mini-bios of his heroes, such as 7 Seconds, Gorilla Biscuits, the Minutemen, and the Violent Femmes—whose inclusion symbolizes how Chancellor fought off becoming a “bitter aging punk” who polices genre boundaries. Chancellor draws himself haunted by that possibility, represented by an Ebeneezer Scrooge–like worst version of himself, an on-point warning for diehards of any evolving art scene. He also learns to finally do the dishes—and gets ready to become a father. Chancellor’s thick-lined, bulbous character drawings charm, but their inherent humor doesn’t detract from the urgent emotional storytelling, especially in inventive sequences where he self-harms with a drawing pen, spirals on his wedding day, or takes a test to determine if he has ADHD. It’s a sweet mix of humor and bite, a little like a punk rock Judd Apatow. (June)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

A decades-old deal with the devil creates drama for the denizens of Henryville, Idaho, in this mesmerizing, funny-scary opus from Eisner-nominated cartoonist Graham (Dog Biscuits). In 1948, Harriet, a painter, tells a mysterious voice that she’ll do anything for success, then subsequently gives birth to a strange fetus she names Robert before flushing him down the toilet. Flash forward to 1974: Robert is now a strapping young man working in construction and dabbling in poetry. Though he’s a major Casanova, he’s drawn to Dandelion, a lovely but insecure woman who works in a nursing home. The evil that spawned Robert relentlessly haunts them, however; at one point, a satanic emissary disguised as a salesgirl tells Dandelion, “The puppet master is weaving curses into the fabric of both of your lives.” Meanwhile, Gary, a black cartoonist, suspects that his comics are foretelling the strange events unfolding in Henryville. Graham’s style harkens back to gritty underground comics from the 1960s and ’70s, with lightly anthropomorphic characters, droll humor, an anything-might-happen atmosphere, lots of genuinely scary scenes, and plenty of sex. This packs a singular punch. (June)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Activist and artist Sauerbrei’s rousing debut graphic novel makes a timely case for solidarity in its nimble depiction of the founding of the Knights of Labor. In the 1890s, a young Welsh family moves to Coal Creek, Tenn., so Pa can earn “a fair wage for honest work” in the mines. His son sees his father’s hopes crushed by a system that makes sure miners are in constant debt to the company store. When the miners refuse to sign a new and even more exploitative contract, the coal bosses bring in Black prison laborers to replace them. Three hundred armed miners demand an end to convict labor, but the governor quashes their initial success by sending in militias alongside more prisoners. Movingly, the story pivots to the perspective of one Black prisoner, who was initially exploited as a sharecropper before he was arrested for sitting next to a white woman on a train. In grayscale watercolors and orderly panels, Sauerbrei depicts the dark, claustrophobic conditions of the mine, and the eerie power of the protestors—now 2,000 strong—storming the stockade. A detailed, wordless sequence portrays how several Knights blow up the mine; the prisoner watches with a small smile of solidarity, and a raised hand to help. Sauerbrei’s account lands with force, like a protest song demonstrating how many voices can become one. (July)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

A fantastical world is run through the wringer by a capricious deity in this gorgeous and bloody graphic adventure. Lonergan (Arca) spends little time setting the scene, depicting a dark, horned, whip-carrying God-like figure who drops a crystal onto a desert planet, which then erupts in chaotic life. Seeing monstrous creatures (like a gigantic crab) and primal humans tear each other apart, the deity introduces “control” in the form of a mighty, blue-skinned woman warrior. Later, she finds love with a red-skinned muscular faun-like creature who shares her reluctant talent for violence. But the romantic idyll of “Blue” and “Red” is short-lived, as a power-hungry man displaced by her sudden intervention seeks revenge. There are echoes of both biblical narratives and premodern oral storytelling in Lonergan’s violence-spattered story, which moves ahead in fits and starts, with irregular and arbitrary interference from the forlorn and randomly punitive deity. The art is spectacular throughout; Lonergan mixes precise grid patterns and densely choreographed action scenes with ineffably lovely images, such as a massive bull-like creature colored like the star-studded night sky. This will captivate readers of ancient mythology and Jack Kirby alike. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

In his impressive first solo graphic novel, animator Wickey (Supper with the Stars) does for Salem, Mass., what From Hell did for London, building layers of history around a crucial act of evil. At the core of the story sits Giles Corey, a victim of the 17th-century Salem witch trials. A cantankerous old farmer, Corey testifies against his own wife, only to be arrested himself, then die refusing to give in to torture. From there, the narrative spirals outward and upward, revealing the cultural context of the witch hunts as well as the future they impact, from modern-day Salem, with its kitschy witch-themed shops and statue of Samantha from Bewitched, to conversations between Massachusetts natives Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. To Hawthorne, the descendant of a judge in the witch trials, Salem is “a haunted town... forever stained with innocent blood and wicked deeds.” Wickey’s art style shifts between period settings; Hawthorne and Longfellow are rendered realistically, while Corey and his contemporaries are caricatured figures reminiscent of Ronald Searle or Ralph Steadman. His linework has the look of woodcuts or scrimshaw, and he ably evokes chilly coastal vistas and the architecture of stern clapboard houses. Shot through with tragedy and dark humor, this ambitious volume makes readers feel the weight of history. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Carr, artist-in-residence at the George A. Romero foundation, teams up with scriptwriter Whitehead for a disappointing comics adaptation of the director’s obscure 1973 film that eschews screams and supernatural horrors for a social moral. The plot follows an elderly man who drifts into an amusement park where he’s berated by employees and visitors for his failing hearing and eyesight, patronized for asking questions, and shoved along to attraction after attraction that preys on his fear of growing older and infirm. At one point, his eyewitness description of a bumper car accident gets disregarded because he wasn’t wearing his glasses. In another scene, he’s ignored and served maggot-ridden food at a restaurant where a young, rich man eating lobster objects to “that smelly old man.” Carr’s realistic artwork highlights dread and uncertainty with shadows and sickeningly macabre faces; unfortunately, the slow pace saps momentum. The supernatural twist involves a time loop and a reveal about past selves and regret, but the art gives it away too early. Though fears of becoming elderly and infirm are legitimately terrifying, this lands as both overly didactic and too tame for horror fans. It’s a miss. (June)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Swiss artist Aeschbacher debuts with a comedic and oddly sweet neo-noir laced with nonchalant violence and theatrical dialogue. Eric, the mulleted, mustachioed leader of a trio of goofy gun-toting goons, tries to recover an improbably valuable stolen vase. The group barges into the apartment of the petty thieves, a low-rent Bonnie and Clyde, only to discover that the vase was pawned off on a neighbor. Eric’s command to “blow these fuckheads away” sets off a violent chain of encounters throughout the apartment building, starting with the pervert running a hidden camera from the apartment below. A stoner duo, a contract killer with a lonely cat, a prostitute entertaining her client’s bizarre pharmacological fetish, and an elderly couple with a death wish soon find that their fates are inextricably linked. The delightfully improbable scenario unfurls in parallel narratives that evoke 1990s indie films like Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. The distinctive cartooning recalls a gritty Tintin, and it elevates the excessive gunplay to the poetic absurd, endearing characters to readers just moments before they meet their untimely ends. This tale of low-level criminality gone horribly wrong will appeal to fans of David Lapham’s Stray Bullets and Jason’s I Killed Adolf Hitler. (June)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

This bold collection of political cartoons from activist Kerbaj (Beirut Won’t Cry) first appeared as a series of Instagram posts observing that Israel’s attack on Palestine is the first genocide to be livestreamed. Though not a narrative, it captures a sense of unfolding in real time. Sometimes Kerbaj simply redraws a news headline: “Red Crescent Loses Contact With the Team Trying to Rescue Besieged Child Hind Hamadeh.” A few pages later: “Update: Hind is Dead.” Other posts combine agit-prop influences in ironic and striking black-and-white cartoons. “Palestine: The Mother of All Struggles” is the caption above a Russian nesting doll, the mother broken open to reveal a baby with their fist in the air. Kerbaj—who grew up in Lebanon during that country’s 15-year civil war, laments his own feelings of overwhelm. One text-heavy page is dedicated to “My Life On Post-Its, Or: What I Didn’t Find the Time to Draw Yet,” such as “a doctor operating under the light of a smartphone” and “A father leaves his son with doctors at hospital. He comes back an hour later: no hospital - no doctor - no son.” Kerbaj’s takes are quick and shocking, but his message rings clear: The enormity of the crisis is not a reason to give way, but to lean into resistance. (June)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink