Graphic novels demonstrate their versatility, covering everything from biography to fantasy, in books for both adults and children. Here Shelf Awareness highlights a few comics and graphic novel favorites we reviewed earlier this year.
Too often missing from the New York roster of notable figures is Stephanie St. Clair, a Harlem legend who ran the numbers racket in the 1930s. Aurélie Lévy and Elizabeth Colomba reclaim her history in Queenie: Godmother of Harlem (Megascope/Abrams ComicArts, $24.99), "an outstanding graphic collaboration." In 1933 when Prohibition finally ended, St. Clair emerged from prison and returned to her posh apartment and Harlem society. In addition to restoring her illegal money-making empire, she also looked out for her fellow Black citizens--making loans and ensuring justice when due. When St. Clair herself was young a quarter century earlier in Martinique, she learned far too early about vicious abuses by the wealthy. Her mother's death and her determination for a different life eventually led her to Harlem, where a trusted few people kept her safe as she expanded her influence. Colomba, who shares St. Clair's Martinique heritage, is a lauded artist known especially for her visual reclamations of Black women in historic settings. She applies that energy--and "stunning art"--to sweeping, black-and-white panels.
Cartoonist Sam Szabo opens her "sidesplitting collection of comic strips" with a disarming introduction to the Enlightened Transsexual, a cosmic entity so advanced as to have "experienced life as at least three genders... tantamount to omnipotence." She is brimming with wisdom and willing to entertain the burning questions of mere mortals: "What an opportunity this is for you." It's this mixture of earnestness and egotism that provides the backbone for what is a "truly hilarious body of work" in Enlightened Transsexual Comix (Silver Sprocket, $24.99). Vibrant and psychedelic drawings that have just the right amount of frenzied verve to "nail the irreverent, and sometimes unhinged, sense of humor behind them."
We Are on Our Own (Drawn & Quarterly, $22.95 paper), the "powerful" graphic memoir by Miriam Katin, transports readers to 1944 Budapest, which is still "a city of lights, culture, and elegance." Here, Katin is young Lisa, living with her mother, Esther, in a beautiful apartment and enjoys cafés and going to see Snow White with Aunt Éva. She doesn't quite remember her father, a Hungarian soldier battling the Germans. When Jewish residents are forced out of their homes, Esther and Lisa manage to disappear, staging their deaths after buying new identity papers. Their hellish experiences are affectingly mitigated by Lisa's simplifying point of view; intertwined throughout is an interrogation of faith amid such horror. Katin renders the terrifying past in vigorous strokes of black pencil--except for the threatening reds of the Nazi and Russian flags. In sharp contrast, she adds full color to panels depicting Lisa's postwar life decades later, as if underscoring the miraculous escape from darkness.
Dion MBD's perceptive illustrations beautifully enhance A's extraordinary, already popular YA story by David Levithan in Every Day: The Graphic Novel (Knopf Books for Young Readers, $17.99 paper), and provide readers additional aid in understanding them as their soul wakes up in a different body every day. No matter the body, A's strong, emotional facial expressions remain consistent; MBD uses techniques in light, color, sharpness to represent emotional states, offering readers different entrances into Levithan's weighty, esoteric concept. "[A]n innovative book full of insightful observations about humans and connection."
Rey Terciero and illustrator Bre Indigo reimagine Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in graphic novel form as Northranger (HarperAlley, $18.99 paper), portraying a closeted gay Latinx teen falling for a white boy whose secrets might explain why his lake house seems haunted. Texan Cade Muñoz, 16, is working on a ranch all summer to help his family financially. He flirts with Henry, the ranch owner's son, who shares Cade's love of horror movies. When they all go to the Northranger, a maybe-haunted lake house built in 1887, Cade learns that Henry's family hides a secret; the book demonstrates the heavy burden of isolation and fear, and how it can warp reality. "Readers be warned: only pick up this book if there is time to finish it in one sitting." --Jennifer M. Brown, senior editor, Shelf Awareness