Graphic novelists and comics artists showcase a broad array of absorbing storytelling, ravishing artwork, and incredible wit. Here are several titles we've reviewed so far this year--and a few more!
Everything Sucks: Kings of Nothing by Michael Sweater (Silver Sprocket, $29.99 paperback) compiles an omnibus of zany comic strips featuring a motley crew of anthropomorphic toons like Noah (a bird), Calla (a lion), Phillippe (a frog), Brad (a possum) as they bumble their ways through distinctly modern and totally avoidable disasters, spitting honey and venom at one another all the while. Sweater's full-color panels revel in an intoxicatingly grungy style of muted hues. This gut-busting collection of low-stakes, stoner comedy nevertheless succeeds in making acute observations about malcontented, unambitious living, including an earnest anti-smoking foreword from the author. Situated in the crusty realms of couch potatoes and dive bars, it's all a little grimy but not at all grim.
Characteristically brimming with wry observations and gentle self-effacement, comics icon Alison Bechdel lampoons her own position of economic privilege in Spent (Mariner, $32 hardcover). This charismatic, soul-searching graphic novel dazzles with vibrant spreads colored by Bechdel's partner, Holly Rae Taylor, just like its predecessor, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. The couple lives a comfortable life on a goat sanctuary in Vermont, but they anxiously watch the nation's cavernous political divides widen, feeling at once targeted by the culture wars and yet dislocated from them to some degree. That their remove has to do with the success of a prestige TV series based on Alison's wildly popular first memoir, about her taxidermist father, creates the perfect meta-narrative wiggle room for this comedic self-reflection to escape the gravitational pull of doomscrolling and enter a healthier orbit around questions of ethical consumption under capitalism.
A probing, curious mind interrogates a fascination with New York City in Kay Sohini's gorgeously detailed debut graphic memoir, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City (Ten Speed Graphic, $24.99). Touching on literary greats, such as Sylvia Plath and Alison Bechdel, who helped shape her image of the city as a refuge for creatives, Sohini explores her life to see how and why she became infatuated with New York, a place with which her "attachment can never be explained in the realm of the logical." The book transcends autobiography through a collage-like assembling of cultural and historical context alongside the personal.
Set in a parallel world inhabited by paranormal creatures and magical humans, Les Normaux by Janine Janssen and S. Al Sabado (Avon, $22.99 paperback) contains a cornucopia of diverse queer love stories. Compiled from a popular Webtoon comic, this first volume is sure to create new fans of the sweet and heartwarming series, which is drawn in a lush, colorful style that neatly balances realistic figures with cartoonish flourishes. The creators' skill in setting exactly the right tone for each moment is perfectly encapsulated in a sequence depicting a usually cynical character's intense first date; emotion pumps off the pages solely via images. Scenes of raw vulnerability and laugh-out-loud humor beautifully render the complexity of developing adult relationships both romantic and platonic.
To engage with Ignatz Award winner Anders Nilsen's visually arresting Tongues (Pantheon, $25 hardcover) is to do more than simply read. This brilliant graphic novel uses full-color realism and design-heavy layouts to invite uncommonly close attention. Its narrative and art will leave readers awed, both by the hand capable of rendering such vivid images and by the mind that was able to conceive of them. Nilsen draws on the mythology of Prometheus, the creator and protector of humanity, but there are no flowing robes or white beards in the depictions of these gods. Instead, each page features stunning geometric panels filled with talking animals, desolate landscapes, and a riveting look at humanity through eons of development, as well as the stories of a girl named Astrid and a young man walking through the desert talking to a stuffed bear.
In meticulous black-and-white illustrations washed over with muted grays, blues, and yellows, legendary Canadian comics creator Jeff Lemire delivers an addictively bizarre series of stories with Fishflies (Image, $44.99 hardcover). "They come for, like, a week every summer and then they all die at once," a boy explains about the fishfly infestation in small-town Belle River, Ontario. Stranger things will happen over this fictional season. A barefoot dare among three friends to procure popsicles leaves young Paul hospitalized when he interrupts a convenience store robbery. Young Franny--bullied for her constantly runny nose--befriends the criminal hiding in her family's barn, provoking her vicious alcoholic father's wrath. Paul's single mother has inexplicable visions about Belle River's first settlers. A pair of aging siblings clearly know too much. And Officer Danny Laraque is the single citizen determined to save the children.
In her debut, The Mother: A Graphic Memoir (Douglas & McIntyre, $18.95 paperback), Rachel Deutsch pays blisteringly honest and acidly funny homage to the temporary hell that is brand-new parenting. The Mother should be a balm to new parents who find themselves utterly upended by the initially mixed blessing that is the blessed event. Like Deutsch's text, her art has a take-me-as-I-am candor. She works with a sure hand and fills her fine lines with flat, grounding colors, and she packs big observations into even her modest-scale panels; one presents a side view of a bathtub with a mountainous dome of skin poking out: "My [pregnant] belly was a giant meatball in a tiny bowl of soup." And Deutsch surely wins the prize for best capturing the absurd-seeming proportions of a nursing mother's breasts, which in The Mother can take on the dimensions of swimming pool noodles.