Aquino, a trailblazer in her own right, understands how to synthesize other people’s stories with conscious grace. Each chapter contains detailed glances into the routines, personalities, and idiosyncrasies of its subject while simultaneously covering their whole lifespan, all in eight to ten pages.
In this collection of comic strips, as in the previous three, Delisle, a stay-at-home dad, makes some questionable parenting decisions involving his children, Louis and Alice. In this final book, Delisle’s children are obviously older, and as life would have it, both children have developed their own interests.
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, the award-winning author of Grass, is known for both her work about the marginalized and for her manhwa, a South Korean comic style. Grass is a graphic work of non-fiction about a former comfort woman, Lee Ok-sun, during World War II.
The title of Michael DeForge’s new book, Leaving Richard’s Valley, hints at the deft mix of whimsical and sinister themes within: four animal friends must leave their home in an idyllic, cult-like community and face a Toronto mired in condo construction and gentrification. This is DeForge’s latest Drawn & Quarterly title, and it’s obvious why NPR calls the author “one of the comic-book industry’s most exciting, unpredictable talents.” Leaving Richard’s Valley dissects community, public space, and the dubious line between adventure and exile.
Creating a graphic memoir of your childhood is a daunting task, particularly if it was not picture perfect. In Chicken Rising, D. Boyd pens a series of vignettes that make up the early life of Dawn, D. Boyd’s younger self, in Saint John, New Brunswick in the 1970s.
There are books that have the ability to draw you into their universe, projecting vivid scenes in your mind, making you ruminate time and again on the characters’ actions and reflections. Bad Friends, a newly translated graphic novel by the South Korean comic artist Ancco, is one such book. In her fictionalized retelling of a troubled adolescence, Ancco instills the reader with empathy for her teenage characters and their bleak circumstances.
In this collection of both previously published and new Woman World comics, Dhaliwal serves up slice-of-life anecdotes of a village of women many years after the male species has died out and the planet has been ravaged by a series of natural disasters. Although this post-apocalyptic theme may come across as dark, most of the strips are light and hilarious, addressing issues such as identity, solitude, love, and anxiety, with some occasional angst about the survival of the species.
The heartfelt and melancholic story in Red Winter covers just a few days of a passionate love affair during a frigid winter in a small Swedish steel-mill town in the 1970s. But it is broader in its emotional scope: it delivers a lovely snapshot of the lives of ordinary people, including their stifled desires, isolation, loss of prospects, and political hopes.
British cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld is the author of the graphic novels Goliath, Mooncop, and You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. Baking with Kafka is his recent collection of short comics, many of which have already been published in The Guardian, New Scientist, and The New York Times. Gauld’s drawings are simple, yet perfectly executed, without any superfluous detail. His short strips (one to eight panels) are usually funny, but above all, they’re smart and insightful.
The ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud rest in Northern Iraq, some thirty kilometres outside the city of Mosul, where they were preserved as a heritage site for more than three thousand years. Readers find themselves there in the opening of Poppies of Iraq, a touching autobiography by Brigitte Findakly with drawings by her husband and collaborator, Lewis Trondheim.
Julie Maroh, known for her lyrical, evocative graphic novels, including Blue is the Warmest Colour and Skandalon, delves into the quotidian details of love in this newly translated work. She seeks to present the ins and outs of romance and sex as experienced by those whose stories are less often told. From her introduction: “I want this book to be an homage to all the loving beings who go against what is expected of them, sometimes risking their lives in the process.”
When you open Boundless, a new comic book of short stories by Jillian Tamaki, you have to turn the book sideways to read its first story – "World Class City." The sparse text, a couple of sentences per page, punctuates the large illustrations that take up the whole two-page spread and leak into the next page as one long continuous image, evoking the passage of time. It’s an unsettling effect, if only because of the subtle discomfort of turning the book.
