Eloisa Aquino

Chinese cartoonist Zuo Ma's Night Bus is a book made of dreams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this ambitious book, Marcelino Truong tells his family’s story, intertwined with a history of the onset of the Vietnam War and contemptary reflections about that time. Truong offers a rare perspective for Western readers – that of a Vietnamese French person who experienced the conflict first hand. Originally written in French, the book has been translated to English by David Homel.

"I wish more food writers would write about going to the bathroom,” declares Lisa Hanawalt in her new comic book, Hot Dog Taste Test, shortly after giving her thoughts on the sanitary installations of a restaurant, “because it’s funny and interesting and it’s the inevitable result of all of this.” This encapsulates Hanawalt’s approach in this book: irreverent, funny, silly, and insightful.

Panther, by cartoonist Brecht Evens, is a colourful and sombre psychological thriller about the troubling relationship between a small girl and a fantastical creature.