Frederik Byrn Køhlert

The importance of Chris Oliveros to the world of alternative comics publishing is probably impossible to overstate. As the founder and publisher of Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly, Oliveros oversaw work by such seminal cartoonists as Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Seth, and Adrian Tomine, among many others, and his successes have been instrumental in carving out a cultural space for offbeat, alternative, and so-called “serious” comics.

After making a splash in the alternative comics world last year with Photobooth, a delightfully idiosyncratic history of the titular machines and the author’s own obsession with them, Montreal-based artist and illustrator Meags Fitzgerald returns this fall with Long Red Hair, a new memoir about childhood, female friendship, and coming of age queer.

The third English-language instalment of Shigeru Mizuki’s gargantuan manga history of Japan’s Showa era (the period from 1926 to 1989, defined by the reign of Emperor Hirohito) is the best yet. This sprawling series gradually deepens its gripping narrative as new layers and perspectives are added to a story that is relatively unknown to most Westerners.

Pascal Girard’s Petty Theft is a fictionalized autobiographical account of the author’s surrogate character, also named Pascal, and his increasingly hare-brained schemes to stalk, date, and ultimately confront a cute girl he sees shoplifting a copy of his book. This innocent enough set-up is followed by an escalating series of comedic embarrassments in which Pascal repeatedly says the wrong thing at the wrong time and where everything he does to get out of trouble has precisely the opposite effect.

Fantastic Plotte, a new collection of Doucet’s earliest work from the late 1980s, reprints most of the stories from her fourteen self-published (photocopied and stapled, that is) mini-comics, or fanzines, notoriously titled Dirty Plotte (“plotte” being Quebecois slang for “cunt”) in their English or French original, and without corrections.

Lisa Hanawalt has been publishing her drawings, illustrations, and short comics in such places as The New York Times, The Believer, and Lucky Peach, as well as on a number of websites and in her own zines and mini-comics for several years now, and her bright colours and bizarre imagination are always a welcome jolt to both eyeballs and decorum.