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In this intricate, wildly inventive graphic memoir from Eisner nominee Tyler (Soldier’s Heart), grief is a physical place populated by odd but helpful guides. Carol is hit by an “anvil of sorrow” when her mother, sister, and multiple friends die in quick succession, and she enters a “long residency in Griefville.” Griefville is depicted as a “dolorous thicket” inhabited by “Clorins,” humanoids with long pointy fingers and screwhead eyes. She acknowledges the many types and stages of grief with reverence and explores a “legacy” of mourning through scenes of ancestors dealing with loss, leading her to realize: “I’m not the first to go through this.” But a voice counters that even tough loss iscommon, “That does not diminish your situation. It connects you.” The particulars of Carol’s personal losses emerge more than a third of the way through the volume, as she trudges through the indignities of daily life while caring for her cancer-stricken sister; meanwhile, her mother’s decline means dealing with her domineering father. In the third section, Carol’s adult daughter and her boyfriend—both ostensibly sober—move in with her to weather a bad economy. But Carol quickly gets entangled in the boyfriend’s drug problems and financial schemes, generating grief in and for her relationship with her daughter. Detailed and often dreamlike, Tyler’s pen and ink illustrations are punctuated with occasional, muted washes of color. In Tyler’s capable hands, grief is not exactly beautiful, but it is specific and transformative. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Making their comics debut, husband-and-wife filmmakers David Ian and Rebekah McKendry join forces with artist Jenkins (Hairball) for a feverish horror yarn that never quite catches fire. FBI agent Miranda Diaz pulls into Barstow, Calif., an isolated desert town that seems to consist mostly of trailers and Quonset huts, in search of a missing fellow agent. With the help of Sheriff Papa Dodd (who looks exactly like Willie Nelson) and his multitalented assistant, Starr, she investigates the eccentric locals and uncovers a demonic infestation. A satanic ballet instructor runs a side hustle to exploit the fruits of hell, selling to people eager to be possessed (“With a demon by your side,” she promises, “you can rise all the way to the top”). Meanwhile, slacker Eli is accidentally possessed and becomes the focus of a rival Christian cult. Then the Hail Satan motorcycle gang rolls into town. There’s plenty of potential in the setting and the setup, but there’s not enough space to develop each member of the expansive cast, and the goals of the rival groups of demons and humans remain murky. Meanwhile, Jenkins’s art is uncharacteristically wobbly with blotchy shading. Despite clever ideas and local color to spare, this feels underbaked. Agent: Bridget Smith and Valentina Sainato, JABberwocky Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

One of the quintessential 1980s manga, Hojo’s bold action classic transports readers to a seedy Tokyo of handsome rogues, tough dames, and street fights. Ryo Saeba is a “sweeper,” a private eye who will stoop to anything, including murder, to close a case. Yet this dangerous dude turns into a goony letch around women, groping his beautiful clients and usually getting beaten up in return. The manga hits its stride when he teams up with Kaori Makimura, a plucky young woman who values Ryo’s lessons on navigating the mean streets, but refuses to take his nonsense. Together they battle human traffickers, busjackers, PCP-numbed assassins (“This angel dust will turn you into a super soldier!!”), and other over-the-top criminals. Hojo draws in a gritty seinen manga style, but the characters’ faces erupt into cartoon exaggeration to sell a gag and dial the energy up to 11. It’s an adrenaline-spiked cocktail of hard-boiled action, slapstick comedy, cheesecake, melodrama, and raunchy jokes (“mokkori,” the sound effect indicating arousal that accompanies Ryo’s “small soldier standing to attention,” per the translator’s notes, is the manga’s catchphrase). The translation plays up the tough-guy one-liners: “Old wounds start aching on days like this,” Ryo reflects, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Readers jonesing for retro ’80s thrills will be blown away. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Trail runner and radio producer Mayer (The Race That Changed Running) teams up with artist and filmmaker Windrestin for a bracing comics debut that follows fictional extreme athlete Sam Hill as he competes in the Tor des Géants, a real five-day, 200-mile race through the mountains of the Aosta Valley in Italy. The narrative picks up in the present day as Hill makes his third attempt to successfully finish the race. Though he basks in the majesty of the landscape and the camaraderie of fellow racers, he grapples throughout with the daunting challenges of heat and cold, treacherous climbs and descents, and exhaustion-induced hallucinations. Along the way, he experiences intense self-doubt and physical pain: “I hated the race. I hated my body.... And I hated myself.” But with steely determination and the help of other participants—notably Frankie, an eccentric fellow runner he meets on the trail (she sticks her tongue out at him and declares, “Ciao, amigo”)—Sam endures. Windrestin’s art elegantly captures the action, from the sweeping beauty of the wild terrain to Sam’s surreal visions of dragons in the sky. The result is a hypnotic and inspiring tale of a man overcoming adversity. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

French historian De La Croix makes his English-language debut with a sweeping if uneven graphic history drawn by Spanish cartoonist Cifuentes (H.G. Wells: The War of the Worlds) that surveys the war to end all wars from within the smoke-filled-rooms of participating heads of state. The perspective focuses on the leaders who initiated the war (Hitler), happily joined in (Mussolini), made doomed deals to halt it (Chamberlain), sacrificed millions of lives not to lose it (Stalin), and, relatively late in the game, united to end it (Churchill and Roosevelt). The creators synthesize vast historical details (alliances, advancements, motivations, conflicting national interests) into a brisk narrative without getting bogged down in minutia. The text is admirably streamlined, and the pointedly unflashy and occasionally stiff art convincingly renders these leaders in meeting after meeting. Meanwhile, the consequences of their decisions are glimpsed in vivid splash images of bombings, troop landings, massacres, and, as the war grinds on, devastated cities. Inevitably, some epochal events get rushed through. Rather than dramatize life and death in Hitler’s concentration camps, for example, the creators invite readers to gape at the obscene opulence of the rooms in which Nazi brass plotted the murder of millions of Jews. Despite a few flaws, it’s a noble and accessible approach to history. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this playful yet edgy throwback horror-noir from Finnegan (The Keeper), a heroic private eye in Los Angeles hasn’t let being dead slow him down. The narrative opens in the shadow of the Hollywoodland sign, circa 1925, as Juan Calavera disguises himself to break up a human-trafficking ring. Along with reporter Maria Valdez (his scrappy, platonic Lois Lane), he’s determined to tackle more crimes—until he’s killed while trying to stop a maniac screaming about giving the devil “more sacrifices.” Five years later, Valdez tends to Calavera’s legacy by licensing his adventures to movie serials. After her son is kidnapped by an evil clown on the Day of the Dead, Valdez goes to Calavera’s grave site seeking help. He reappears as a wry, smoking skeleton in a natty suit and fedora, and he and Valdez set out in pursuit of her boy. This first volume of the ongoing series keeps a snappy pace, even as Finnegan weaves in details like a prose extract from an imagined pulp novel, The Man with the Calavera Grin, or a pointed scene where Latinos are rounded up for deportation (“We don’t need papers! We are American!”). The pulpy script is matched with retro art, giving the whole thing a somewhat ragged feel. The rough edges will appeal all the more to fans of Black Mask–style pulp. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

French Canadian artist Jusseret debuts with a beguiling wordless fantasia featuring two young girls wandering through a magical and dangerous land. The story opens with the sisters leaving the safety of their home to venture out past surrounding power lines and into the countryside. They encounter a flock of crows feasting on a dead woman and collect her bones to carry along with them. Later, they run into sentient, tool-shaped creatures toiling away on a construction project with the aid of gigantic worms. After the pair befriend a young anthropomorphic fork who escapes its duties and runs away with them, all three are taken in by two elderly women. As the menacing tools and worms chase after their MIA fork, the girls fight back using the bones of the dead and natural magic. The surreal landscape is drawn in evocative lines rife with feminist imagery, as in a sequence depicting the girls bathing in a river surrounded by blood red flowers, which concludes with one of them experiencing her first menstruation. Jusseret’s dreamy but accessible narrative, with its message of finding and reclaiming feminine power, is conjured with elegance and grace. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Itagaki (Beastars) delivers a gleeful and outlandish fantasy in which Christmas spirit translates into fighting power. In a near-future Japan where low birthrates have made children a precious resource and climate change means the younger generation has never seen snow, cherub-faced Sanda seems like an ordinary teenager. But his classmate Shiori, a feral-looking girl with a violent streak, susses out his secret: Sanda is descended from Santa Claus, and under the right circumstances he transforms into an elderly but muscle-bound Saint Nick. Shiori believes the legendary guardian of children can help her find her missing friend Ono, but first she and Sanda must learn the extent of his powers, which range from flame-retardant skin (“I guess that’s a chimney thing”) to sleigh runners that pop out of his feet. Itaragi is fully aware of the absurdity of her premise and pushes it to ever greater extremes, dropping in bizarre details along the way (the kids’ boarding school is located in an abandoned department store, and their principal stays artificially young by “injecting near-fatal doses of hyaluronic acid and collagen”). The characters’ lanky figures and intense, deeply shadowed eyes give the book a gothic Nightmare Before Christmas vibe. Readers who love shonen action manga but tire of predictable formulas will be thrilled to find this in their stockings. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Ignatz nominee Mendes (Freddy Stories) delivers a gut punch of a family saga that finds moments of hardscrabble transcendence in the Depression-era dairy fields of America’s Northeast. The Catheresque story follows headstrong Edie from a tomboyish childhood on the outskirts of a U.S. Air Force base, where she lives with her parents in a shack insulated with newspaper, to her adolescence on her grandparents’ modest farm, where she wanders fields of clover and encounters turtles, grasshoppers, and herons. Edie’s visceral compassion for animals is a defining trait. In one early scene, she performs burial rites for a rabbit over the protests of the neighborhood boys who trapped it. Such cruelties are all too familiar to Edie, a regular witness to her father’s brutal drunken tirades against her mother. Edie’s laconic but devoted grandparents—and the Arcadian routines of the farm itself—offer refuge from deep-seated traumas, but alcoholism, chauvinism, and abuse persist beyond the fence line, testing Edie’s grit and resolve. Mendes imbues her homespun cartooning with an attentiveness that at times evokes Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl photographs, while ink washes add weather-worn depth and, quite often, the foreboding charge of a gathering storm. Unsentimental and quietly devastating, this portrait of resilience is a feat of rough eloquence that leaves an indelible impression. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

From Australian cartoonists Milton (Animals Rule This Land) and Lang comes a goofy space opera spoof that upturns the cliché of Earthlings as ambassadors of an enlightened culture. ? la Spaceballs, explorer Vega Ulysses is an incompetent braggart and blowhard returning from a 12-year trek to strange new worlds having botched every single mission. Worse yet, he’s left his house keys behind. As Ulysses retraces his journey, he catalogs his misadventures: Weekend at Bernie–ing an alien tribal leader he assassinated, accidentally burning down the forest on a planet whose residents feel their trees’ pain, and being put on trial by robotic aliens for the “most heinous crime” of placing things inside their box-like heads (naturally, Ulysses cooks popcorn and dunks a basketball in them). By the time Ulysses returns to Earth after encountering a Jack Kirby–styled God, he’s learned nothing at all. The colorful cartoony art leans into the ridiculousness with sight gags playing on Milton and Lang’s outrageous alien worlds. Fans of lighthearted sci-fi like Futurama and Star Trek: Lower Decks will get a kick out of this. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink