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Jun 17, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Charles Burns |Joonas Sildre |Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki
Dash Shaw. New York Review Comics, $34.95 (480p) ISBN 978-1-68137-846-6A chance encounter triggers an intricate sequence of stories within stories in Shaw’s kaleidoscopic latest (after Discipline). Browsing an H&M for clothes to wear to a wedding, Ken bumps into a former middle school classmate, Mel. When Ken doesn’t recognize her, Mel points out that she now wears glasses. The narrative then shifts to Mel in her 20s, when her vision began blurring.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Charles Burns |Joonas Sildre |Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki
Julian Hanshaw. Top Shelf, $19.99 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-60309-543-3In this eloquent, melancholic sci-fi parable from Hanshaw (Free Pass), aliens have used up their planet and must now move onto the next. Young Hoshi and Faith, however, resist the mandated evacuation. Hoshi’s obsessed with chickens and has a metallic leg, while Faith is distinguished by the outmoded tech bolted to her skull.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Charles Burns |Joonas Sildre |Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki
Joseph Béhé, trans. from the French by Edward Gauvin. Graphic Mundi, $39.95 (368p) ISBN 978-1-63779-066-3Béhé, a comics professor at the Haute École des Arts du Rhin, adapts anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s theory of religion in this detailed and convincing work of graphic scholarship. Pascal arrives at a dinner party and dives into a debate with the other guests about the origins, purposes, and features of religion.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Joonas Sildre |Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki |John Lees
Charles Burns. Pantheon, $34 (224p) ISBN 978-0-593-70170-6The manias of art-making and adolescent lust are brilliantly rendered by Burns in his first standalone graphic novel since Black Hole. Fans will recognize Burns’s lovingly etched backdrops and pulp sensibility as he returns to the subject of confused hormonal youths lost in a netherworld caught between reality and nightmare.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Charles Burns |Joonas Sildre |Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki
Choi Gyu-seok, trans. from the Korean by Lynn Eskow. Ablaze, $14.99 trade paper (248p) ISBN 978-1-68497-190-9Gyu-seok’s arresting English-language debut showcases the struggles of Korea’s labor movement through the misadventures of a reluctant activist. The narrative opens in the aughts, as labor organizer Go-shin Gu uses underhanded tactics to help a man receive unpaid wages.
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May 24, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Alex Irvine |Joonas Sildre |Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki
Kevin Eastman, David Avallone, and Ben Bishop. Image, $16.99 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-5343-7167-5There’s no business like the comics business, as Shane “Books” Bookman, can attest in this rollicking action-comedy by Eastman, cocreator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, written with Avallone (Elvira), and art by Bishop (The Last Ronin). Bookman’s risen rapidly from a complete unknown to a global comics superstar as the cocreator of the Radically Rearranged Ronin Ragdolls.
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May 24, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Allison Conway |Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki |John Lees
Conway’s wryly whimsical latest (after The Lab) peers into the weeds of a bug’s life. Millie, a sweet-faced pill bug, lives in a leafy city with friends, including an ant who’s eager to show off her colony’s work, a spider with a brood of children clinging to her thorax, and a ladybug who can’t stop chowing down on aphids. She attends a campout, drinks cocktails by the beach, gets a check-up (“It looks like you have a copper deficiency.
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May 24, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Joonas Sildre |Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki |John Lees
Joonas Sildre, trans. from the Estonian by Adam Cullen. Plough, $26 (230p) ISBN 978-1-63608-134-2Sildre (Messages from Ukraine) delivers a lyrical ode to composer Arvo Pärt that translates the minimalist beauty and power of Pärt’s music to the page. Born in Estonia in 1935, Pärt grows up in a nation occupied alternately by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
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May 20, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki |John Lees |Carl Sciacchitano
Stan Mack. Fantagraphics Underground, $50 (336p) ISBN 978-1-68396-916-7This hefty and hilarious anthology collects more than 300 of Mack’s Village Voice strips depicting conversations overheard on the streets of New York (“All dialogue guaranteed verbatim,” he claimed.) Like a crowded apartment building, the volume’s chock-full of stubborn individuality, and the joy and pathos of urban life.
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May 14, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Stan Mack |Yamada Murasaki |John Lees |Carl Sciacchitano
Sophie Adriansen and Mathou, trans. from the French by Montana Kane. NBM, $19.99 trade paper (152p) ISBN 978-1-68112-334-9In this gentle and accessible portrayal of a mental health crisis, Adriansen (Nina Simone in Comics) and Mathou draw on their experiences as mothers to tell the fictionalized story of Marietta, who becomes clinically depressed during the final trimester of her pregnancy.
