Tongues

by Anders Nilsen
368 pages
Published by Pantheon
ISBN: 1524747203 (Amazon)

The old gods have awoken again after a 3000-year slumber, and now they make war once more. When we say old gods, we could say Greek gods, but they were never really Greek. They were the world's gods, the progenitors of what we've inherited on this cacophonous orb, and we only know them as "Greek" because those were the last human peoples who could speak of them before their long slumber.

They're older and weirder and a little more terrifying than we're used to through the pacifying mediation of our Homers and Virgils and Rick Riordans. And maybe they'll wipe us out and maybe they'll save us, but damned if they won't have a lot of conversations about stuff along the way.

A large part of my affection for Tongues stems from how adjacent it feels to the conversational motifs of Duncan The Wonder Dog (the second best comic ever written). These guys love to talk and the love to talk about stuff. It really is delightful.

Artistically, it's a joy to see Nilsen grow. We saw a lot of growth across the years represented in the time he worked on Big Question, but Tongues is easily he zenith so far. He's so careful and meticulous now that it's a joy to take in—and his use of color is fantastic. Muted colors are usually one of the banes of the contemporary comics scene, where colorists just wash everything in a watered down mixture of poop and ash, but here, because of Nilsen's allergy to gradients (more people should have this allergy), the colors still feel bold and lend the work a confidence that most contemporary works lose out on through an over-reliance on texturing.

This is only a first volume, with more to come. Maybe it'll come and maybe it won't. When you're a reader of comics by independent creators, you learn to hold these things loosely. Sometimes we win and Bone wraps up, and Berlin surprises everyone just after they've given up and comes to a close. Other times we lose and have to be satisfied with the incomplete treasures we have—Age Of Bronze, Duncan The Wonder Dog, Nod Away*, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters—all the while crossing our fingers for more. All that to say: Tongues isn't yet finished, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy it for what it is right now. Any one of us could be dead by Christmas and wouldn't it be a shame to have missed out just because we didn't have the whole story?

*Note: Cotter's presently working on Nod Away vol 3 so we shouldn't lose all hope, but making comics is a lonnnng game.

 

Land Of The Lustrous

by Haruko Ichikawa (translated by Alethea Nibley and Athena Nibley, lettered by Evan Hayden)
13 vols
Published by Kodansha
ISBN: 1632364972 (Amazon)

Land Of The Lustrous is simply an incredible exercise in imagination and storytelling. I never knew where it was going to turn next. And here with the final volume, Ichikawa proves the series to be one of the most epic stories in comics. Truly, an incalculable achievement.

SYNOSPSIS: The world is very different than it was. There are, essentially, three forms of life: the mollusks, the Lunarians, and the gemstones (our main characters). And Sensei, whatever he is. The Lunarians attack the gemstones fairly regularly for reasons unknown. The gemstones are smartly dressed creatures (coded as vaguely androgynous women) whose toughness and character is related to the Mohs scale of the gem from which they're formed. Most of them are hundreds of years old. This story concerns Phosphophyllite, a fragile and pretty useless gem, as it investigates the world and seeks to understand the Lunarians and the Sensei.

Land Of The Lustrous is kind of amazing in how rapidly a story about incalcitrant, functionally immortal beings evolves and changes. Some of these characters are 700 years old and harder than steel, but the youngest of their group breaks and remolds and grows and shifts in both form and personality and motivation. She doesn't just have a character arc; it's more like a character squiggle.

And the story continues to evolve dramatically even up into its final chapters. A bravura performance by a cartoonist of whom I hope we'll see more; but even if we don't, she's left an indelible mark on the form.

 

Square Eyes

by Anna Mill and Luke Jones
256 pages
Published by Jonathan Cape
ISBN: 0224097229 (Amazon)

Mill and Jones's large-format, square-cut book about a genius-level programmer cut out of work, life, and network is astonishing to hold in your hands. For a book so intimately concerned with virtually augmented realities, it's very much meaty, an object of raw physical presence. Weight and texture, the way the ink sits on paper, the effort to turn these fraught pages—all these work as well to make the book's argument for real presence as any of the inscrutable chaos of its narrative.

Fin and her brother George live in a just-at-the-edge-of-our-present future; if this was a cornier book, it would begin with a narrative caption placing it "Sometime next week." AR (augmented reality) has become normative, much as in 2007's Den-noh Coil. People walk around plugged into the vast AR network run by Habis(?) and/or Clearmesh (?)—I don't remember their names offhand and was never clear on their status in the network though at least at the beginning they are in competition of some kind. This state of things allows Mill to run rampant visually, often diving into the perspectival, overlaying mundane reality with colorful perceived wonders. It's a trick she goes back to a lot; and it works every time. Just a joy to take in.

Fin begins the book, released from institutional care but with no access to the network, where her light and life subsist. She finds her apartment but is not recognized by security. We discover she's a famous world wunderkind that suddenly no one recognizes. Shady things are afoot, both in her life and in the corporations fooling around in people's brains. It's kind of a mystery to be solved, kind of a thrillride to be swept up into, kind of a look at a horrible future mixing bits of M.T. Anderson's Feed and Stålenhag's Electric State.

What it is: art, and satisfying at that.

We can see a nice example of Mill's use of overlayed AR visuals in sample images above 1-3, where the recto page featuring the people holding out to a virtual tesseract then bleeds into a two-page spread from Fin's view of a room in her grandmother's house to finally in image 3, the view of the room drab but unhindered by AR overlays.

Also, Mill does this neat little formal thing elsewhere where she turns the book's centerfold gutter into a comics space where people can go, where things can be. It's pretty neat.

 

Ginseng Roots

by Craig Thompson
448 pages
Published by Pantheon
ISBN: 0593700775 (Amazon)

Ginseng Roots is kind of magnificent. Like Blankets, this is a work of memoir, with 40yo Thompson looking back at his childhood in the ginseng farming community of lauded Wisconsin Ginseng. Unlike Blankets, memoir is the smallest part of the book, the rest playing out like a low-stakes Joe Sacco book of journalistic virtuosity, trading the war-torn and downtrodden for the more mundane struggles of man vs the earth vs technology vs industry.

Thompson interviews a lot of people, in Wisconsin, in Korea, in China, even in Portland (which is less immediately related). You will learn a lot about ginseng, ginseng farming, and what makes the root special and difficult. (And with the current U.S. trade wars with China, I've no idea if Wisconsin ginseng, already tottering at the time of Thompson's writing, has any future.)

Like Sacco, Thompson lets people speak for themselves—it's a good choice. At the same time, Thompson knows that it can be hard to garner interest in a deep dive into agricultural farming without some emotional tie, so we get to return to his family, who weaves in and out of the narrative for the duration. We get to see what his parents are like in their sunset years. We get to see more of Phil and his relationship to adult Craig.¹1For those unfamiliar with the convention I use: When I talk of the author of a memoir, I use the last name (as one normally would when referring to an author), but when I talk about the in-book character as the author reveals themselves, I use their character's first name. This helps differentiate between the reality (the author) vs the necessary fictionalization (the character on page). We get to meet Thompson's sister for the first time.

And we get to see a lot about how hard it can be to be a cartoonist. Craig is falling apart, physically, and we see a lot of direness with regard to his hand. He's also got some of the expected artist trauma we'd associate with someone who a) skyrocketed with his second book and then b) did a critically acclaimed book that also made a lot of people mad and generated a lot of critical takes on the social and then c) put out a book that nobody really bought (Space Dumplins), that a lot of people didn't even know existed (First Second has never been great about marketing their books well), and was meant for an entirely different audience than the audience who loved him (it's about space whale poop).

Ginseng Roots is Thompson's crisis of confidence book. (And yeah, I remember when it was announced and the first issue came out, everyone's chatter was "Uh oh, is Thompson gonna do another appropriation?") There's a lot here about Craig's inner thoughts and that, honestly, was where I most connected to the book. We don't share the same kinds of thoughts, but I could feel the deeply human nature of artistic creation at war in that aspect of the book.

I'd think this would make a good book club book, but howdy is it ever long. 150 pages shorter than Blankets, but the Sacco-like nature of the book means it'll take maybe three times as long to read. Just a lot to get through. Worth it, but it's no breezy afternoon read.

 

3rd Voice

by Evan Dahm
2+ vols
Self-published
Purchase at: Topatoco)

Evan Dahm's new big project after the close of Vattu (an all-time banger of a book) is expansive and displays more invention and curiosity about the nature of peoples and cultures than anything we seen from him so far, which says a lot about the fabric of this new world and its characters and narrative.

3rd Voice is about the world that limps along for a bit after the end of the world on its way to becoming something else. A new world, perhaps. With any luck.

While very much alien to our own world and our sense of it, Dahm's new creation does share some thematic kin to what we find in, say, Canticles Of Liebowitz.²2Another convention I use is to capitalize every word in a title, including articles and prepositions. I started doing this because on social media, you don't usually have the option of italicizing and Once upon a Time in the West doesn't look like a title at all (and ALLCAPS LOOKS DUMB AND GROSS). Already, having crossed that bridge, I felt there was no reason to not capitalize even when italics were available. So yeah, it's not a mistake or because I don't know any better. It is, of course, actually quite different, but there are vibes and rhythms that I think fit well enough with Miller's own vision of a world crawling onward from calamity. Gods. Demigods. Priests. People. Many have fallen and a few get up.

3rd Voice's now-concluded second act spent itself deeply infused with the politics of its city, ruled by an authoritarian presence operating in the name of a king that no one's seen in decades. The intrigues flow fast and thick. Mysteries and murders. Where knowing too much is an executioners noose. It's all quite thrilling and there's nothing else quite like in on the market.

Aside from a pile of meta-textual videos and background materials (and letter column!) available for interested readers, Dahm employs an intriguing conceit to build our alien sense of things. He uses (in something like the Mighty Marvel Style) editorial notes throughout, sometimes focused on translation of terms and other times noting his position of authorship/interlocution.

These instances from "–ed" propel us into a conception that the work is one that Dahm is translating or at least annotating. In ways, it feels very much like something Umberto Eco liked to play with, proposing that various novels were "found" and then communicated somehow to the reader. It gives everything another layer, making carrying through the narration a more delicious prospect.

 

Legend Of Kamui

by Shirato Sanpei (translated by Richard Rubinger and Noriko Rubinger with Alexa Frank, lettered by Michael Deforge)
2+ vols
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770467297 (Amazon)

The Legend Of Kamui's true value won't be seen until we get the story entire, but even at 28% of the work unveiled to us (English speakers here in North America), we have a narrative that astounds by its unruly exploration of a world long gone (and yet of course still relevant). In Kamui Sanpei is deeply concerned with class distinction and the whimsical caprice that inserts each person into their lot in life. While characters within these social pericopes definitely view their hierarchies as just and those belonging to one class as more or less natively valuable than those of another, Sanpei rubs on that ideological vector throughout. History is full of people who think they're better than others for accidents of faith rather than for more turgid realities, such as the quality of their character. Sanpei underscores the believed fantasy while pushing us to yearn for the rejected reality.

When I described the book as unruly, this is a praise for Sanpei's effort in embracing the chaos of the era and the chaos of living. It's truly wild how many characters and situations he cycles through. You'll get introduced to what looks like some new important antagonist and ten pages later, they've been disemboweled. You meet a new love interest and five pages later they're hanging from a tree. No on is safe. It's a dangerous world and Sanpei knows it.

He'll also break story to spend 40 pages every now and then following the life of a miscolored wolf, just for thematic reasons probably. I love that for him and I love that for us.

 

Good Person Trouble

by Noëlle Kröger (translated by Natalye Childress)
100 pages
Published by Fieldmouse
Purchase at: (Fieldmouse)

Kröger adapts Bertolt Brecht's play, The Good Person Of Szechwan, so strikingly and with such sensibilities that anyone would be forgiven for thinking it came wholesale from Kröger's own brain. A courtroom drama in which fox Sebastian answers for the disappearance of his cousin Teresa, featuring a gallery filled with rambunctious, gossiping mustelids and presided over by three gods who are one, a swirling mass of tanuki.

It's no great mystery and most readers (unfamiliar with the play) will probably clock what's happened to Teresa well before that fate has been revealed around the halfway point; the joy then comes not from the solution but from the tension of knowing what Sebastian has—and has to lose—and witnessing him try to navigate that and make it through with his soul intact. I was riveted.

The Good Person Of Szechwan but with animals is such a paltry way to describe Good Person Trouble. At its base, sure, that's a true enough description; but it doesn't account for the fact that you're holding something visually splendid in your hands. Kröger's art won me over instantly—particularly the swirling self-reiterative manner Kröger's depicts the three judges/gods. Look at the pages in the sample above and you'll see what I mean.

 

The Once And Future Riot

by Joe Sacco
144 pages
Published by Metropolitan
ISBN: 1250880262 (Amazon)

While a comparatively lean book, in some ways, I think The Once And Future Riot may be Sacco's strongest work. The way it describes the maddening impossibility of determining anything close to Whole Truth when looking at polarized conflicts fits the current moment precisely. As well, it homes in on how we continue making woman objects by making them fulcrums for political conflict.

Through so much of the book, many western/westernized readers will be tempted to think, "Man, India is wild!" and not realized that Sacco is describing the current western zeitgeists, and doing so in a gonzo style. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was published when Sacco was 11yo, but I'm certain it was still in play by the time he started in on his own journalistic endeavors. I think Once And Future is securely Sacco's most gonzo work since Palestine.

It's also filled with neat comics tricks: Look at this amazing, curious choice by Sacco. Panel 1 features village chief Singh denying anything serious happened in his village, village men looking at him pointedly. Panel 2 continues his excusal but now he is just off-panel and the men continue to gaze, unchanged save for the smoker exhaling. It's a neat visual trick to implicate community while still showing the importance of a power structure unifying voices in any reality-shifting proposed narrative.

 

Tonoharu

by Lars Martinson
3 vols
Published by Pliant/Top Shelf
Check availability (Amazon)

Tonoharu. Geez. What a book. And what a terrible thing that it took me so long to get ahold of the final vol (of 3) in order to finally read it. And what a terrible thing that this is so far out of print that I can't even find vol 3 on ebay.

Structurally, Tonoharu opens with a JET teacher reflecting on his last 10 months in Japan and reflecting on what's passed since his arrival, and then closes with his decision whether to renew his annual contract or not and what happens next. Prologue and epilogue. In the prologue we hear mysterious things about a now-departed house of raucous foreigners. We learn that one of the Japanese teachers intriguingly holds disdain for the JET role. And we wonder how this guy's going to do, whether he'll stick with it.

Everything between those bookends, between prologue and epilogue, is flashback, telling the story of the man's predecessor, a hapless JET teacher who's awkward and out of place and lonely and sad, and a bit of an unhappily friendzoned incel. Tonoharu in large part is his story; and in hearing his story, the introductory character's story begins to fill out. Our worlds are built by others, whom we are ignorant of and who remain ignorant of us.

Tonoharu is an ingenious work that deserved better than it got.

I think this would have vastly benefited from being collected into a single volume instead of cut into three. The first volume really just doesn't work that well on its own. We're introduced to a character, follow him for a fair chunk and then suddenly we go back to this man's predecessor and the rest of that volume is part of his story. By the end of volume one, we've learned little except that this guy is kind of a sad ass. His story remains unfinished in vol 1 and so we've had little time to see the growth he'll encounter, the ways he'll evolve. It makes it hard to want to get to vol 2, where things begin to take shape. All of this would be alleviated were the book to just be housed as a single novel, which would work beautifully. If Top Shelf or some other publisher ever takes on the work again, I truly hope for a nice large edition containing the whole story.

 

Drome

by Jesse Lonergan
320 pages
Published by 23rd Street
ISBN: 1250386934 (Amazon)

Drome is a Gilga-like, a creation myth and the folderol that comes along for the ride. Much of it reads as deeply indebted to the older sources. The god who rules the night creates life and the foremost is a tyrant (like Gilgamesh in the earliest chapter of his own myth). The god who rules the day creates two foils for that tyrant, one who adapts Enkidu, beastly and unbeatable, and another who reads as a combination of Gilgamesh himself and Shamhat, the priestess who subdues/seduces Enkidu. This Gilgamesh/priestess character is Lonergan's protagonist here and it is she for whom we largely cheer in the feats that will follow. Through in a fiery Humbaba-like, a war amongst the creation, and a quest against death itself and we've got all the classic ingredients for a solid, primitive creation myth.

And that's what we get, something that on its surface is simplistic but that on observation unveils other beauties.

In The Epic Of Gilgamesh that beauty is in the words, in the verbal expression of ideas through repetitive poetry. In Drome it's all in what Lonergan gushes into our eyes: a gorgeous table set with a visual feast.

Atop Lonergan's Lonerganian paneling, which most of us first really saw in Hedra, which remains inventive and compelling here, we get beautiful, bombastic art. We also get some interesting implementations of C and M and Y (cyan, magenta, and yellow, the foundations of color in the printed sphere), which here hold a kind of thematic/narrative weight that I wish had been explored a bit more. The god's themselves are represented by absolute K values (black and white). I think ultimately I would have liked to see a bit more cohesive vision of these distinct elements along with what is and isn't allowed to break paneling (like if divine entities/actions could break the out of the paneled world while the created elements remained restrained by the rules governing their world, the formal comic itself). We get hints of this, as when the hero challenges the gods and the structure of the panels begins to fragment, but in the end the governing motif seems mostly to be What Looks Cool On This Page. It's not a bad motif by any stretch because cool pages are, in fact, cool pages. But imagine if there was more.

Also, an aside and not for nothing, but Lonergan's come a long way in the last 18 years from his debut book, Flower And Fade:

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A Bride's Story

by Kaoru Mori (translated by William Flanagan, lettered by Abigail Blackman, edited by Abigail Blackman and Rory Nevins)
15+ vols
Published by Yen Press
ISBN: 0316180998 (Amazon)

Enough cannot be said about the wonders of Mori's work on A Bride's Story. As things wend closer and closer to what could be a finale, we take in vol 15 a break from the goings on fixed to the Aral region with its historically imminent Russian incursion and spend time with Smith (and his bride) in Britain, where he's finally returned in safety from the danger of being falsely imprisoned/executed for imagined espionage. His mother is aghast at his decision to take a foreign bride and the volumes explores the fallout of his decision. Mori of course gives us plenty of sweet moments and the series remains one of the highlights of the contemporary comics landscape.

[Note: I wrote this entry twice because I'd forgotten that I'd written it at all, so here's my second version, just for fun.]

With volume 15, we see Henry Smith return from his time in the Turan Lowlands and the Aral–Caspian Depression back to his home in Britain, only arriving with his foreign fiancee, whose story we've been following since volume 11. They've made it out just in time as Russia will soon begin its downward sweep and Smith would likely be executed as a spy, but while less fatal, things aren't rosey at home either. Rather than facing death, Smith and Talas merely encounter his mother's racism, so volume 15 concerns largely their adjustment to life in a new place where their principal support is only in each other—which is fitting for this book concerned with couples.

Along the way, we get asides focusing on Nikolovsky and his wife, Ali finding his own bride, and Talas's mother being let in on her secret. It's another warm-hearted volume filled with all the things you'd come to expect in A Bride's Story, only Mori has less opportunity to draw the decorative minutiae of the Near East, swapping for her familiar Victorian settlements.

 

Daemons Of The Shadow Realm

by Hiromu Arakawa (translated by Amanda Haley, lettered by Phil Christie and Bianca Pistillo)
9+ vols
Published by Square Enix
ISBN: 1646091868 (Amazon)

Because she's a Fullmetal Alchemist superfan, I first got this for my then-15yo's birthday but read it before her so that she'd have someone to talk to about it because I'm a good dad like that. Daemons Of The Shadow Realm, despite its absolutely generic and non-memorable and kind of tryhard English title, is actually super fun.

Catching up this Christmas with the ninth volume, I was once more reminded how insane it is that Hiromu Arakawa, creator of Fullmetal Alchemist and Silver Spoon has a new ongoing series out that it is a real banger and nobody is talking about it. The critical/marketing dereliction here is mind-boggling. (Though an anime adaptation begins airing in April, so maybe it'll pick up some more readers!)

And yeah, this book rips. It's so much fun. After a couple wild switcheroos in volume 1, Daemons Of The Shadow Realm settles into a solid book of battles and mysteries about a 16yo boy trying to find out what happened to his parents, who fled his village when he was just a youngster, leaving him and his sister behind. It's funny, smart, and exciting. Basically it's what you should expect from an Arakawa fantasy adventure.

Also, a funny thing: Hiromu Arakawa is 2 months older than me. Amazing that we're exactly as accomplished as each other. Just shocking.

 

Garden Of Spheres

by Linea Sterte
336 pages
Published by Peow2
ISBN: 9789187325700 (Peow2)

For the first half I would have described A Garden Of Worlds as a Moebius/Nihei-like featuring a goddess with a dopey hair-cut. (Sorry to all the micro-bang lovers in the world!) At the beginning this is more a book to inhabit, an environment to steep in, than a story to unfold. It felt like a Stertian World Of Edena. Which is cool and all—I enjoy vibe books as much as the next random dude. Like, full stop. A Garden Of Worlds with only the lightest touch of story would be one hundred percent worth your time, your money, and your attention.

That it eventually becomes more is a treat. To me at any rate. Because I love stories.

In A Garden Of Worlds there have been born many gods and from them many societies, some magical, some technological, some a mix, and some neither. In Sterte's story we follow one particular god, the rare one whose powers destroy rather than create, and while at first this serves merely as a wandering motif intended to introduce different worldbuilds and see some bitchen art, eventually some characters stick around and the politics of the world begin to unfurl. And suddenly we've got a bit of story and I want more. I'm sure the next volume will take a good while to come about, but I'll be happy to buy it when it does.

 

Short Game

by Mitsuru Adachi (translated by Matt Schley)
202 pages
Published by Denpa
ISBN: 1634428528 (Amazon)

There is a drought and famine upon the land. The best work of comics literature is well out of print and until this last month, only two of its creator's titles have been published in the US. We got Short Program vol 1 in 1988, vol 2 in 1996 and then Cross Game collected into 8 vols beginning in 2009—oh, and also half of a single chapter in Rumiko Takahashi's collection of shorts, Came The Mirror. And now in 2025 we get a third title, Short Game, a collection of five shorts interspersed with 5-page gag bits.

For one of the best creators of comics in the world, this is an astonishing, mind-blowing disaster of marketing and prejudices. Mitsuru Adachi, known for his sprawling series of thrills and laughs and lives and loves, has only a single series to his name in the US: Cross Game (OOP but you can still get the entire series on Kindle). And there is no reason that Cross Game should have failed save for that it didn't find its audience (Chip Zdarsky said it was one of his favorite books ever)—aka 98% of people who might be willing to read a comic. (Seriously, I've loaned the series out prodigiously and only found one person who didn't love it, a woman who *only* reads fantasy and couldn't get past the fact that it wasn't fantasy; that one was on me.) We should be *at least* as awash in Adachi's books as we are in Naoki Urasawa's. But we're (mysteriously) not.

But at least we got Short Game!

While Adachi is most well known (and lauded) for his longer series where he gets to build characterization and drama over time (Touch, H2, Rough, Cross Game, Katsu, etc), he's also done quite a few single chapter shorts. There are four collections, under the title Short Program, though we only ever got 2 in the US. And now Short Game.

If Cross Game were still readily available in the US (vols 2 and 6 are exorbitantly priced), I'd recommend starting there to get a taste of what makes Adachi so incredible a cartoonist, but in lieu of that, Short Game is fair at giving a taste of some of Adachi's penchant for giving things little twists, sometimes subtle. Each of the five main stories offers an enjoyable twist, and while all five *do* revolve around baseball to some degree, three are about adult former members of a high school baseball team. As well, camaraderie, humor, and hopeful romance abound (also common Adachi themes).

It's a stronger set of stories than found in Short Program, in that each of the five stories is enjoyable and well put together (Short Program is more mixed in quality). Short Game is satisfying for what it is but it does make me hope even more desperately that 1) Viz will print H2, and 2) they'll really sell people on it so we can get more Adachi.

 

Insomniacs After School

by Makoto Ojiro (translated by Andria McKnight, lettered by Inori Fukuda Trant)
14 vols
Published by Viz
ISBN: 1974736571 (Amazon)

While the story is warm-hearted and it's just very nice to inhabit a world in which Nakami and Magari can find each other, gradually and persistently, the real star of this show about stars is Ojiro's art. She may be one of the best working cartoonists currently publishing.

Ojiro is a shockingly good drawer, not only well able to illustrate a cornucopia of expressions on very human looking faces, but leans deeply into compositions that underscore proximity in ways that push and pull her narrative in directions that mere prose cannot and that we also don't see attempted in most comics. The reader feels the physicality of these two bodies, where they are both in actual material relation to each other but also in terms of how near or far those same two bodies feel they are. It's like how on weather apps, you'll get the actual temperature and then the "feels like" temperature.

I will follow Ojiro's comic-booking to the ends of the earth. No matter her subject, I will be there. I need this art in my life. But all the same? I'm glad that such a sweet story of human need and connection was my introduction to her work.

About a eight months ago, comics' social media discourse was taken up (for a day, as with all comics social media discourse) with a grumpy lady who made a short comic whining about how creators of color get rewarded for mediocre work because of white guilt. It read like sour grapes with a nice helping of racism. That tying into another conversation I saw complaining about how this or that creator got snubbed for an Eisner, made me think of Makoto Ojiro.

So listen, until Makoto Ojiro wins her prize for best cartoonist (and not in an "international" category but the real deal), nobody has any business even beginning to covet an award. Other people may win and almost certainly deserve their wins, but nobody deserves to feel slighted so long as Ojiro remains unadorned by the best awards. Her cartooning is unreal. I'm constantly gobsmacked by the ease with which she developed character through expression, with how deftly she uses her art to emphasize proximity, relationship, yearning, and internality. She is, quite frankly, magnificent.

 

Ghost Writer

by Rayco Pulido (translated by Andrea Rosenberg)
96 pages
Published by Fantagraphics
ISBN: 1683963180 (Amazon)

Against the backdrop of Franco's Spain and the moral instruction masked in a national advice radio program, a stream of brutal murders roil in the cacophony of a Barcelona summer. The 8-months pregnant Eulalia, who goes by the diminutive Laia (both meaning well-spoken), is the prolific new scriptwriter for Dr Elena Bosch's radio program offering social and relationship advice to the people of Spain. Only there is no Dr Bosch (she is merely a product of the advertiser) and there is no pregnancy, as Laia wears a false belly.

The Ghost Writer is funny, brutal, and twisty, a delightfully lurid crime story, whose translated title strips the book of some of its thematic resonance. As intended, the title is Lamia, a reference to the creature of Greek myth, forced to see her children die and then goes mad, becoming a wrath against men and children. Lamia? Laia? Get it? Get it? Maybe Fantagraphics just didn't think Americans know their Greek myths. Or that they have played D&D.

Anyway, look at these illustrations. Very sharp, and while I didn't include many images of other characters, Pulido's caricatures are quite varied. There's even a dog-faced woman reminiscent of the kind of thing Inio Asano tosses into most of his books. Everything is in stark B&W save for the occasional splash of bright red for blood.

Definitely recommend this for fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafon and his pulpy Franco Barcelona.

 

Tower Dungeon

by Tsutomu Nihei (translated by Sam Malissa, lettered by Darren Smith, edited by Daniel Joseph)
4+ vols
Published by Kodansha
ISBN: 1647294541 (Amazon)

In Tower Dungeon we have perhaps Nihei's most accessible work, full of fun characters and wild fantasy monster design. Where previous Nihei offerings had relied almost wholly on the environment for its sense of mystery, Tower Dungeon holds narrative mystery as well, featuring characters with secrets and hidden motives and clouded identities. Of course, since this is still Nihei, life is cheap and the architecture of the megastructure is imposing.

Nihei style evolution across 5 books: Blame, Abara, Biomega, Sidonia, and Aposimz

With nearly every Nihei outing we see a reinvention of his art style, and Tower Dungeon is no different. With the end of Aposimz he'd begun to reintroduce solid black fills into his pages again, though sparingly. With Tower Dungeon, he leans hard into those old friends, last seen in the first half of Knights Of Sidonia. Only in another departure from Aposimz, he leaves behind the fine and careful linework for a sloppier brushwork. This book would almost feels like a rush if it weren't for the elaborate creature designs and architecture (probably the main thing people come to a Nihei book for: What does the megastructure look like!?).

 

Human Capital

by Moro Rogers
292 pages
Self-published
Purchase at: (Amazon)

This is Rogers's third graphic novel³3You may remember her City In The Desert from Archaia back around 2012 just before Archaia bellied up and was acquired by Boom. and, well, it's nutballs.

The time is the near future. The place is Southern California (and the only story I've encountered besides Rian Johnson's Brick to prominently feature San Clemente). A.I. has successfully alleviated all need for human physical labor, so there are no jobs for humans besides a) artist, b) swami, and c) heir. With so many artists vying for the attention of the heirs, society devolves into themed art gangs—like you're watching Walter Hill's 1979 documentary The Warriors.

Main character NTTL (pronounced nettle, like the stinging plant), a nom de plume, finds an artifact that keys him into the worldwide artistic muse and goes from former almost somebody to Actual Somebody And Toast Of The Critical World. A bunch of people die, a little art gets made, we get a visit from the Pope who tells a ghost story, and there is ethically ambiguous sex between consenting adults.

Anyway, yes. This book is a madcap mix of satire, culture critique, and wondering what the friggen point of it all is anyway—where "it all" means life, not the book, though that question might apply equally. It's delightfully unfocused and takes risks. Also has a badass drawing of a melting skeleton that makes you want to throw horns. It's weird and funny, and I think we could all use a little more weird and funny in our lives.

 

Raised By Ghosts

by Briana Loewinsohn
224 pages
Published by Fantagraphics
ISBN: 9798875000508 (Amazon)

This stands as a snapshot of a lonely girl in hard living situation steeped in the cultural ephemera of the mid-'90s. Loewinsohn's high school career post-dates mine by about five years, but so much of what she depicts is recognizable, an ode to an era gone and never to be recovered (the advent of cellphones and then smartphones assured that).

Note-passing between friends abounds and that's the central motif Loewinsohn uses to speak of those times, those experiences, those trivialities, and those foundational uneasinesses. While there are the occasional in-panel word balloons, much of the narrative is explored external to the panel in handwriting on torn ruled-notebook pages, emulating the very notes that Loewinsohn and friends would pass in class and slip into lockers. In a way, this is an adult picturebook/comic hybrid (if one has a tough time accepting that picturebooks actually *are* comics).

I'd read a lot of this book in tricks and treats over a couple years on Instagram, but it's a treat to see it all together at a once in print. Loewinsohn makes it effortless to inhabit young Briana's world. Mixtapes, walkmans, folded notes, piling into one car or another. Friends, once-friends, and maybe friends again soon. Waiting and waiting and waiting. It's hard to underestimate how much waiting happened back then. And walking.

Books like this are invaluable as a preservative of a cultural pericope that only existed for a period of fifteen years or so, couldn't exist before then and will never be able to exist again. In that way, Raised By Ghosts occupies a similar place of value to Aya Of Yop City and certain feels kin to Guibert's How The World Was.

 

Veil

by Kotteri!
4+ vols
Published by Udon
ISBN: 1772943614 (Amazon)

Veil is much less a story than it is a mood, a series of vignettes that drip the honey of mid-century cinematic banter (think Philadelphia Story or To Have And Have Not) while suffused in aesthetic style.

Here we have Alexander, a police officer (with a heart of gold!) and Emma, a wealthy young in the city on her own. She is blind and on an adventure. He is concerned and watching out for her. He offers her a job on the telephone bank at his precinct. And that's all the excuse the book needs to just offer up short scene after short scene, which are themselves just an excuse for mise-en-Scène, fashion, and banter. Which may be an excuse for Kotteri to luxuriate in the mutual invasion of these characters' personal spaces.

So you know that scene in Before Sunrise when Jesse and Celine are in the listening box, very close, looking at each other and not? (Obviously you do because you're no barbarian.) Where there's this tension of curiosity, intimacy, yearning, and reserve just absolutely smashing down on them and the viewer? That's the humidity of Veil. The opportunity for closeness, to touch an ear, play with a button, breathe on a neck. An intoxication.

The other thing about Veil is how fashion forward it is. The outfits are impeccable but between each short chapter, usually no longer than six pages each, Kotteri will put in two to four pages of fashion imagery, showing Emma or Alexander in different outfits or vamping for the camera as if on a poster for a perfume or watchband. Beautiful work.

But yes, I don't know if somewhere down the line a story appears, but I'd doubt it. This is a book of moments.

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Fluorescent Black

by MF Wilson, Nathan Fox, and Jeremy Cox
196 pages
Published by Heavy Metal
ISBN: 1935351303 (Amazon)

Fluorescent Black is like jungle sci-fi set in and out of a Singapore where the world's been divided into two strata, not vertically but urbans vs rurals, where the rurals are those kept from the city because of genetic issues and those within are privy to all the best genetic upgrades.

Aesthetically, it's kind of like if Paul Pope and David Rubin were doing up the biker gang portion of Akira (the homage is obvious enough that Fox draws a kid in Kaneda's famous pill jacket in a flashback). It's jungle and shanty towns and gang wars and infiltration of the obscene dystopian city.

Fluorescent Black is a vibrant burst of art and color and chaos and does this neat little trick where you figure out the narrator for reals only in the last pages and kind of go "ohhh"—not like a world shaping revelation but a neat trick.

Fluorescent Black came out to critical acclaim in 2010, and I hesitate to recommend this because it is, like too many good books, currently out of print. Still books come and go in and out of print so who knows, maybe we'll see it again soon. Otherwise, keep an eye on the used market.

 

The Corus Wave

by Karenza Sparks
144 pages
Published by Avery Hill
ISBN: 191735522X (Amazon)

Science comics, those that employ the sciences to tell fictional—often fabulist—tales while remaining relatively grounded are a joy. Two years ago, the science comic of the year was Robin Cousin's The Phantom Scientist. Last year, we got ohuton's Seaside Beta. This year's science comic is The Corus Wave and it is delightful adventure on a small scale.

Sparks introduces us to geology student, Lorelei, preparing for her thesis. In researching a particular kind of ammonite fossil, a palindenite known as wrinkled potch for the strange designs in its opalized crust. I don't think palindenites are an actual thing and that this wrinkled potch was invented for the story, which (if true) is fantastic. In trying to nail down sources, she finds bare reference to a scientist, Havius Corus, and eventually finds he was disgraced for his insistence that he heard the voice of angels (a very kind of Isaac Newton thing to insist).

Eventually, this leads her and her roommate Eddie (and their cat) to travel to Chokesbury to visit some scholars devoted to the study of Corus's body of work. There they discover that Corus, an architect, built several of the town's historical landmarks, leading to a kind of treasure hunt not unlike From Hell's tour of landmarks in London.

It's a lot of fun to watch their scavenger hunt unfold and to discover why and for what purpose the wrinkled potch seems to have a sonic field resonating at 44 hz, doing that thing you may have seen in TikToks where different magnetic resonances shape fine grains into repeating designs. Just a wonderful little book.

I dug this book so when I say I have two small gripes, know that they are small. 1) I wish the entire book was colored as wonderfully as the cover—that would have been a boon to the story I think. 2) I wish the lettering was better. That's it, the sum total of my complaints because this is a wonderful book.

One thing I did love though: at one point Lorelei follows a dead link to the Corus Society's webpage. Frustrated, she gives up and I'm shouting at her, "Go to archive.org!!" The very next page, her roommate's like, "Uhh, why haven't you tried archive.org yet?" That was a perfect moment.

 

Open Borders

by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith (colored by Mary Cagle)
256 pages
Published by First Second
ISBN: 1250316960 (Amazon)

While America (where I find myself) currently reels under a frenetic expression of immigration policy, we're not the only nation to struggle with the question of our borders. Who Gets In has been an open question (and sometimes a nearly settled question) in nations across Europe and eastern Asia. Here in my country, Republicans (who hate the idea of open borders) love to complain about how Democrats (who hate open borders) are trying to open our borders. But in reality, basically nobody wants open borders or thinks they're a good idea. Nobody except economist Bryan Caplan. And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) cartoonist Zach Weinersmith, whom Caplan pretty much convinced. And now, I guess, me whom Caplan and Weinersmith have pretty much convinced.

I came to Open Borders skeptical, as will probably most of its readers. Certainly I'd been very unhappy with American immigration policy as far back as I was aware of it (going back to the Obama administration—I didn't pay it much mind before then), and I didn't think there was anything particularly just in valuing people based on the happenstance of which side of a river they were born on, but I'd assumed closed or at least prickly borders were still a utilitarian necessity.

I suppose I was willing to be convinced, but I've been down the road of comics that propose an argument for an issue before, and so I'm well used to cherry-picking, to hand-waving criticisms, to straw men and false dichotomies and a host of other techniques we love to employ to shore up our arguments' weaknesses. Only. Only Caplan and Weinersmith don't really do that. Bryan (I'll refer to Caplan-as-narrator as Bryan, the character we see speaking directly to the reader) frequently cites weaknesses in his own position and strengths in the arguments against his case—and then tries to deal with those forthrightly. He even takes a long chapter to deal with the four biggest complaints against his position that we help the world *and* our own nation if we open our borders (in addition to it being a moral good). The final sections of the book feature Bryan saying, Look, I'm certain something I said didn't convince you, so let's just pretend that all those arguments were bad and look at a variety of strategies that don't involve open borders at all but are both closer to morally just immigration *and* answer the fears of those of you who oppose open borders. It's a wildly responsible technique for a book and I encounter it so rarely that it shocked me.

Additionally, Caplan and Weinersmith's book does what I was horrified to find that the Lies My Teacher Told Me graphic novel doesn't do: it includes comprehensive end notes. Not merely a bibliography or list of sources, but actual end notes. What is this? Paying For It?

 

Bones And Berserkers (Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, vol 13)

by Nathan Hale
128 pages
Published by Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 1419773208 (Amazon)

For Nathan Hale's 13th book investigating the harrowing within American history, he elides (mostly) the bedrock of the series, historical fact, and dives into a fun exploration of the mostly legendary. There's a chart at the end with a fact-o-meter labeling how close to Real each bit of the book is. And apart from the story of radium and the one detailing the massacre at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin home, everything involved is some measure of folk horror. It's a delight.

These books are always quite funny, as Hale has his interlocutors josh and joke their way through the horrors of war (e.g. Treaties, Trenches, Mud, And Blood)and exploration (e.g. Donner Dinner Party), but here we have over-the-top horrors to enchant your giddy macabre children.

There's the Jersey Devil killing its mother and 12 siblings fresh from its womb. There's Yaley Eben Byers whose jaw melted off from drinking radium-infused health tonics several times a day for a couple years and was eventually buried in a lead-lined coffin because his corpse was a hazard. There's an adaptation of Poe's Hopfrog, who incinerated his kind and 12 nobles in a touch of vengeance. There's Berserker Vikings who cut off a king's butt. There's a ghost in the White House. There's some poor sap who marries a monster lady and poured salt and pepper on its skin to push it real good out of its body. There's Joaquin Murrieta, the vigilante of vengeful justice who took on racist miners in California and inspired Zorro and therefore Batman.

My son loves these books and when we saw a new out, we knew he'd love it. Amazon reviews were from a bunch of weenie parents whose kids were too scared to read it so they gave it weak reviews, but really its just a lot of (often gross) fun.

 

To The Sea

by Mukoubi Aoi (translated by zhuchka, lettered by Tim Sun, edited by emuh ruh)
430 pages
Published by Glacier Bay
ISBN: 9781953629357 (Glacier Bay)

You know that thing about how horror comics don't actually horrify at all? You know that, right? About how the only real horrifying stuff in comics, the stuff that truly unnerves, the stuff that gives you the chills for real, how it's just people acting like people? Right?

Because see, that's the thing. The supernatural weirdnesses in Lovecraft, in Ito, in monster movies—none of that's real and so it doesn't really tap into the truly frightening. What's really scary is when people show themselves for the monsters they are. That's why the scariest parts of a book like Lovecraft Country are when, say, the characters are driving through a sundown town on their way to confront the cosmic horrors. That town is far more horrifying than anything the cultists or creatures could muster. It's why I never met a Junji Ito or Emily Carroll book that frightened or horrified but every last Joe Sacco book is nightmare upon nightmare.

To The Sea is not a horror book. It's a travel fantasy, a girl with a magic blade riding around on the back of a dolphin, stopping off here and there to have Odysseyian adventures and scrapes whenever she makes landfall. And yet, its a book that is filled with horror because it's a book filled with men who will do terrible things to young girls. (As I write this, more Epstein files have dropped so all of this is a little more present in mind.) The book is very much about the despicability of the human race. Not just their despicableness, but about they're ability to be, their propensity toward being, despicable. Toward greed, toward power, toward the gratification of self against the wellbeing of another. It's horror and horror and horror. And even up 'til the end, the question remains: would the responsible human end humanity?

 

The Princess Beast

by Sarah Burgess
3+ vols
Self-published in print, Tapas for digital
(Read here or purchase here)

If you want reliable romance comics, you're largely going to be spending your time on Japanese productions. They've kind of got the romcom nailed down at this point. My Love Story, Horimiya, Cross Game, Princess Jellyfish, O Maidens In Your Savage Season, ad infinitum. If however you'd like to read English-language romcoms, books that are foremost written for the reader immersed in English-language culture, there are only a handful of guiding lights. Andi Watson and Chynna Clugston were big around Y2K. Bryan Lee O'Malley shone for a time. There are a new crop of good romances from contemporary creators (such as Jen Wang's Prince And The Dressmaker).

Among my favorite of the last few years is Sarah Burgess. The Princess Beast seems like an idea spun out of Moto Hagio's story "Iguana Girl." The main character is a princess named Princess. She looks to everyone like a pretty young princess, but Princess looks in the mirror and sees the truth: she is a beast. (Or it may be the other way around—there is still some mystery about Princess's beastliness.) It's about her and a sullen-but-awkward-but-kinda-cool prince. And about love and falling in love.

Burgess has a great voice for romance. She writes lively characters that can carry a banter. Her art is fantastic for the wide variety of expressions necessary to pull this kind of thing off.

 

Kowloon Generic Romance

by Jun Mayuzuki (translated by Amanda Haley, lettered by Abigail Blackman)
11+ vols
Published by Yen Press
ISBN: 1975345789 (Amazon)

What begins in the guise of a slice-of-life romcom gradually unveils itself as something much more: twisting sci-fi mystery? psychological thriller? a question of teetering existential identiation?

Reiko works for a property management company in the third Kowloon Walled City. The first was destroyed by the Chinese government (as you know!) in 1994. The second destroyed much more recently. This third instance of the cacophonous neighborhood is just as grimy as in the past and looks fifty years old if it looks a day. Also, there's a giant iridescent rhombohedron floating above the city representing Gene Terra, a strange science facility. Generic in this series refers to things adjectivally related to Gene Terra; a Gene Terra plushie would be a Generic plushie, etc.

Anyway, Reiko has a crush on her coworker who's showing her the ropes and introducing her around. It's cute and sweet and non-eventful til just about the end of vol 1 where things start to take a turn. Reiko finds that people she's never met remember her. She finds a photo of her and her coworker being very cozy in each other's company, a photo she knows she's never taken. Also, she can't quite remember coming to Kowloon?

As we follow Reiko trying to figure out who she is, things ramp up and ramp up and ramp up. It's a wild ride and if that's something you enjoy, this is a great little book. It's by the cartoonist who did After The Rain.

 

The Solitary Gourmet

by Masayuki Kusumi and Jiro Taniguchi (translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian)
344 pages
Published by Fanfare
ISBN: 1912097443 (Amazon)

I didn't expect how grumpy, put upon, and judgmental the main character of The Solitary Gourmet would be, but I definitely didn't expect restaurant fights.

This book is like if The Walking Man was about a guy who's kind of an ass was the walking man and instead of walking, he most just wanted to overeat. It's good in that way that Taniguchi is, but it's not among my favorites from his bibliography. Could be the writer. I'm also pretty surprised that this book could generate a nearly 120-episode television series. What a wonderful world!

 

Zeroed Out

by Jim Munroe and Eric Kim (toned by Wai Khan Au, edited by Allison O'Toole)
150 pages
Published by At Bay
ISBN: 199877967X (Amazon)

Probably more than anything Zeroed Out reminds me of one of Oni's mid-Aughts romcoms.⁴4A small selection of these:
• Breakfast After Noon
• A Boy and a Girl
• Cheat
• Hopeless Savages
• Lost At Sea
• Love As A Foreign Language
• Scooter Girl
• Three Days In Europe If you don't remember or weren't there at the time, Oni had a good run of lean romance comics that were a little bit funny, a little bit sad, a little bit up in the sweet ol' smoochies. Serendipitous then that Eric Kim did art on one of them, Love As A Foreign Language, because his presence on Zeroed Out really cements the vibe—and it's a good vibe to cement.

In Zeroed Out we have a soft alien invasion, where the invaders are more just gentrifiers whose only real interest in the planet lie in Earth Foods, which are enjoying a bit of a cosmic flash in popularity, and in return, they're boost our tech and ability to self-actualize, kind of. Most of us are shuffled in into jobs involving livestock. But they are curing cancer and are scheduled to get us shapeshifting real soon.

Our hero is one of the few remaining people working in computers, though it's kind of a George Jetson job. His girlfriend left him for an invader a few months ago and now he's smitten with his manager, an invader themself. Romcom chaos ensues!

It's fun and it's a pleasure to see Kim back on books.

 

Second Shift

by Kit Anderson
160 pages
Published by Avery Hill
ISBN: 1917355203 (Amazon)

Reminiscent of those lonely-employees-in-space stories that have proliferated, but more on the end with Olga Ravn's The Employees or Pip Adam's Audition than, say, the action/adventure/thriller kind—maybe a little like Moon too—Second Shift is about interiority, about the motivation, outlook, and goals of its principle character Birdie Doran.

Birdie, her brother, and a third employee, Porter, are the lone members of a terraforming station on a frozen planet in a remote section of space. Between shifts, they go into mechanically induced hibernation, during which the AI feeds them lessons and stories in dreams (squeezing productivity into every moment of their lives). And while they are awake, the AI tailors their perceptions to keep them happy and productive.

Terracorp is like every other sci-fi corporation, bloated and heartless. One could complain about cliché but for the fact that really only megacorps could fund and benefit from the massive expenditures related to any of these sci-fi operations. And since we know how our comparatively modest real-life megacorps operate in the name of pleasing shareholders, it's less cliché and more just what it means to have megacorps.

All that is slight background to the thoughts and conversations of Birdie and her brother (Porter spends almost the entire book in hibernation)—and the only other person is Station, the local AI who's there to tailor everything to employee needs, which also makes him a potential accomplice to Terracorp.

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Dogsred

by Satorou Noda (translation by John Werry, lettering by Steve Dutro)
7+ vols
Published by Viz
ISBN: 1974748928 (Amazon)

Dogsred is fantastic. It's a sports manga, so if you've read or watched a couple, you know the general terms of the contract, but Noda is so much better and funnier than most cartoonists doing this stuff that Dogsred really sings. I was hooting out laughs, causing my children to ask what was up. ("Nothing! Comics! Let me read!")

Storywise, it's about a genius figure-skater and Olympic hopeful who has a freakout and quits figure skating in a tantrum brought on by stress because mom recently died in an accident when she was driving him to practice and fell asleep at the wheel because she'd been over-doing it for his figure-skating career. Yeah, it's a lot.

Anyway, he and his sister (who got forced out of figure-skating bc his mom only had time/energy to support one of them) move to Hokaido (familiar to Golden Kamuy fans) to live with his grandpa, to a land where hockey is king. Pretty soon, skater lad is into ice hockey and is part of the freshman crew trying to learn the ropes of hockey with the team that has won 20 years in a row—oh, except for last year, when they lost.

What I've left out there is everything that makes the book great, which is the comic timing and most especially Noda's cartooning. His expressions are incredible. I hate reading comics digitally, but I'll come out for this. This will make a fantastic binge once it's in print.

 

Akane-banashi

by Yuki Suenaga and Takamasa Moue (translated by Stephen Paul, lettered by Snir Aharon)
20+ vols
Published by Viz
ISBN: 1974736482 (Amazon)

This one is a fun story. I went in as an interested skeptic but quickly swapped over to an affectionate reader and have swapped personas once again now to anticipatory fan. This is my trajectory with all the best shonen-y sports manga/anime I've ended up loving—e.g. Cross Game, March Comes In Like A Lion, Chihayafuru, Ping Pong, and Run Like The Wind.

It's pretty much a perfect ride through all the rhythms of a shonen sports drama with a bit of the political intrigues of Eagle: The Making Of An Asian-American President for good measure (within the rakugo world, not on the international stage).

Rakugo is the art of traditional Japanese storytelling. It relies on creativity within pretty strict boundaries, not unlike the ancient forms of storytelling in the West (western individualism has long since departed us from valuing that sort of thing, but in the ancients, sticking rigorously to a canon recitation was peak art). As it is, the closest thing we have in the west today is probably musical covers, but even that allows for a lot more leeway in interpretation. Akane-banashi is the story of Akane and her quest to vindicate her father by becoming one of top rakugo performers in Japan (i.e. in the world). The banashi in Akane-banashi means story and is a reference to the four main genre of rakugo performances: shibaibanashi (theatre story), ongyokubanashi (musical story), kaidanbanashi (ghost story), and ninjobanashi (sentimental talk)—so Akane-banashi therefore while meaning "Akane's story," refers more to the hyper-particularized genre of rakugo that will be Akane stories (as sports manga stories tend to emphasize individuation and particularization in a way that bends against the group—e.g. "Play your own kind of [insert sport], Main Character!!").

We don't quite get to see Akane progress from neophyte to rising star because while we begin with her first live performance, she's been trained and training for years, but we do get to watch the ups and downs of her ascendancy. As she slowly rises through the ranks of rakugo performance, we get to see a lot of different styles of storytelling and its fun to see how artist Moue will portray the characters of each genre. The major difficulty Akane-banashi faces is the same encountered in music-forward books like Blue Giant: it's trying to portray a performance that is absolutely dependent on the heard aspect, on the auditory rhythm of the storyteller. It's the reason I've declined reading Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju (even though I loved the television adaptation of it)—it's just so much more fulfilling to watch the show and get to see/hear the intricacies of the performance that are impossible to get through a mere comics page. Recognizing the struggle, Akane-banashi works hard to emphasize other interests and makes particular use of pushing the telling of stories to reflect, react to, and comment on the exterior narrative—usually to decent effect.

The book is a lot of light fun, though it takes a bit to get there, and I'm pretty completely onboard for the rest of the story. This is no Sunday or From Hell or Asterios Polyp. This is summer reading. Lots of drama to eat up. I'd say it struggles in its early volumes to overcome its shonen topos but once the expected vectors have been established or addressed, Akane-banashi allows itself to flourish. I'd guess this growth transition takes about four volumes to begin landing and it's maybe til vol 8 when things start to cook up nicely. It'll never become an Amazing book (nor is it aiming to), but it's a solid piece of entertainment and a fun way to spend a bit of your reading time.

 

The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store

by Tsuchika Nishimura (translated by Jan Cash, lettered by Mercedes McGarry, edited by Linda Lomnbardi)
2 vols
Published by Seven Seas
ISBN: 979-8891602861 (Amazon)

In The Concierge Of Hokkyoku Department Store the reader finds themselves in a turmoil. It's a cozy, warm-hearted book featuring animals in little suits and dresses (adorable) who are extinct (!) and enjoying the capitalist excess that led to their extinction (!!) and served by the species that perpetrated their extinction (!!!). This is explicit in the text, so the tension is not in anyway subversive save for that Nishimura's little story is so charmingly winning that you (and apparently the animals) forget for long moments just what is going on, and so upon remembering you feel like you've keyed into some interpretive subtext when it was really just overtly The Text the whole time.

Anyway, this begins much like Taniguchi's Guardians Of The Louvre, being merely fine, good even, before coming together in its final chapters for a heart-buoying final thrust at what being a good person can look like.

Also: it features animals in little suits and dresses. So!

 

Usagi Yojimbo: Ten Thousand Plums (vol 41)

by Stan Sakai (colored by Hifi Colour Design and Emi Fujii)
160 pages
Published by Dark Horse
ISBN: 1506750702 (Amazon)

My grumpy old man complaints about Usagi Yojimbo moving to color and thereby diminishing the art notwithstanding, Sakai's book continues to be a wonderful collection of warmth-tinged samurai stories. These are always stories about hard lives and oppressive classism and murders and greed and greed and fear, but the inclusion of this ronin wanderer (who only very sometimes finds employment as a yojimbo) always seems to soften the world with uncanny grace. Usagi is humble and noble (in the virtue sense rather than in the class sense; he remains samurai in status, and therefore privileged, but he does not lord this over others, and his status as ronin marks him as despised or at least distrusted, within his caste).

In this forty-first volume of stories, Usagi and current traveling companion Yukichi (his cousin and generally good guy), come upon an orchard of plum trees harassed by a deeply wronged fox spirit seeking vengeance. As usual when encountering a vengeful yokai, Usagi takes up his swords in defense of the citizenry, even when it turns out that they probably deserve everything doled out against them. Always grim to find the monsters are not the monsters advertised but come from a different quarter.

In the volume's other story, Sakai returns to the issue of Christianity in Tokugawa Japan and the shogunate edicts oppressing kakure kirishitan followers (last explored in vol 33, "The Hidden"). Here we find Christians making pilgrimage to a statue of Kannon, who with child have become for them stand-ins for Mary and the natal Christ. And again we find checkpoints where travelers must step on a representation of the holy mother and child to prove their lack of faith. The story ends with a miraculous healing and sacrifice that might appear abrupt in another kind of book, but Usagi Yojimbo has long been a book filled with the supernatural, with demons and ghosts and yokai, so that Christian-coded supernatural events slide right into the world of mystery Sakai's created over the last 40 years.

It's been interesting to see how Sakai has worked his own (presumable) faith into a story about a land of Buddhists and about a character dedicated to bushido. And in the endnotes to the volume, Sakai includes a remembrance for his departed brother, Kenneth, and where we find that this volumes second story is written as a dedication to him and his abiding Christian faith.

 

Ballad For Sophie

by Filipe Melo and Juan Cavia (colored by Juan Cavia, Sandro Pacucci, and 3-page drug sequence by Santiago R. Villa, translated and lettered by Gabriela Soares)
320 pages
Published by Top Shelf
ISBN: 1603094989 (Amazon)

Imagine all the common tropes of stories about musicians:

• an interview with musician at the end of their life as framing device
• high pressure childhood
• talented but not exquisitely talented like...
• hyper-talented rival
• jealousy, envy, betrayal, remorse
• time as street musician
• reinvention as pop musician
• celebrity, wealth, creative bankruptcy
• Drugs!
• NAZIS!!

So imagine how absolutely dull that all sounds and then marvel when Melo and Cavia instead turn in something lovely and enjoyable. Somehow while taking us through all the steps we've seen elsewhere, they still manage to take us somewhere artful and true.

Or maybe I'm just woo'd by Cavia's delightful illustrations.

At any rate, this is a fun story, if you can really call a story full of anger, hopelessness, despair, regret, and self-sabotage "fun"—I think you can because it's ultimately bound up in love. Love of music and a love for people. There's some humor and redemption in there as well, which always cuts the sting of the hurt.

(Also, that they brought on a separate or additional colorist for the 3-page drug sequence is hilarious since the coloring technique looks identical to the rest of the book. Honestly, it would be a pain to color for sure, so maybe it was just an all-hands-on-deck situation.)

 

They Were 11!

by Moto Hagio (translated by Ajani Oloye)
288 pages
Published by Denpa
ISBN: 1634428153 (Amazon)

They Were 11! is a tight little thriller based around hidden identities and undiscovered motivations.

A prestigious interstellar academy is having its entrance exam, a 53-day teamwork-based survival task aboard an abandoned spacecraft. The ten men taking the test hail from different parts of the galaxy and so are biologically and culturally distinct.

Also, there are eleven people on board instead of ten, which immediately throws the entire endeavor into suspicion-buoyed chaos.

The test almost ends right there, but 1) these guys really want to succeed (and only one group of ten will), and 2) bombs just went off and the ship is in peril. Things go on, and the tension and mystery ramps up, and it's great fun.

They Were 11! does a good job of treating its characters, even the super obnoxious ones, humanely and giving them all good motivations for their deceptions, their misleadings, their prevarications. It's a fun series of questions about who people are, who they are perceived to be, and who they perceive themselves to be.

I'm not a big Moto Hagio fan, but I did enjoy this one from 1976.

 

Stop!! Hibari-kun!

by Hisachi Euguchi (translation by Jocelyn Allen, lettered by J. Mai, edited by Patrick Crotty and hazel m.)
3 vols
Published by Peow2
ISBN: 9789187325694 (Peow2)

Alright, so I definitely felt cheated by this one. Don't get me wrong, the book is a delight. But that cover is gorgeous. I was all set to enjoy some book about, I guess, a transgender lady or dude (if in the Princess Jellyfish fashion) who played guitar with some wicked art; and instead, it's kind of like that but the art is very very early '80s shonen manga style. Simple art, simple lines, perfect for weekly deadlines. It's fine. It's great. But that cover had me expecting something else. Something like a not-mopey Solanin, maybe.

But yeah, enough about my expectations. Stop! Hibari-kun is a gag comedy book filled with jokes and pratfalls. It's very funny and I can see why it would earn itself an English-language edition 45 years later. I really enjoyed it but my appetite for comedy books like this is lean. I petered out on Ranma 1/2 for similar reasons, even though I enjoyed my time in it immensely.

 

Slices Of Life

by Qu
303 pages
Published by Bulgihan
ISBN: 9781737130178 (Bulgihan)

Qu's book, Slices Of Life, is beautiful and feels very much kin to the illustrations of Pascal Campion. I wish so badly it didn't have a Swiss bind though. It's a struggle to read comfortably and I've nearly torn the book several times already because of it's pretty-but-hostile binding.

There is no narrative here. The book is a series of one- or two-page explorations of how to play with visual motifs. In one, objects half-dipped in a lake retain their reflected parts when removed from the lake. In another, the bright decorations on umbrellas drip of into the world as the rain drips from the umbrellas. Sometimes the montages are more observational and less fantastic. A glance around a room. Someone peeling fruit with a knife while the season pass. It's all very nice to look at and there's not much more to it.

 

Meat Eaters

by Meredith McLaren (edited by Zack Soto and Megan Brown)
248 pages
Published by Oni
ISBN: 1637157924 (Amazon)

I'm so much a fan of Meredith McLaren's art that I picked up Meateaters despite my longstanding dearth of interest in zombies, werewolves, and vampires. These are not creatures I want to spend any of my narrative time with. And that's fine. But McClaren can get me to look at anything. And her art here is as delightful as ever, such a unique visual voice.

So did this win me over to wanting to read about fantastical grim creature-feature creatures? Nope! But little could. Did I enjoy my time in her book? Yes. It's a fun story about a young woman who wakes up in the woods after a harrowing incident, hale and whole, save for that food tastes like ashes and she doesn't have a heartbeat anymore. Things go from there and it's kind of a comedy horror book that leans a little more into comedy than horror, probably, as she finds community in others like her among the towns citizens.

 

Who Killed Nessie?

by Paul Cornell and Rachael Margot Smith
100 pages
Published by Avery Hill
ISBN: 1917355238 (Amazon)

This is a little zipper of a mystery that's full of light cryptid-centric humor. The Loch Ness Monster has been murdered at the annual cryptid meetup and conference at a hotel, and the hotel's one remaining concierge (the rest of the staff hightailed it for the weekend) is tasked with discovering the murderer. There's lots of clues and red-herrings and a little hidden information and it pretty much works and was fun. Which is the important part.

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