Hope Larson's
All Summer Long is an incredibly charming, subtly complex story about friendship and coming of age, the story of Bina and her lifelong friend Austin, who, as far back as they can remember have spent every summer playing a game where they award themselves "Fun Points" for petting cats, finding change on the sidewalk, going swimming, and otherwise making the most of a long, wonderful summer. Until now.
Paper Girls is the
outstanding Stranger-Things-esque graphic novel series by Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, a tale of time-travel, meddling, war and coming of age whose mind-bending twists and turns
earned it a Hugo nomination this year. Now
Paper Girls 4 is on shelves, and it's time to party like it's 1999.
Peter & Ernesto have a good life: the two sloths sit in their Amazon treetop and make up songs about the animal shapes they see in the clouds. But one day, Ernesto gets it into his head to see
the whole sky, from every place on Earth, and sets out through the jungle.
Lumberjanes is the longrunning, justly beloved kids' graphic novel series about an all-girl summer camp where the campers fight magic monsters, sometimes
are magic monsters, and swear oaths on feminist icons from history; it keeps going from strength to strength, and
Stone Cold, the eighth collection in the series, is no exception!
Hey, LA! Molly "Strong Female Protagonist" Ostertag, Tillie Walden and I are going to be talking with Jen Wang about her amazing, genderqueer middle-grades fairy-tale/graphic novel The Prince and the Dressmaker, tonight at 7PM at Chevalier's Books. Be there or be square!
Read the rest
In honor of the Library of American Comics' publication of
For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library, Vol. 1 (
Volume 2 is out this summer), we are delighted to publish this essay by Lynn Johnston, contemplating the nature of writing a serial for decades and how she might approach her life's work today.
Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre's middle-grades graphic novels
Giants Beware! and
Dragons Beware! are two of my family's favorite books: Rosado and Aguirre's character design, comedic dialog, plotting, and scenarios are so charming, so funny, so overwhelmingly, compulsively
great that we've re-read these dozens of times; now we've got
Monsters Beware, the third volume in the series, where the mysteries of Mont Petit Pierre and the intertwined lives of the huge cast of characters from the previous volumes come together.
In
the first volume of Briggs Land,
DMZ-creator Brian Wood set up a gripping scenario: a leadership struggle in a far-right separatist cult whose leader has languished in prison for decades. Now, in the
second collection Wood and his collaborators are playing out the story for all it's worth.
Beneath the Sugar Sky is the third novella in Seanan McGuire's wonderful Wayward Children series, following from 2016's
Every Heart a Doorway and 2017's
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, chronicling the lives of the children who've accidentally returned from the magical kingdoms they adventured in, who haunt Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children praying that the door to their true homes will return and they can vanish into it forever.
I
love Jen Wang's work: her
debut graphic novel Koko Be Good was thought-provoking and challenging and beautiful; "In Real Life," her
adaptation of my story Anda's Game took the tale to places that delighted and surprised me -- today, Firstsecond publishes
The Prince and the Dressmaker, which I believe will be her breakout graphic novel.
In 2016, Victoria Jamieson won the prestigious Newberry Honor Award for
Roller Girl, a beautiful, moving, hilarious middle-grades graphic novel about friendship, girlhood and roller-derby; her 2017 followup
All's Faire in Middle School will delight everyone who loved
Roller Girl with a tale of Ren Faire, misfits, forgiveness and resilience.
Saga is
the best space opera in comics, a masterpiece of serial storytelling from Fiona Staples and Brian K Vaughan, whose character designs -- a cross between Vaughn Bode and the Mos Eisley Cantina -- and fearless war-scenes combine with masterful cliff-hanger storytelling to weave a tale that hurts even as it makes you bellow with laughter.
The eighth collection in the series ships today and the story shows no sign of slowing down.
Lumberjanes is
the hilarious,
sweet,
exciting series of graphic novels created by Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis and Brooke Allen and energized by a roster of brilliant collaborators. The latest collection,
Lumberjanes Vol. 7: A Bird's-Eye View, is a delight to read, brought a tear to my eye, and features intergenerational conflict, giant mythological birds, some great genderbending, and a whole menagerie of superpowered, supernatural kittens.
When Princess Harriet Hamsterbone was born, her royal parents naturally didn't invite the evil fairy, and so of course the evil fairy cursed her to prick herself on a hamster wheel on her twelfth birthday and die; and of course the three good fairies softened the curse -- and that's where things get really
funny in Ursula Vernon's 2015 middle-grades fantasy
Hamster Princess: Harriet the Invincible, the first in a wildly successful series.
Wildstorm started life as an independent, creator-owned comics universe of enormous verve and originality; following its acquisition by comics behemoth DC in 1998, it grew moribund, leading to its shuttering in 2010. Now it's back, in a revival helmed by Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis, who has reimagined the complex geopolitics of this paranoid superspy/shadow government/black ops world into a brutally fast-paced, dynamic tale that's full of real bad guys and ambiguous good guys who may or may not be trustworthy. The first six issues are collected in
The Wild Storm Vol. 1, out this week.
Drawn & Quarterly has a new edition of Lynda Barry’s coming-of-age novella, The Good Times are Killing Me
Young Edna Arkins lives in a neighborhood that is rapidly changing, thanks to white flight from urban Seattle in the late 1960s. As the world changes around her, Edna is exposed to the callous racism of adults―sometimes subtle and other times blatant, but always stinging. By weaving the importance of music in adolescence with the forbidden friendship between Edna, who is white, and Bonna Willis, who is Black, Lynda Barry captures the earnest, awkward, yet always honest adolescent voice as perfectly in prose as she does in comics.
The publisher kindly gave us permission to run Barry’s afterword. Enjoy!
Seattle photo: MILKOVÍ Read the rest
