psocoptera

Drome, Jesse Lonergan, 2025 graphic. Stunning fantasy epic that blew me away with what it did with color and formal structure. Lonergan establishes a five by seven grid of square panels and then combines and subverts them in fascinating ways, bringing the gutters in to become motion lines and new divisions. The comic opens with an invocation of the four colors of printing, cyan magenta yellow and black, in a creation of the world sequence, and returns to that in a very meta way in the climax. There is *so much* going on in the character and world design and paneling and the way panels act as both time and space and the use of negative space and callbacks to sword-and-sorcery comics and retro superhero costuming and amazing vivid action sequences and mythological weight (no spoilers but there was definitely some "wait, is this... ??", except not exactly). Funny moments and touching moments and sometimes actually manages to hit larger-than-life heroic grandeur. But really it comes back to the art. Everyone else is writing free verse and this thing is a villanelle. Damn.

So, if Drome has catapulted its way to the top of my Hugo graphic nominations, where does that leave the rest of the list. To recap, I have read: The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, Second Shift, In the Land of Simplicity, Flip, The Other Jay & Eve, Who Killed Nessie?, Testament, A Song for You & I, Strange Bedfellows, part of A Garden of Spheres, and Drome. From which I guess, picking in more or less favorite order, I want to nominate: Drome, Nefarious Nights, Flip, Testament, and then... maybe Song? for the last slot? Or maybe Simplicity has more of a shot at the ballot, and it would be neat to get that on? Hmmm.

A Song for You & I, K. O'Neill, 2025 graphic. Beautifully drawn and colored coming-of-age fantasy in which a pegasus-riding trainee ranger befriends a violin-playing shepherd and mutual personal growth ensues. Quiet, simple, and lovely, perfect for fans of Kiki's Delivery Service or maybe Blue Delliquanti's Across a Field of Starlight.

Strange Bedfellows, Ariel Slamet Ries, 2025 graphic. Also YA; a college dropout in a good-future space colony ("utopian" feels more laden than I want to say here) develops a late-blooming superpower to bring things from his dreams into reality, including his high school crush. A terrific premise that didn't always work for me, especially reading it right after Song for You & I. They're very similar books at the core - two young people whose interaction helps each of them figure out what's holding them back - but felt very different to read, in a couple of ways.

Song is, like I mentioned, beautiful - it's set in a medieval-ish world that values harmony with nature, and drawn with a lot of attention and panel space given to scenery, from big vistas to close-ups of specific birds or plants, Miyazaki-style, a slow detailed richness of the world around the characters that gives the characters more emotional weight. Very peaceful and relaxing to read. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is in a very busy high-tech future, and the art reflects that - crowded pages, crowded panels, crowd scenes, a couple of different ensembles of secondary characters, inclusion of text elements like search results and chats and social media (some of which was so low-contrast I skimmed over it rather than squinting to read every word). An effective match of content and style - but *a lot*, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming.

And then also, Song is very, very chaste - the big romantic climax is a kiss on the cheek - which felt reasonable for the Miyazaki-like tone and possibly middle-grade audience. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is also weirdly chaste, with a Big Deal being made out of a couple of kisses, and... it just felt off to me? Like, yes, Not Everything Has To Be Porn, but something felt infantilizing to me about the way the relationships of these nominally college-aged young adults were rendered suitable for a younger-YA audience. Dreams are such fertile territory for the weird, the disturbing, the unsanitized, the id, but here they're pastel, quirky, dragons and unicorns. There was a one-off line about the idea of making out with your own dream-projection being masturbatory that felt particularly prudish, like, what's wrong with that, exactly? I'm sure not everybody would immediately fuck their dream of their high school crush if they projected that dream into reality but would a twenty-year-old really be scandalized by the *idea*? It felt like the kind of pearl-clutching neo-puritanism you sometimes get on Tumblr, the "there is s*x here MINORS LOOK AWAY" nonsense, and I think I personally would have found this book more interesting if it was a little more visceral. Get some horniness into those dreams, and a little horror too, maybe, or a more adult take on the whole idea, generally. Made me really appreciate that Simplicity and Other Jay & Eve didn't shy away from sex (and in the case of Simplicity, some very non-pastel dreams about desire and monsters from the id). I mean, there's nothing wrong with Young Adult! Every book its reader! I just thought it was a neat story (it was a neat story, a nice satisfying plot) and I would have liked it if it was catering a little bit more to me. :)

ETA: Also I'm fascinated by the way Song and Bedfellows and Flip all use climactic or major-turning-point dance sequences to convey intimacy and joyous catharsis. Something about how the silence and stillness of the comics page leaves a big space for the reader to "complete the scene" filling in the implied music and motion thus heightening the emotional impact from that reader investment, I don't know.

A Garden of Spheres, Linnea Sterte, 2025 graphic. I read maybe 100-120 pages of this and it was very pretty but I had no idea what was going on and I felt disconnected rather than intrigued. I don't mind slow and I don't mind having to work a little but I think I need a little more of a thread to follow. :/

I still hope for another round of Annual Take Advantage Of My Best Friend's Comic Purchasing Day, but in my first pass at sitting in her living room and reading her books, I enjoyed:

The Other Jay & Eve, Emma Jayne, 2025 graphic. What if you and your roommate got duplicated for money and then you met up with your duplicates and then you found out they were *engaged*. An obviously instantly compelling premise with good execution, although I initially felt like it didn't reach a satisfying conclusion, but on further reflection I think it worked, and definitely worthwhile overall.

Who Killed Nessie?, Paul Cornell and Rachel Smith, 2025 graphic. A murder mystery at a convention for mythological creatures, which one newbie hotel worker has been left by her coworkers to staff. Fun premise and a bunch of the joke made me laugh.

Testament, J. Marshall Smith, 2025 graphic. A nun and a caretaker robot, the last survivors of a one-way mission of planetary exploration, contemplate their situation. This is exactly the sort of thing I like - space nuns, quiet sad thinky stuff about how space exploration might really work and who would do it and what it would be like, beautifully illustrated alien biology. Recommended to fans of To Be Taught If Fortunate, Scavengers Reign, and maybe anyone who remembers whatever that Robert L. Forward novel with the one-way mission was.

Flip, Ngozi Ukazu, 2025 graphic novel. I started this once and didn't get very far but I started it again and I guess just had to be in the right mood because I was really into it. A body-swap story about a Nigerian-American scholarship girl at a ritzy private school with a crush on a rich white boy. Ukazu does great work with her expressive, appealing faces (she's the author of Check Please, and it's neat to see her bringing the style and skills she developed there to this new project) and tells a solid story with some funny and touching moments. Are we going to get this onto the Hugo ballot? Probably not, but is it way better than at least half the likely ballot? Heck yeah.

Realized the other day that rather than sitting around waiting for my intrepid graphic-novel-reading friend to tell me what 2025 graphic novels I should be reading, I could seek some out myself. Unfortunately I did not love either of these for Hugo purposes, and neither had the kind of breakout awesome that might be able to compete with inevitable frontrunners Prestige DC Cape Project, Adaptation of Classic Novel, and Latest Kieron Gillen, but it's still interesting to me to see a little bit of what's up in the adult SF graphic novel space.

Second Shift, Kit Anderson, 2025 graphic from Avery Hill, is about workers on a distant planet and the corporate AI that provides them with perception overlays and entertainments. I have to admit I do not love "but what is really real" plots even while I concede that this is an increasingly relevant theme in the age of bespoke AI slop. Also this book is oblique to the point of not really landing for me. I know from my own writing experience that sometimes I am thinking "surely I don't need to spell this out, that would be boring", but it's always more obvious inside your own head when you already know what you're trying to say, and I feel like this story could have used a little less trailing off and a little more actually saying things.

In the Land of Simplicity: A Novel, Mattie Lubchansky, 2025 graphic from Pantheon Books, is a near-future story about an anthropologist visiting a backwoods commune in post-United-States New York. An interesting contrast to Second Shift in that there is also some "what is real" stuff happening but it turns out to be clearer cut and more explained, and also a contrast in positing a possibility of resistance and escape from the corporation that Second Shift doesn't. And it was interesting to see how they both used the idea of the museum in different ways. Unfortunately, while it was at least clear in this book *what* was happening, I didn't really buy into it in a "this is a satisfying narrative" way. I hate to not love a queer book! I do like the way Lubchansky writes/draws about transness and bodies! And no blame to Lubchansky for not wanting to write a tragedy! But the improbability of the end, especially the bigger story we're asked to believe took place off the page, kind of undermined for me the personal character story the book is mostly about. But, I don't know. I guess it's a tonal fit. Maybe I'm too picky. Enh.

The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, Shaenon K. Garrity and Christopher Baldwin, 2025 YA SFF graphic novel. Sequel to The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, and despite opening with a charming little recap, I think you will want to have read that one to appreciate this one. If you have read that one you know it was delightful and this one is as well - fun new characters and an expansion of the premise, some excellently silly moments, Baldwin's adorable art, great stuff.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way, written by Ryan North, art by Chris Fenoglio, 2024 graphic novel. I tricked myself out of Hugos hooky by reading this book not on my own voting behalf but on the theory of just looking into it to see if I thought someone else should bother, and then it was fun and I got hooked and it was a nice evening's read. Cute and clever take on the choose-your-own-adventure format, satisfying story, worked for me even though I don't know the slightest thing about Lower Decks (but I do know TOS/TNG decently well and there were a lot of references). And now I suppose I might as well take a look at the rest of the graphic category, maybe, hm.

The Girl from the Sea, Molly Knox Ostertag, 2021 YA graphic novel. Selkie story, not for losers. (Sorry.) Cute and sweet story about a closeted high school girl having a summer romance, coming out to her family and friends, and finding solutions other than eco-terrorism to a local ecological problem, what's not to like.

Young Hag and the Witches' Quest, Isabel Greenberg, 2024 YA graphic fantasy, or possibly I mean middlegrade. Arthurian, but mostly centered on an original character and taking place after Arthur's death, with flashbacks being told as stories within the story that mostly focus on the female characters. I enjoy seeing people find new directions to take the Matter of Britain and I thought this was a good one. Also it was funny and made me laugh out loud a couple of times, and Greenberg has a really interesting art style, kind of intentionally childlike and sometimes scribbly, but really expressive. (And nice use of a limited color palate, and some neat scenery stuff with standing stones and a river, and a cute and funny baby.) I had Hugo-nominated this on the chance that I would end up wanting to have done that, and, yay, I did, good call past me.

Also I ended up reading this book partly on Hoopla and partly on paper (with reading glasses! they work!) which meant I could do a direct comparison of which felt like a smoother/easier reading experience. Digital comics interfaces have come a long way - Hoopla will show you the page, then each panel so you can read it, then the page again, and only got confused about panel order on a couple of two-page spreads - but I tried timing myself reading 20 pages each way and it was still faster for me to read on paper. (With reading glasses, because the lettering here is small.) It's useful to know that the Hoopla interface is a workable way for me to read comics, though!

The Deep Dark, Molly Knox Ostertag, 2024 YA graphic novel. I was hooked on this as soon as I picked it up and ended up reading it in one sitting once I got my hands on a library copy. A reunion with a childhood friend and a supernatural secret and a nicely-realized near Joshua Tree setting and a sweet F/F romance. I really enjoyed Ostertag's art - mostly black and white with some excellent use of spot color, switching to full color for flashbacks and similar purposes. One particular sequence was just - wow. The pacing and plot were all very well done too; Ostertag did some neat stuff to help us track the passage of time (ranging from setting the story around the winter holidays to showing time and day stamps on cellphones) and wove the various plot threads together in a really satisfying way. I'm definitely adding this to my Hugo Graphic ballot!

Went over to C&G's house for the now-traditional (in that we've done it twice) discussion of potential Hugo nominees and opportunity for me to browse/skim/read in their graphic novel collection. I was reminded that Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe is series-eligible (and I want to nominate it even though I haven't read the most recent installment yet; I've enjoyed a bunch of them and I'm sure I'll get there eventually) and that Sacha Lamb's The Forbidden Book counts as a YA.

Some comics:

When I Arrived at the Castle, Emily Carroll. I like Carroll's work but this was just too surreal and oblique, over the line for me into my not being able to make heads or tails of it at all. :(

Plain Jane and the Mermaid, Vera Brosgol. I'm a long-time Brosgol fan (going back to Return to Sender) and this was cute and fun and delightful and I'm adding it to my nominations.

Young Hag and the Witches' Quest, Isabel Greenberg. This has gone onto the to-read list but I wanted to mention the exciting new experience I had of picking up a comic and finding the text was too small for me to read comfortably. :( Hoopla tells me my library's collective daily borrow limit will reset at midnight and I'm hoping I can read it in my browser and just embiggen it as much as I want. Plan B involves my reading glasses, which I have hitherto only used for sewing.

The Deep Dark, Molly Ostertag. I read the first ~30 pages of this and I am *so hooked*.

I Shall Never Fall in Love, Hari Conner, 2024 graphic romance. A queer loose retelling of Emma and an absolute delight. Gorgeously drawn with appealing, expressive faces and beautiful, detailed, thoroughly researched costuming and settings. We're still Regency here but the Knightley character is nonbinary/transmasc and Conner has thought very hard about what kind of masculine-leaning clothing choices someone in that position might be able to get away with in what settings, and in what circumstances they could go further. The romances were lovely, the central one was just delicious but the secondary ones were nicely done too. The art reminded me a bit of Baldwin's work in Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, or maybe Dylan Meconis's in Queen of the Sea, although a richer/less limited color palate. Highly recommended if you like romance at all.

Sacred Bodies, Ver, 2024 graphic work. This is a 55-page full-color comic about a human person and a giant bird-person person who get married for ritual reasons and then have to figure out what that means for them. It is really good and interestingly speculative around topics of what is taboo/exploration of taboo. Kinky or maybe kink-adjacent; content notes for nudity and violence. Purchasable online here, or if you are a Hugo nominator I personally know who thinks they might be interested in it as a 2024 graphic work, especially if you are a Hugo nominator from whom I frequently borrow books, I'd be happy to share my PDF for that purpose.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 2, Emil Ferris, 2024 graphic novel. I've been waiting for this (and sometimes not believing I would ever see it) since I read the first one six years ago. I definitely still recommend them both (and not just because I would like someone to book-club them with me, although, *please*), and would specifically recommend re-reading the first one before diving into this one - I did and was very glad I did, there's a *lot* going on here, and you'll want as much of it fresh in your mind as possible.

Spoilery discussion behind the cut. ( Read more... )

The Witches of World War II, written by Paul Cornell, art by Valeria Burzo. This was neat - an alternate history in which Rudolf Hess's (real-life) flight to Glasgow was the result of manipulation by a team of (real-life) British occultists. I enjoy this kind of alternate history, and I like a good con story, and I liked the interplay and tension between belief and con-artistry, both between different people and internally. I also liked that I could tell and keep track of who everyone was, which is sometimes tricky with artists doing a more-realistic style, and great fun was being had with one character's devil-horns hairstyle.

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons, Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott. I was not enthusiastic about this - oh look, I thought, it's this year's obligatory big two entry, at least there's only one this year. I was so wrong! This was terrific! Epic story, gorgeous art, does interesting things with canon. Perhaps I should have considered from the start that Kelly Sue DeConnick is a more interesting writer than Tom King.

Bea Wolf, Zach Weinersmith, art by Boulet. Cute concept, but seems very much like the kind of project that was more fun to do than it is to read. At least, I found it tedious, skimming through silently in one sitting - I can imagine it might work better as a readaloud, read to kids chapter by chapter. (I tried reading Q the first page and we agreed it seemed to work that way. If he was younger or we were all stuck on a road trip or something, maybe. But not really something I'm looking to do at this time.) Some fun panels art-wise.

I talked about Shubeik Lubeik here.

Saga Vol 11 - I was such a big Saga fan in the early years (that breastfeeding cover! I was sold!) but I did not miss Saga when it went away for a few years and I was not eager to see it when it came back (in fact last year's Graphic ballot was so generally uninteresting that I had forgotten whether Saga 10 was on it or not) and I think at this point I can liberate myself from feeling obligated by further Saga.

Similarly, Three Body Problem seems to be everywhere - two different television series, and this comic adaptation (and also apparently a movie, an animated series, and a series animated in Minecraft?) - and I just don't feel like I need to read or watch any of it.

My ballot behind the cut: ( Read more... )

I packed a bag of books for the drive home from the eclipse, including several graphic novels I've been meaning to start/finish/post about, of which I ended up reading two:

Bunt!, by Ngozi Ukazu and Mad Rupert, about an art student who forms a softball team for financial-aid reasons. Cute, fun ensemble cast. I never managed to make Avant Guards happen as a Yuletide fandom but this could totally be a Yuletide fandom in exactly the same way.

Artie and the Wolf Moon, Olivia Stephens. Werewolf middlegrade (or maybe young YA). Nicely done - well paced, well drawn, good balance of flashbacks/backstory and present day.

So, my friend heroically read, like, three dozen graphic novels this year looking for stuff she might want to nominate for the Hugos (so, SFF, adult rather than YA/middlegrade, non-superhero), and then I sat down today with the stack of her five favorites to see how much graphic novel I could read before either a) my eyes fell out of my head or b) I had to go pick up my kid. It was b, and it was three of the five. All of which I would now like to rec!

A Guest in the House, Emily Carroll. I thought this one was already on my to-read list but apparently I had failed to actually put it there despite knowing I wanted to read it? People may know Carroll from some online horror comics works like His Face All Red. Guest in the House is a Gothic set in Ontario in the 80s (or 90s? I can't remember which) - young wife comes to her new husband's lake house and discovers mystery re his first wife. Carroll is a master of giving just enough to feel like you've been told a story and leaving enough to end on a note of "oh holy shit", and this book is very much that.

Carmilla: The First Vampire, Amy Chu and Soo Lee. This one was definitely set in the 90s! I know nothing about the original Carmilla but in this one, a young Chinese-American social worker is looking into the deaths of some young women and becomes aware of both the original Carmilla book and a person of that name who may be involved. Some twists I did not expect and some solid character work - probably my least favorite of these three, but it's well done, and the end opens up some sequel/spin-off possibilities that I would definitely read if Chu and Lee decided to write more of them.

Shubeik Lubeik, Deena Mohamed. I have to admit that I skimmed some of this and read parts out of order because I was running out of time, but I absolutely loved it. A world where wishes are real, with some top-notch worldbuilding around that, and a sort-of-semi-anthology structure around a man in possession of three wishes and the people who end up using them. Funny, biting, sometimes deeply moving even despite my skimming. I have an abandoned opening-and-notes for a world-with-wishes story, so it was so exciting to see someone else doing something related (and much different and better than I was going to. I mean, mine was just USian and this is in Cairo and has a lot about how Islam might view wishes, just to start with). Does anyone else remember that Will McIntosh novel with the spheres, Burning Midnight? Highly recommended to fans of that (well, the first half of that, you know what I mean if you've read it), and fans of Sandman. Oh, and fans of great black-and-white art - there is some splash color but it's mostly black and white, and Mohamed does some interesting stuff with low-key stylistic variation that I would have needed more time to really think about but helped organize the narrative. I hope they give it the Eisner, but I can't vote for that, so I'll at least try to give it the Hugo...

I guess any three points define a triangle, but in this case it must be a pretty big triangle, because gosh these are three extremely unrelated books (related only in that I happened to finish all three today).

The Awakened Kingdom is NK Jemisin's 2014 post-Inheritance-trilogy novella that I somehow misread as being a 2024 work and moved to the upper ranks of my reading list before I realized. I don't *think* I ever read it in 2014? It was fine. Bit heavy-handed - Jemisin seemed determined to hit us over the head with the point to a degree that actually took me out of the story somewhat - but it reminded me how much I liked the trilogy, and I thought it was a neat epilogue.

Slippery Creatures, KJ Charles. The first book in of one of Charles' many historical-romance trilogies. This one is a working-class soldier home from WWI and an aristocrat and there is ~espionage~. I somehow still haven't binge-read everything Charles ever wrote, but gosh I eat this stuff up. I feel like the aristocrat character here might be exploring some Peter Wimsey-adjacent territory (if you had a Wimsey who was actually gay, I mean, not just sometimes gay on AO3).

The Mysteries, Bill Watterson and John Kascht. 2023 picture book. Let's be real: I would not have been especially interested in this if it didn't have Watterson's name on it, and, having read it, I think my biggest takeaway was "huh, I guess I'm glad Watterson is still out there exploring as an artist". Something like 35 two-page spreads, where the lefthand page has a sentence, and the righthand page has a black-and-white illustration, which I guess are a mix of photographs of sculptures (Kascht) and drawing (Watterson). The story is an ambiguous and inconclusive fable; you could read it a few different ways. I didn't, on a first read, find any of them hugely compelling or memorable (although who knows, occasionally something ends up staying with me much more than I would have guessed from the initial impact), but it was a fine little interval of contemplation. (Not comics but I'm tagging for comics because I might later think that's how I would have tagged it...)

Fence: Disarmed, Sarah Rees Brennan, another tie-in novel for the Fence comic series. I think I've fallen a bit behind on the comics - there's a volume 5 I haven't read (and then a volume 6 coming out in Jan 2024) - but I didn't feel like I was particularly missing anything. I thought this was fun - I liked it more than the previous one, maybe because I was now more used to SRB's writing of them, or maybe because it was a better plot concept, or maybe because everyone has been allowed to grow up a little bit. Some good moments for everybody but most especially Seiji and Nicholas, <3.

(Note: this is not a comic, but I'm tagging for comics to make it easier to find again.)

Hidden Systems, Dan Nott, 2023 graphic nonfiction. A comic about infrastructure, specifically internet, electrical grid, and water systems. Really good! A fast easy read with some stuff I knew and some stuff I didn't - I did not know about the influence of WWII on utility interconnection, or just how many dams there are. (I definitely would have guessed wrong about whether more new dams were built in the US between 1920 and 1950 or 1950 and 1980. 10K vs 40K apparently!) I was hoping Q would read it since he's been interested in electricity and solar power, but it couldn't compete with videogames and YouTube, I guess. Definitely recommended to other kids or adults. People who have read Scott McCloud might enjoy how much it sounded like "Scott McCloud voice", to me - like there's a certain cadence of how the text is spread over the panels. I dunno, maybe all graphic nonfiction sounds like that, I don't read that much of it. I guess what would be interesting would be to find some nonfiction comics from *before* Understanding Comics, and see how they read in comparison.

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Entries tagged with comics

one more graphic novel, and picking some graphic novels

more graphic novels

some graphic novels

Flip

Second Shift and Simplicity

The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor

Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way

The Girl from the Sea

Young Hag and the Witches' Quest

The Deep Dark

Extremely Local Comic Books Day

I Shall Never Fall in Love

Sacred Bodies

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 2

2024 Hugo graphic novels

2x graphic

2023 graphic novel recs!

any three points

Fence: Disarmed

Hidden Systems