In this lively and fun comic book-inspired novel, Mike Chen explores the humanity of superheroes, and supervillains, in a creative and comic spin on superhero tropes.
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California Comics Publishers Are Rising Up
California is an important center for comics publishing.
PW talked with Legendary Comics based in Burbank, Boom! Studios and Humanoids in Los Angeles, IDW in San Diego, and Viz Media in San Francisco.
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Now Available: Native American Graphic Novel
How can we recollect tragedy without eulogizing it? Can acts of artistic reinterpretation reveal the fluidity of history, memory, and collective mythology? Written, illustrated, and published by Native American artists,
Ghost River reimagines an event that transformed colonial Pennsylvania from the perspective of the Indigenous Peoples at the center of the story.
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Review: Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera and Celia Moscote
This lively graphic adaptation of Rivera’s acclaimed YA novel (with art by cartoonist Moscote), presents the story of Juliet Milagros Palante, a 19 year-old baby dyke from the Bronx, N.Y. with a secret long-distance girlfriend, who is trying to figure out how to come out to her Puerto Rican family.
Review: Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale by Tim Fielder
Fielder’s epic graphic novel introduces ancient African warload Aja Oba, who is cursed with immortality by a vengeful concubine. Now a mythic literary presence, Oba reappears throughout history, turning up as a slave in America, an urban folk hero, and interplanetary explorer, in a reimagination of the history of genre storytelling transformed by an unkillable Black presence.
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Review: 
What the Font?! A Manga Guide to Western Typeface by Kuniichi Ashiya
This delightful manga transforms typefaces into quirky human personalities that connect with the characteristics of the fonts. A young designer learns that Helvetica is highly versatile, that Ariel, a Helvetica knockoff, is shy about her origins, and that Futura, often used by NASA, is well, kind of spacey. A charming manga that doubles as a real reference guide.
- The Price of Existing: The Millions’s Marie Myung-Ok Lee examines three novels and a volume of poetry by four contemporary Korean women authors and connects their literary evocation of unrelenting sexism, predatory males, and a culture of pervasive misogyny to the recent Jeffrey Toobin “incident” on a zoom call. “These novels share a depressing commonality of women ground down or driven “crazy” by an unescapable patriarchy where misogyny is not just baked in, but baked into older women’s (i.e., the in-laws) non-support of the younger.”
- Wakanda In Outer Space: Acclaimed author and comics writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ is back to writing Black Panther and his new run on the series (with art by Daniel Acuña and Ryan Bodenheim) will be released in February 2021. In the new series, T-Challa The Black Panther returns to earth after discovering a war-like alternate Wakanda empire in the far reaches of the galaxy and joining a rebellion against it.
- Talking Gender and Race in Comics: Professor LatinX, aka pop culture scholar Frederick Luis Aldama’s YouTube video series, interviews fellow academic Francesca Lyn, associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, about her research into the comics works of such women of color creators as MariNaomi, Lynda Barry, and Belle Yang, and talks with Lyn about her love of the comics of such creators as Gabrielle Bell and much more.
- We Need Diverse Superheroes: WNDB communications manager Alaina Lavoie interviews French cartoonist Mirion Malle about her new YA graphic novel, The League of Super Feminists (D&Q), a clever guide to understanding key tenets of feminism, consent, media literacy, intersectionality, body image and much more, wonderfully disguised as a funny superhero graphic novel for tweens and teens.
- Art, Africa, and Abstraction: Nigerian American abstract painter Odili Donald Odita will be interviewed by Nigerian art curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi online on November 20 at 6:30pm EST as part of BOMB magazine’s Oral History Project, an ongoing series of one-on-one interviews with visual artists of African descent. Follow the link to RSVP for the livestream.
This Week on the More to Come Podcast
This week on
More To Come’s Stargazing feature Calvin talks with
PW graphic novel reviews editor Meg Lemke about three books with starred reviews: Allie Brosh’s methodically wacky autobio
Solutions and Other Problems, Ryan North and Albert Monteys’s dazzling adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel
Slaughterhouse-Five, and Tomi Ungerer’s grotesque social satire
The Party. More
Based on South African historian Koni Benson’s PhD thesis, Crossroads: I Live Where I Like is a thoroughly researched, stylishly illustrated graphic history focused on the struggles of a group of courageous South African women who fought the apartheid government’s destruction of informal settlements such as Crossroads, a section of Cape Town, during the 1970s. Benson teamed with the cartooning brothers André Trantaal and Nathan Trantaal, and designer Ashley E. Marais, to create the work, which also includes a foreword by UCLA historian Robin D.G. Kelley. Benson interviewed more than 60 people who were part of the Crossroads resistance and the book profiles key personalities as well as the ongoing challenges presented by South Africa’s violent racist, colonial and apartheid past. This 8-page excerpt opens in 1978 after the Crossroads settlement has been brutally raided by the police. Undaunted, the women of Crossroads come together and stage a play called Infuduso (which means exodus in the isiXhosa language) that featured actual Crossroads residents onstage telling the story of their fight for housing and the fight against the racist policies of the South African government. Crossroads: I Live Where I Like: A Graphic History by Koni Benson, André Trantaal, Nathan Trantaal, and Ashley E. Marais, will be published by PM Press in February 2021. Click the image above to view the full excerpt.
