House Cat: Inspirational Interiors & The Elegant Felines Who Call Them Home by Paul Barbera with Rafael Waack. Thames & Hudson, 2024. 9781760764036. 240pp. This is a follow-up to Barbera’s Where They Purr features US cats (and interiors). In his introduction he calls out Lady Penelope as one of his favorite subjects — there’s a reproduction of Sputnik in the living room of her place, a penthouse in New York City’s financial district that also includes an adult-sized slide, a lamp that looks like a small horse, and the coolest place for a cat to take a nap I’ve ever seen. My favorite space is the one in Chelsea, New York, that’s filled with more books and cats (three) than my wife would ever allow. The shelves are amazing, but so are the stacks of books that seem to function as furniture. Amen. Includes a visual table of contents featuring cats, plus a number of photos of each interior/cat habitat, words describing the space and its occupants (ranging from one to nine in number), and a Q&A about the cat(s) in that chapter.

The First Cat In Space Ate Pizza by Mac Barnet and Shawn Harris. Katerine Tegen Books, 2022. 9780063084094. 316pp. There’s trouble with the moon — rats from another galaxy are eating it. It’s time to activate Project 47, a very special cat who is humanity’s last hope. This is a beautifully drawn adventure full of unexpected encounters. It seems like it’s going to be mad science, but then it becomes a total fantasy complete with moon royalty, monsters, and a charming, toe-clipping robot encountered as our hero travels from the Land of Cheerfulness to the dark side of the moon, where the rats have built their fortress. Buy it for a kid you really like, but read it before you give it to them.  

One Giant Leap by Thao Lam. Owlkids, 2024. 9781771475990. A space adventure inspired by that feeling you might remember from when you were a kid when you were so dressed up for winter you felt like an astronaut. Lam’s paper illustrations always astound me, and this book reminded me of long-forgotten snowstorms.   Slug in Love by Rachel Bright, illustrated by Nadia Shireen. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2021. 9781665900461. Doug is a friendly slug who needs a hug, but no one is interested. Then he meets a snail named Gail. (Spoiler: things don’t work out, then they do.) I’ve had a bad week, and this was exactly what I needed to read this morning.   You Broke It! by Liana Finck. Rise x Penguin Workshop, 2024. 9780593660409. This is a fun collection of what are essentially one-panel comics featuring problematic parents yelling at their kids. From her bio at the back of the dust jacket: “[Finck] is thrilled by the opportunity to use her adult privilege to validate children everywhere in this, her first children’s book!” Buy it for the adult in your life who needs a quick laugh at themselves and for the kids who know they’re right at least some of the time.

Duel written by Jessixa Bagley, illustrated by Aaron Bagley. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2023. 9781534496545. 316pp. including an author’s note by Jessixa, photos of her family and her fencing, and a look at the art process Aaron used to create the book. It’s Lucy’s first day at Butler Middle School, and she’s worried about a lot of things but none more than running into her sister Gigi, an eighth grader and the top fencer on the school’s team. In the cafeteria their paths cross, Gigi is mean and trips Lucy, and so Lucy pulls out her foil and challenges Gigi to a duel. They both end up in the principal’s office. Their mother is called in. And soon the entire school is buzzing, waiting to see the sisters have their bout. (Their father taught them both to fence, and they haven’t had a good relationship since he died a few years ago. Their mother is struggling and has been dealing with her own grief.)) Each chapter opens with a marked-up page from a book on fencing that explains the sport a bit. These pages are some of my favorites, though I loved everything about this book. (I never fenced, but once upon a time I didn’t get along well with one of my own sisters…)

Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham. Pantheon, 2023. 9780593316696. 296pp. Seymour, a film editor, sells a script for what feels like a 70s grindhouse-type movie and then gets a chance to direct it. The production is out of control and there are budgetary problems. Seymour’s marriage is also in trouble. But enough about that, the plot details seem unimportant. What I think you need to know is that the story is adult, the is a true novel among graphic novels, and every element feels perfect: the pacing, the illustrations, the layouts, the lettering. Several comics folks told me to check out Harkham’s work, and I’ve been reading bits and pieces of this book in Crickets and Kramer’s Ergot for more than a decade; they were enjoyable, but it was more than worth the wait to read it in a single volume.

Juliette or, the Ghosts Return in the Spring by Camille Jourdy. Translated by Aleshia Jensen. Drawn & Quarterly, 2023. 9781770466647. Juliette returns home for a not-quite vacation, to deal with her anxiety. It’s unclear why she thinks spending time with her family might help. Her sister Marylou is struggling to balance her two kids, life with her husband, and an ongoing affair. (She frequently meets the young man she’s sleeping with in the greenhouse in her backyard. He owns a lot of animal costumes.) Their aging parents annoy them both in different ways. Juliette meets Polux, who seems interested in more than friendship, and who adopts a duckling to impress her. The book is about the interaction of all of these characters, and it all feels organic, personal, and compelling. Jourdy’s soft colors and panel-less borders make everyone in the book seem more human and their emotions more subtle. Juliette makes me think of Michel Rabagliati’s Paul books because they’re all about family and the people in it, though the families are not at all similar. I’m still pondering the image on the copyright page, under the book’s dedication, “Thank You to Émile.” It’s a female garden gnome facing me, having opened her coat, flashing the reader. I’m not sure how this sets the tone for the graphic novel, but it made me laugh.

Adherent by Chris W. Kim. Conundrum, 2023. 9781772620825. Adherent is set in a quiet, post-apocalyptic world where folks survive, at least in part, by scavenging the leftovers of our civilization. A group finds an abandoned cabin in the woods, and it’s full of writing which they take home in case it’s useful. It captivates Em, who reads all the pages — it’s just the writer’s observations and feelings — and then wants to see the cabin where they were found. After that she sets off after the writer, to find her and talk to her about her work. This is a story of bibliographic obsession, and I enjoyed it for that. It’s also about the power and value of books, civilization, and the distrust of strangers (which doesn’t do anyone much good). I loved the way Kim’s wordless pages establish the setting, both its landscape and soundscape.

Totem by Laura Pérez. Translated by Andrea Rosenberg. Fantagraphics, 2023. 9781683968979. 140pp. At the center of Totem are ghosts, death, and crows. There’s also a road trip, a romance, a disappearance, strange lights in the sky, and stories about a woman who could see the dead. It’s all interconnected and mysterious and a bit spooky, and it feels like something I need to read again in a few weeks to try to work it out. It’s beautiful, though, so I think it will be worth it. It reminds me of nothing as much as the graphic novels of another Spanish creator, Borja González, which also read like graphic poems I want to read over and over.  

Batgirl: Year One by Scott Beatty & Chuck Dixon, pencils by Marcos Martin, Inks by Alvaro Lopez, colors by Javier Rodriguez. DC, 2023 ( (c) 2003). 9781779516831. Contains #1 – #9 of the series. First, this book has a beautiful design, with great images of Batgirl in action, drawn from the graphic novel, on the title page and the page before each chapter in the book. They’re colored differently from the rest of the illustrations, usually with just one color, and add to the sense of Batgirl as a complete badass. Note: The book opens, as all great stories do, with a superhero vs. supervillain fight in what looks like a library. Post-college, Barbara Gordon wants to become a detective — she thinks her computer skills will be an asset to the police department — but her dad, the not-yet Commissioner Gordon, opposes the idea. Barbara opts to find a different path. So she takes martial arts classes, applies to the FBI (they turn her down), and even breaks into JSA headquarters to leave a note to be forwarded to Black Canary. None of that works, so she sews a Batman-ish costume to wear to a police fundraiser masquerade. When Killer Moth attacks and tries to kidnap attendee Bruce Wayne, Batgirl steps in to save him. Batman is not impressed with the new Bat-hero. Neither is Barbara’s father. She spends the rest of the book earning their respect and dealing with Robin’s crush on her. The pacing is perfect and the art is stunning. Martin and Lopez make the action look at once light and serious, though even they can’t make the villainous Condiment King look like anything other than a joke. If you haven’t read a superhero book in a while or in, like, forever, there might not be a better choice than picking up this reissue.

Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki. Drawn & Quarterly, 2023. 9781770464339. 444pp. It’s 2009. Zoe and Dani meet up for a freshman spring break trip to New York City. Fiona, Dani’s friend from her dorm, goes along. Zoe has a new very short haircut and does not like to talk about herself. Fiona seems more concerned with being cool and drinking and not being seen as a tourist than anything else. Dani is the one with guidebooks and an agenda that includes her friends, buying a bunch of postcards, and visiting a ton of museums. After they check into their hostel, they have pizza and wander to Times Square and then a bar. It’s a great sequence that includes them paying for a photo (oops) and Fiona epically telling off a guy in a bar. But then cut to day two, where things start to feel weird, it becomes clear which of them is the third wheel, and it seems like two of them are on their way to hooking up. Awkward. (It’s a perfect distillation of that moment of not quite feeling at home at a four-year school while still pining for / trying to figure out the place of older friends in one’s life, in light of growing up a bit and starting to move on.) Things I love: Law & Order coffee, every page set in the Natural History Museum, and the horny pigeons on the title page that stand as a warning to any library person who opens this: THINK TWICE BEFORE YOU PUT THIS IN THE YA SECTION. It’s one of my favorite books of the year. As soon as I return this to the library, I’m buying several copies to give as gifts. Here’s a great interview with the Tamakis conducted by Jesse Thorn, on his show Bullseye about the book and more. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1197954636/jillian-mariko-tamaki