Punycorn and the Princess of Thieves by Andi Watson. Clarion Books, 2025. 9780358572008. 202pp.
Punycorn’s sword Bloodgutter is broken and needs to be fixed, which is even more of a problem than that might otherwise seem because Bloodgutter is Punycorn’s friend, too. It needs to be reforged in a hurry. Wheeze (a dragon) has something in his hoard that might help, but his hoard has been stolen. Together with P’oo (a dung elemental) they head to the Verdigris Forest to track down the Princess of Thieves and her band of brigands, who have the treasure. (Side quest: Wheeze’s friends need to help boost his self-confidence so he can finally breathe fire.)
The evil Sir Ogre’s mom is upset that her son was defeated by Punycorn (in the previous book), and she’s confiscating his weapons, which makes his sister Sixsmith super happy; Sixsmith wants to rule the Land of Carbuncle herself. To that end, she seeks a magical grimoire that will help her conquer it. It’s also in the hands of the Princess of Thieves.
Watson’s graphic novels are all beautifully drawn, and I loved the color in this one as much as I did in his Gum Girl series. He excels at writing entertaining, silly characters while walking a fine line between embracing and making fun of the fantasy genre in a way that makes this a great read-aloud.
James Bond 007: Your Cold, Cold Heart by Garth Ennis and artist Rapha Lobosco. Dynamite, 2024. 9781524125523. Contains #1 – 6.
Bond is hunting for a secret weapon that the British developed after stealing it from the Soviets back in the day. It’s been stolen back by them, basically, which is going to cause big trouble. (I’m not telling you about the weapon because why ruin the surprise?) There are twists and turns, of course, and a betrayal that leaves Bond with no one to trust except Moneypenny. (She’s also tough as nails in this book.)
Ennis might be more famous these days for writing Preacher and The Boys, but I always loved the way he wrote the Punisher. His run was gleefully brutal and has a lot in common with this graphic novel. If Hollywood action films seem too soft-hearted, this is the book for you.
My favorite part is the extremely violent misdirect at the beginning. It’s the perfect opening to this story, which ends with a poetic bit of payback.
Muybridge by Guy Delisle. Translation by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall. Drawn & Quarterly, 2025. 9781770467729. 218pp. Includes credits for all photos in the book and a timeline of the lives of the artists, photographers, and others appearing in the book.
On the first page of this graphic novel, Delisle summarizes the mystery of the galloping horse and shows Muybridge in the last “panel” as the young Englishman who would eventually solve the mystery (while working for Leland Stanford). What Delisle doesn’t say is that in pioneering the photographic methods that solved that mystery, Muybridge became the first person to animate photographs, leading to movies and more.
Muybridge’s story begins in 1850 when he arrives in New York and becomes a bookseller. “This wasn’t the adventure he had hoped for.” Ha. He went to San Francisco, where he met a friend working for a portrait photographer. And the rest is history, kinda. After failing at the American dream, a gruesome accident, and a return to England to recover, Muybridge returned to the US as a photographer. Not too much later, he headed west and took pictures of the then-unknown Yosemite Valley. The rest of his story is crazy — it includes not only the history of photography and early filmmaking but also a murder and more.
Delisle includes photos as part of the narrative, both by Muybridge and others. I haven’t seen photos this well integrated into a graphic novel since reading Guibert’s The Photographer.
My favorite moment of the book is when, after achieving fame for his photos of a galloping horse, Muybridge decides to capture the motion of other animals and people. This is Victorian times, and he wants people to be photographed nude to show their bodies in motion, but no one will do it. This is why there is a 12-photo sequence of a naked Muybridge, age forty-eight, swinging a pickax. That’s dedication. (My second favorite, and the most unexpected moment, is Delisle’s note about how Muybridge’s techniques led to the way the action sequences in The Matrix were filmed. Very cool.)
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A Shining Beacon by James Albon. Top Shelf, 2019. 9781603094450. 205pp.
An authoritarian government has created a new pool that’s both a grand rejuvenation project and a national sporting monument! All that remains is to find an artist to create the central mural. Most candidates have been blackballed by the censorship committee. The two men in charge of finding an artist have identified Francesca Saxon as the person to recruit for the job. She lives and works in a small town; her art is a little bland, but they don’t expect her to cause any trouble. After receiving their invitation, she heads for the capital as requested and begins to submit her ideas. Of course, they’re all rejected, with little explanation, but she continues to sketch and submit more. And then some real trouble starts.
Albon’s illustrations are beautiful, loose enough to convey both Saxon’s initial excitement and to later capture the oppressiveness and confusion she experiences. His art really comes to life when the city explodes in violence later.
My favorite thing about the book is the relationship between Saxon and the low-level guard who is supposed to keep an eye on her, who accompanies her wherever she goes. Albon goes to great lengths to humanize him as Saxon tries to get to know him.
Albon has three other graphic novels published by Top Shelf: Her Bark & Her Bite, The Delicacy, and, the most recent (from 2025), Love Languages. I plan to read them all as soon as possible.
Trumpets of Death by Simon Bournel-Bosson. Translated by Edward Gauvin. Graphic Universe, 2025. 9798765644324. 230pp.
One night, Antoine’s father drops him off at his grandparents’ place in the country. He’s never liked it there; it’s full of his grandfather’s spooky hunting trophies. His grandma tries to connect with him, but his grandfather is distant when he’s not being a jerk.
When his grandma is running errands, she tells Antoine to go mushroom picking with his grandfather. They become separated. And Antoine finds a truly magic mushroom that transforms him into a young, white stag. He’s hunted by scouts and others, and eventually by his grandfather, too.
The book feels a bit more surreal than the plot suggests due to Bournel-Bosson’s coloring, which is striking. I’m not sure what most young people will make of the book, but it’s a quick, enjoyable read that’s more literary than most graphic novels marketed to them.
Tower Dungeon Volume 1 by Tsutomu Nihei. Translation: Sam Malissa. Kodansha, 2025. 9781647294540. Publisher’s Rating: 13+.
Princess Ignelia has been taken to the Dragon Tower, where most of the troops who tried to rescue her have been killed. Each village is to send someone to help, or to hand over twenty bushels of grain as a penalty. The people in Yuva’s village decide he should be the one to go. He’s fine with that; he even feels like he might be able to help. With his grandpa’s old helmet and shield in hand, he sets off for the tower.
There he finds a group of beat-up warriors trying to deal with a monster on the tower’s fiftieth level that has killed many of their comrades. Yuva is sent into the tower with a group of soldiers to try to take it out. He isn’t given a weapon or much of an explanation, though he is carrying two barrels for the group. Along the way they face a door guardian, a slime monster, and other dangers. It’s all pretty spooky and weird, which is reinforced by the sense of the mountainous size of the Dragon Tower that Nihei’s art creates, as well as some of the more bizarre character/creature designs. My favorite of the “creature” designs is the messenger who arrives toward the end of the book.
By the end, the soldiers are ordered home. But three new recruits, including Yuva, are left behind to try to bring back the princess.
I’ve read the three volumes published in English so far and have no plans to stop.
The Great American Dust Bowl written and illustrated by Don Brown. Houghton Mifflin, 2013. 9780547815503. Includes a selected bibliography and source notes that include a few stunning photographs.
I recently ordered every one of Don Brown’s nonfiction graphic novels from my local library system, and this is the best of those I hadn’t read before. Brown includes geology, history, and weather to explain the context for the start of the Dust Bowl, and then presents fourteen dusters (dust storms) in 1932 in a few quick sketches. It’s a perfect introduction to the chaos the dust creates in the later pages as it falls like “chocolate snow,” damaging everything in its path, suffocating people and animals, and burying the land as it darkens skies across the country.
Brown gives a sense of the scale of what happened, of the carry-on effects as well as the toll they took on people. And he cites his sources! Brown continues to be a model for everyone who writes graphic nonfiction.
Tall Water by SJ Sindo and illustrated by Dion MB. HarperAlley, 2025. 9780063090163. 248pp.
Nimmi wants to become a journalist like her father, but her interview to get into Columbia goes badly. When she gets home, her dad has a surprise for her; a letter from her mother, who runs an orphanage in Sri Lanka, and whom Nimmi has never met. (Minor spoiler: the government in Sri Lanka revoked her dad’s press pass long ago, and he has not been allowed to enter the country since he fled with Nimmi when she was a baby.)
Nimmi doesn’t fit in at her South Dakota high school, but she does have a great boyfriend, Daniel. And she’s having dreams about meeting her mother that seem like more than dreams. So when her father tells her he’s being sent back to Sri Lanka to cover the war there, she wants to go along and meet her mother. He insists it’s too dangerous. But that doesn’t stop Nimmi from buying her own ticket and secretly following him.
What follows is a wonderful, harrowing tale of Nimmi’s first visit to the country where she was born. There’s some violence and a hugely sad natural disaster to contend with, in addition to Nimmi and her mother getting to know one another. This book is worth reading for its setting and sense of place alone, but the story offers much more than that.
Black Cloak Volume One by Kelly Thompson, art and colors by Meredith McClaren. Image, 2023. Contains. Publisher’s Rating: T+/Teen Plus. #1 – 6.
Black Cloaks are investigators in the “last city in the known world,” Kiros. It’s a place full of magic, neon tech (think Blade Runner), and bright billboards that’s ruled by elves, though there are humans, centaurs, mermaids, and the like, too. The story is a police procedural starring Detectives Essex and Pax, a murder case involving the prince (he’s Essex’s ex (say that three times fast)). At the center of it all is a secret that could be the end of Kiros.
The city is so well designed! McClaren’s art works for me in every way, though I particularly love the way she draws people in the distance, and the way her colors make things glow.
They Were 11! by Moto Hagio. Translator: Ajani Oloye. Denpa, 2024. 9781634428156. Publisher’s Rating: Teen (13+).
I don’t read much shojo manga, but this graphic novel has so much shelf appeal I had to pick it up. The eleven characters appear on both the front and back, and the whole thing is oversized, at least in terms of how manga are usually reprinted.
The first They Were 11! adventure involves a test to enter the prestigious Cosmo Academy. Ten examinees are sent to a spaceship for their practical exam, but when they arrive, there are eleven of them. What’s the implication? Is there a taritor in their midst? Do I need to tell you more about the plot?
The second, “Horizon of the East, Eternity of the West,” mostly involves three of the examinees from the previous story, one who is the king of his planet and two others, now engaged, who are visiting him. There’s a rebellion against the king and a larger, looming conflict, and the characters spend a lot of time on the run.
What I love about this book more than anything is the way Hagio draws the action sequences; they remind me of Star Blazers, Galaxy Express 999, and Astro Boy cartoons, and make me a bit nostalgic about watching those when I was kid. The characters have big emotions, and the threat of violence and risk of death always seems cute in a way that I find entertaining. The romance is there, too, but it’s downplayed most of the time in a way that may make this a gateway to more shojo manga, at least for me
(If any of this sounds familiar, I believe Viz published these stories in English in several volumes back in the 1990s.)
Punycorn and the Princess of Thieves by Andi Watson. Clarion Books, 2025. 9780358572008. 202pp.
Punycorn’s sword Bloodgutter is broken and needs to be fixed, which is even more of a problem than that might otherwise seem because Bloodgutter is Punycorn’s friend, too. It needs to be reforged in a hurry. Wheeze (a dragon) has something in his hoard that might help, but his hoard has been stolen. Together with P’oo (a dung elemental) they head to the Verdigris Forest to track down the Princess of Thieves and her band of brigands, who have the treasure. (Side quest: Wheeze’s friends need to help boost his self-confidence so he can finally breathe fire.)
The evil Sir Ogre’s mom is upset that her son was defeated by Punycorn (in the previous book), and she’s confiscating his weapons, which makes his sister Sixsmith super happy; Sixsmith wants to rule the Land of Carbuncle herself. To that end, she seeks a magical grimoire that will help her conquer it. It’s also in the hands of the Princess of Thieves.
Watson’s graphic novels are all beautifully drawn, and I loved the color in this one as much as I did in his Gum Girl series. He excels at writing entertaining, silly characters while walking a fine line between embracing and making fun of the fantasy genre in a way that makes this a great read-aloud.
