Low Orbit by Kazimir Lee. Top Shelf, 2025. 9781603095525. 336pp. Azar lives in Vermont with her mother, in an apartment inside a house where her friend Tristan and his father Shannon also live. Azar’s father is still in New York trying to sell their old apartment, but Azar thinks something else may be going on between her parents. She doesn’t quite fit in at school and has a crush she can’t quite bring herself to act on. The way her mom keeps misusing Tristan’s they/them pronouns, and the fact that she thinks Tristan is too young to make such decisions about themselves, keeps Azar from coming out to her mother. One night, Azar finds a science fiction novel under her bed; it’s The Exiles of the Overworld, a novel Shannon wrote. Tristan seems unimpressed by his father’s work, but Azar can’t put it down. And from the way Shannon’s agent, Howard, keeps trying to get in touch with Shannon, it seems like others are very interested in his work, too. When Azar needs some space, Shannon and Tristan are there to support her. The town’s abandoned mall and the secrets everyone is keeping play a part in the story. Minor spoiler: Several of the characters end up at a science fiction convention in New York that highlights much of what I love about fandom, especially the folks who cosplay. This is a beautiful, character-driven graphic novel about growing up and coming out. I loved everything about it, and I know several people I’m going to buy copies for this year.

The Field by Dave Lapp. Conundrum Press, 2024. 978772620948. 552pp. In the book’s first episode, young David Lapp, inspired by his friend Edward, draws dirty pictures and puts them on the edge of the vocabulary board in Ms. Lewis’s class. Edward then turns David in. Ms. Lewis tapes a note to David’s mother, along with the drawings, to David, who has to wear them for the rest of class. There’s some more trouble before summer vacation starts. It’s not all Edward’s fault — especially the incident with the angry gym teacher during a square dancing session, when the teacher slams David up against the wall for goofing off. But Edward is always there. He gets David to collect “bees eggs” in a jar. He shows David the dead cat he found. When David takes his new friend Hussein to the field, Edward and Jack drop a hammer on Hussein’s head from their treehouse. It’s no wonder David’s mom thinks Edward is bad news. She wants him to stay away from Edward. He doesn’t. And it’s just the beginning of a long summer. It’s easy to see why the book is dedicated to Chester Brown — it shares Brown’s matter-of-fact tone in showing the trouble the boys get up to. It’s not all horrific, but a lot of it reminded me of how thoughtless and cruel my friends and I could be as little kids, particularly to bugs, birds, and each other. And it made me remember the fields where I’d disappear with friends carrying bb guns and books of matches, and of all of the weird, horrible adventures we had. This is not a book for children, though at first glance it might look like one; it is the ultimate gift for men of a certain age, who grew up where suburbs abutted natural areas, and whose parents thought sending them outside all day was better than having them watch TV. (If they’d known what we were doing, I think they would have begged us to watch more TV.)

Lion Dancers by Cai Tse. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2024. 9781665927739. 299pp. including a note from the creator at the end. The book opens two years ago at the Twelfth Asian International Lion Dance Championships, where the Black Lion Dance Team performed a spectacular leap to defend their title. Wei was in the crowd with his grandmother, and he wanted to fly as part of a lion dance team, just like his dad. But two years later, in middle school, Wei is a different kid. His father died, and he’s living with his grandma. Sports are not his thing. A boy named Hung and his friends seem dedicated to making Wei’s life miserable. Then Wei runs into someone from a lion dancer team and asks to join. But when he shows up for practice, Hung is there. Hung starts screaming that Wei is not allowed to join. Other team members welcome Wei, though. And as he starts practicing with the team, he remembers when he and Hung trained together with their fathers, and Hung was his tail. The rest of the book is about them learning to endure one anothers’ presence, and then of course (minor spoiler) to work together as a team again. I loved how upbeat this book is despite Hung’s terrible attitude. Plus Tse taught me a lot about how tough it is to be a lion dancer; in Seattle, I’ve seen my share of performances over the years, but I never really understood the strength and coordination required.

Spectators by Brian K Vaughan and Niko Henrichon. Image, 2025. 9781534331211. 344pp. After Val is killed in a Manhattan movie theater, her spirit emerges into the black-and-white world where those who haven’t moved on can do nothing more than observe. This isn’t terrible for Val; she’s a movie fan and she enjoys watching pornography, so there are a lot of “stories” for her to follow. Jump forward to the future, where Val is trying to find a couple with potential. It’s now a world of flying machines and giant robots. Many people are addicted to sex robots, though, so it’s not always easy to find folks who are going to put on a show she wants to watch. She follows a crowd of ghosts to an underground fight club and ends up in the house of a hot young couple. And that’s where she meets Sam, another ghost — he looks like a cowboy, complete with six shooters. The couple has sex while she and Sam talk. And they’re together when they see a TV broadcast announcing that a nuke has gone off in California. It’s probably the end of the world. So Val and Sam head off to try to find a threesome to watch before it’s all over. Along the way, they talk about movies, their lives and deaths, and even the dwarf planet, Pluto. The first graphic novel Vaughn and Henrichon produced together was Pride of Baghdad, a beautiful book about lions that escaped from a zoo during the Gulf War. Spectators was originally written in installments on the creators’ Substack newsletter and completed at the end of 2024, and I believe that the original version has been expanded for this print edition. Worth noting: This book contains graphic sex and violence. And you’re going to like it, but you’ll particularly enjoy it if you’re a Michael Biehn fan and/or if you’ve watched the silent 1903 film The Great Train Robbery.

Free Piano (Not Haunted) by Whitney Gardner. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2025. 9781665938136. 252pp. The end of the book includes notes on the Prophet-5 keyboard, a Hall of Fame, and some early sketches. Margot likes making songs and playing her ukulele. Her friends Seven and Sebastian love to smash junk and make videos while doing it, which they post online. They find a keyboard with the titular note — a Prophet-5 keyboard (circa 1979). The boys want to smash it, but Margot takes it home. Her dad is a flaky musician who decides to head to Los Angeles to pursue his music career because he has nearly 10k followers online. In doing so, he disappoints Margot; he had said he’d teach her to play the Prophet, but leaves her to find online tutorials. Margot’s mom has to pick up the pieces. Margot is mad at both her mom and father when the ghost of 1980s pop star Vision appears. This is not quite a freak-out moment. Vision predates the whole internet / followers thing, and wants to know the real reason Margot wants to write music. It’s not much of a spoiler to say they start working on a song together, and that there is another, less friendly specter that eventually needs to be dealt with. This is another fun, unpredictable graphic novel by Gardner (Fake Blood); I’m a huge fan, and I’ll read whatever she writes from now on.

Saint Catherine by Anna Meyer. 23rd Street, 2025. 9781250364371. 362pp. Includes “Extras” at the back: a note from the author plus photos and more. Catherine never skips Mass. Never! Her mom always reminds her to go. But she’s kind of secretive about it with her friends and her boyfriend, Manolo. Catherine feels like something terrible will happen if she doesn’t go. Then one day she heads to Staten Island with Manolo instead of to church. There she gets bitten by a squirrel and wonders if it’s an omen. She and Manolo go into an old church to look around, and it’s there that Catherine first sees a bunch of black blobs; Manolo sees nothing. Later, at home, after a nap, Catherine wakes up to find that the blobs of darkness are talking to her (and only her). One has a giant eye. It introduces itself as Vassago, Prince of Hell, and it’s not alone. Are the demons real? How can she get rid of them? And will anyone believe her if she tells them what she’s seeing? This is an entertaining, twenty-something coming-of-age graphic novel. My favorite thing about it is that Catherine lives a normal life; she makes one mistake and then tries to turn things around. Her story feels realistic and complicated, especially her relationships with Manolo and her mother. Worth noting: Meyer’s art is fantastic.

R.U.R. The Karel Capek Classic by Katerina Cupová, translated by Julie Novàková. Rosarium Publishing, 2024. 9788986614687. 264pp. Includes a sketchbook at the end. I’ve tried to read translations of Capek’s 1920 play, R.U.R., a few times (it’s famous for introducing the word “robot”), but this graphic novel adaptation is the first version I’ve finished. Cupova’s adaptation pulled me through because the book is just beautiful to behold. (So beautiful that even when I couldn’t quite follow the story’s jumps and such, and when its dated treatment of the female characters in particular annoyed me, I could focus on the art.) R.U.R. stands for Rosarium’s Universal Robots, a factory churning out emotionless, humanoid workers. Director Domin opens the book with a big speech. Helena Glory wants a tour of the factory; these are never granted, but he shows her around anyway because she’s the President’s daughter. She’s an activist who believes robots are people, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. She soon reveals herself as a representative of the League of Humanity, who are out to free the robots; she believes people need to show them a little love. The director wants to marry her. She initially refuses. And then the story jumps forward a bit, to when society is falling apart and those onboard are trying to ride out what may be the end of human civilization.

Botanica Drama by Thom. Pow Pow, 2023. 9782925114246. 244pp. This is an entirely wordless, book-length graphic novel starring Death (aka XIII, according to the Dramatis Personae page at the back of the book) and his little friend Philomène, a flower (I think). They live together in a nice little town with a bunch of anthropomorphic animals, plants, and insects and such, under a sky filled with an anthropomorphic sun, moon, and planets. Death and his friend run a nice little cafe bakery. Everything is great until one day the sun parties too hard and doesn’t rise in the morning. With the skies dark, tall beings emerge from their home under the earth. They’re hungry, plus the world is now a cold place. How can the citizens get the sun back up in the sky where it belongs? I love Thom’s version of Death; he seems to love his friends despite his duties outside the bakery; with his constant, toothy smile, it’s really up to us to interpret how he’s feeling. (Death also appears in the other wordless graphic novel I’ve read by Thom, titled VII, which was also published by Pow Pow.)

Eat by Nagabe. Translation by Adrienne Beck. Seven Seas Entertainment, 2025. 978893732603. 234pp. Publishers’ Rating: Older Teens (15+). Lufaria is a law professor with a harsh reputation and black fur. His students call him The Killer. His secret: he loves to watch people eat. When a tardy student approaches him after class — the dude is a huge, handsome herbivore who keeps saying he’s hungry — their interaction makes Lufaria realize that what he really longs for is to be eaten. The rest of the book is about this thing between them, a teacher-student relationship (between adults) that must be uncommon even in an anthropomorphic world. I’ve picked up a few of Nagabe’s other books in English, but somehow I couldn’t really find my way into his style, and hoped a standalone might give me a better way in. I ordered this one from my library without reading a synopsis and was quite surprised. I enjoyed the pacing and art enough that I’m going to give The Girl from the Other Side another try.

Soma by Fernando Llor (script) and Carles Dalmau (art and colors). Translation by Diego Jourdan Pereira. Oni Press, 2025. 9781637156124. 288pp. Maya spends almost all of her time drawing comics, but she’s bored with the scripts she’s been drawing. The only source of enjoyment she has is smoking and occasionally meeting friends for coffee; she has time for little else. And then something crashes through her window — it looks kinda like a one-eyed cat head, and it has tentatcles that allow it to communicate mind-to-mind with Maya. After a while she finally understands what it has been trying to tell her, that an alien civilization is invading Earth and that it needs Maya’s help to stop it. This book offers a violent invasion that is, in many moments, quite kawaii. Dalmau’s art reminds me of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim in the best way, though with far more blood (which is colored, like the rest of the book, perfectly). Weird note: I love the way Dalmau draws pigeons with little scarves.