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.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders. Tor, 2025. 9781250867322. 320pp. Jamie teaches classes while continuing to research but failing to write her dissertation. She has a secret — she can do magic. She shares this with her mother, Serena, who used to be a lawyer but who retreated from life because of scandal and the death of her wife, Mae. But Jamie does not share the secret with her partner, Ro, which causes huge problems between them, as does the way Serena begins to use magic. Jamie’s magic is about expressing what she truly craves, about asking for what’s possible and not getting greedy. It seems to have few and fast rules. I loved how she uses it to research Sarah Fielding and her companion, Jane Collier. In particular, Jamie is looking into a novel written in 1749, Emily, that’s often attributed to Fielding; Jamie feels like the book is full of secrets meant just for her. (When Jamie becomes the target of harassment, she continues researching the friends’ correspondence and the novel, and discovers the truth behind that feeling.) I don’t read much fantasy with contemporary settings, but Charlie Jane Anders has written two of my favorites, this book and All the Birds in the Sky. Seriously messed-up parents, a realistic romantic relationship, magic, and literary analysis — this book would have been perfect for me when I was studying English literature, and it’s perfect for me now.

Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business by Avrind Ethan David (author) and Ilias Kyriazis (artist), with Cris Peter (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer). Forward by Ben H. Winters. Pantheon, 2025. 9780553387599. 128pp. This graphic novel adaptation of Chandler’s novel isn’t black and white, but its most noir scenes are so dark and smoke-filled that my brain remembers them that way. I’m a huge fan of Chandler’s novels, and it was great to see how this fit so much dialogue into so few pages; there are many with a single image and interwoven word balloons that capture the back and forth of a conversation. If you’ve never read a novel starring private eye Philip Marlowe but love crime comics, this is a great place to start. And if you love classic noir mysteries but not graphic adaptations, pick this one up. The story features Marlowe investigating a young woman who has her hooks into a rich man’s son, and maybe to buy her off. Then the twists and turns begin.  

Absolute Batman Volume 1: The Zoo by Scott Snyder (writer), Nick Dragotta and Gabriel Hernández Walta (artists). DC, 2025. 9781799505259. 176pp. Contains Issues 1 – 6. Snyder (Undiscovered Country, American Vampire, more) and Dragotta (East of West, Once Upon A Time at the End of the World) team up to launch a new Absolute Universe version of Batman as part of DC’s All In initiative. Don’t know what that is? Me, either. This version of Batman is young and poor, but still smart as hell and driven to fight crime after his father’s murder. His gadgets are cheap-ish but high-tech. His friends are folks who, in other DC universes, will become some of his most insane enemies. Alfred is an operative tasked with hunting him down. Oh and Batman is facing gangs of thugs armed and motivated by an unnamed villain (so I guess I won’t name him, either), though you’ll immediately know who he is (or at least who he’s supposed to be) if you’ve read many Batman well-known collections. Snyder’s script is tight, Dragotta’s art feels futuristic while evoking nostalgia, and I love how the two of them have reinvented the way Batman moves and fights. Check it out. Buy it for your collection. PS: The other Absolute Universe book I’ve read is the first Jason Aaron / Rafa Sandoval / Ulises Arreola Superman graphic novel, Last Dust of Krypton. It’s also pretty dark, with Superman and his parents being part of the labor caste on a Krypton ruled by science elites out only for themselves. Superman is young and is fighting for justice on Earth against the Lazarus Corporation and its Peacekeepers. Lois Lane is a mercenary out to track him down. Superman also has a new, cool cape. (I thought the Absolute Universe might be all about new capes until I started reading the Wonder Woman book, which is also worth picking up.)

Ready Or Not by Andi Porretta. Atheneum, 2024. 9781665907033. 336pp. Four friends celebrate their high school graduation in the opening pages. Three of them are heading off on educational adventures at the end of the summer, but Cassie is taking at least a year off and planning to work in her parents’ diner. Cassie is stressed out; her friends are leaving, and it feels like they’ll be leaving her behind. To get them all to hang out a bit more, she proposes they play a game from when they were kids: risky slips. Each writes a dare on a piece of paper. Draw a dare and complete it within twenty-four hours. If you don’t complete the dare, you’re out. The penalties are tough, and different for each friend (and decided much later in the book, so I won’t spoil them). Cassie is up first. This coming-of-age story has a nice combination of sweetness, friendship, awkwardness, and queerness. Each of the friends comes into focus through Cassie’s interactions with them, and love is very central to the whole tale, as is messing up. Porretta’s art is particularly fun during the dares, most of which seem designed to get everyone in trouble.

The One Hand & The Six Fingers by Ram V (writer, The One Hand), Laurence Campbell (artist, The One Hand), Dan Watters (writer, The Six Fingers), Sumit Kumar (artist, The Six Fingers), Lee Loughridge (colorist), and others. Image, 2024. 9781534359719. 280pp. Contains #1 – #5 of each series. Publisher’s Rating: Mature. This book contains two series from Image that form one graphic novel. Both take place in the same time and place: Neo Novena, 2873. In one, Detective Aris Nassar cancels his retirement to see a case through, the case of the One Hand Killer. Nassar is sure he has caught the killer twice, but there’s a new crime scene, and symbols found at previous crime scenes have been drawn on a wall along with a handprint. But this time the handprint is slightly different, which leads Nassar to believe the killer has six fingers. In the other narrative, Johannes Vale, an archaeology grad student, proposed an expedition to a mine his father explored long ago. He has an artifact his father brought him, an arrowhead made of an unknown material, and wants to go look for evidence of an undiscovered branch of civilization. But his presentation about it doesn’t go well. And then he has a bad shift at his day job, which exposes him to toxic chemicals. There’s evidence that repeated exposure has mutated him a bit already; he’s growing an extra finger on one hand. Then Johannes wanders along a path he took the night before, and arrives at the wall he drew symbols on. He asks himself why he did what he did, and as Nasar hunts for him, that question becomes Vale’s thesis. From there, it’s a gritty back-and-forth. It’s so dark it reminds me of Ellis and Templesmith’s Fell, though it’s not funny, and it has Balde Runner-esque details, too. It’s a lovely book if you’re into this sort of whodunnit/whydunnit, and it’s a great value at just under $20.

Tongues Book 1 by Anders Nilsen. Patheon, 2025. 9781524747206. 368pp. Oversized. Mythological. Philosophical. Violent. Absolutely beautiful. I’m struggling to figure out what to write about this book. If you like graphic novels, you should pick it up; but if you’re getting it from a library, plan on having to check it out several times before you finish it (at least if your experience is anything like mine). It’s one of those books I had to think about, often for several days, before reading another part. Most of the story takes place in the present. Prometheus chats with the generations of eagles that eat his liver, plus others, including the god who imprisoned him. A young man wanders on foot across a desert war zone. A girl with a destiny, a chicken, and a monkey are in the same area; the girl is being hunted for the cube she carries. (It looks like the kind of hyperobject you’d expect to see in a Grant Morrison comic.) It all has something to do with what may be the end of the world. There are things in this book that remind me of work by Jeff Vandermeer, Warren Ellis, Edith Hamilton, David O. Russell, and Mike Mignola. It’s fantastic in all senses of the word, and worth checking out.

Let’s Go, Coco! A (sorta) true story by Coco Fox. HarperCollins, 2024. 9780063256415. 236pp. Fox’s graphic “memoir” focuses on the time just after her best friend, Blair, moved away. Coco is particularly worried about making new friends, and after some tears and awkward moments, she follows some advice from her brother about how to do scary things. This leads her to talk to a few other kids, including her crush, and to join her middle school basketball team, the Owls. The team includes said crush, a nonbinary kid, and a girl who is pretty mean but may be a new friend, among others. The basketball season becomes a journey that includes friendship, forgiveness, and a broken arm. I loved Coco’s brother, her black cat, and the awkward moments in science class in particular. The basketball games were great, too.