Posted on September 11, 2025 at 6:32 am by Gene Ambaum
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.

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Posted on September 9, 2025 at 6:20 am by Gene Ambaum
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.

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Posted on September 4, 2025 at 6:24 am by Gene Ambaum
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.

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Posted on September 2, 2025 at 9:34 am by Gene Ambaum
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.

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Posted on August 28, 2025 at 6:11 am by Gene Ambaum
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.)

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Posted on August 26, 2025 at 6:37 am by Gene Ambaum
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.

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Posted on August 21, 2025 at 6:17 am by Gene Ambaum
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.

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Posted on August 19, 2025 at 6:23 am by Gene Ambaum
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.
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Posted on August 14, 2025 at 7:23 am by Gene Ambaum
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.

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Posted on August 12, 2025 at 6:22 am by Gene Ambaum
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.)

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