Adventure Awaits
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Updated takes on traditional adventure genres are big
this season, displaying the kind of worldbuilding that
comics do best.
Image, home to a superstar lineup of comics talents, fields some of the
best this spring. The long-running team of Ed Brubaker and Sean
Phillips is back with The Fade Out, a stylish mystery set in
Hollywood’s golden age. Kurt Busiek and Ben Dewey dig in to the
genre of anthropomorphic high fantasy with Autumnlands, Vol 1:
Tooth and Claw, offering an exquisite level of visual detail and charac-
terization.
The school for young fill-in-the-blanks has been a staple of endless
mangas and Harry Potter–copies, but two forthcoming comics give it
kicky updates. Gotham Academy, Vol. 1, by Becky Cloonan, Brendan
Fletcher, and Karl Kerschl presents a magic-tinged Gossip Girl for
Gotham city. Jillian Tamaki, follows up Cloonan’s award-winning This
One Summer with SuperMutant Magic Academy, a collection of dark-
humored webcomics that skewer the entire genre while creating empa-
thy for its drifting, affectless teens.
In a season of visually striking comics, The Divine is a standout,
with hallucinogenic art by Asaf and Tomer Hanuka boldly illustrating
Boaz Lavie’s story about two mercenaries caught up in a supernatural
war in Southeast Asia. And Josh Simmons’s Black River is an even-
bleaker-than-usual take on the popular postapocalyptic survival genre.
The invasion of French cartoonists continues with Anne Goetzinger’s
Girl in Dior, a comics biography of the designer in an appropriately
stunning art style. And the last 25 years of indie comics gets a splendid
showcase with Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of
Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels, which
includes comics by D & Q luminaries and essays by Margaret Atwood
and others. Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace
and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer is a
delightful history of the birth of the“difference engine” by two early
computer nerds. Finally, the science of comics themselves are examined
in Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening, a thesis on perception and context
presented in comics form.
COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS
SPRING 2015 ADULT
ANNOUNCEMENTS
