5 new comics to read in November, including the return of Chris Ware
A spooky Alpine mystery, an explosive sci-fi epic, and more.
Welcome to The A.V. Club’s monthly comics preview, where we recommend new books to check out over the next few weeks. This month, we’ve got five noteworthy picks, including a history of modern public health, a spooky Alpine mystery, and an explosive sci-fi epic.
The Greater Good: People, Power, And Public Health by Whit Taylor and Joyce Rice (November 3)
Comics are an excellent vehicle for educational content because creators can imbue information with visual personality and specificity that make it more engaging and digestible. Writer Whit Taylor and artist Joyce Rice accomplish this in The Greater Good: People, Power, And Public Health (23rd St. Books), a nonfiction graphic novel exploring the foundation of modern public health and the infrastructure that was built to combat various crises over the last 200 years. From the origins of epidemiology to motor vehicle safety and the response to AIDs, The Greater Good tracks how public health ties into greater social, political, and technological advances. As both a health educator and cartoonist, Taylor understands what to highlight to give these historical stories narrative momentum on the comics page, and Rice’s artwork brings the context and charm with period-specific details and crisply animated character work.
The Greater Good: People, Power, and Public Health by Whit Taylor and Joyce Rice (November 3)
The ACME Novelty Library #21 by Chris Ware (November 10)
Prepare to be overwhelmed by the return of Chris Ware’s The ACME Novelty Library, which hasn’t had a new installment since 2010. Like Ware’s 2012 masterpiece, Building Stories, The ACME Novelty Library #21 (Drawn & Quarterly) is a package containing multiple comics of different lengths and dimensions in a folio box, itself adorned with additional material like more comics and an obituary for Ware’s mother, who passed earlier this year. That obituary provides a personal and touching entry point for a reading experience that spans a wide array of human relationships and emotions. The scope of the storytelling expands with the dimensions of each comic, culminating in a fold-out broadsheet that communicates the vastness of city life through a cavalcade of urban snapshots ranging from character vignettes to still illustrations. Ware’s structural ambition continues to grow as he sharpens his ability to convey specific feelings in a single image, resulting in deeply layered storytelling that forces readers to slow down to take in all of the visual stimuli.
The ACME Novelty Library #21 (Drawn & Quarterly)
Lantern Pass by Serge Lehman and Frederik Peeters (November 17)
Lantern Pass (Abrams) showcases how much a color palette contributes to the atmosphere and energy of a story. Just take a look at the cover colors: lavender, electric pink, and neon green. These are not the types of colors you would usually get in a suspenseful crime yarn, indicating a surreality that becomes more prominent in the plot as a missing persons case in an Alpine village morphs into something much stranger. Serge Lehman writes a mystery that delivers a steady stream of twists to keep readers on their toes, and the script strikes a balance of action, character drama, and supernatural intrigue that puts Peeters’ versatility as a visual storyteller front and center. He has incredible control of tension through his page layouts, panel compositions, and those bold colors, which are essential in shifting the vibe from calm to chaotic as the stakes rise.
Lanterns (Abrams)
Chainkata #1 by Daniel Warren Johnson (November 18)
“Chicks with chainsaws in space” is a reductive tagline for Daniel Warren Johnson’s new creator-owned series, Chainkata (Image Comics), but this is the person who turned “robots in disguise” into the foundation for an Eisner Award-winning, commercially massive Transformers run. Chainkata’s hero, the warrior queen Luma, would probably split you in half if you called her a “chick,” but the book’s concept of “strong woman with big chainsaw sword” plays exactly to the strengths that make Johnson a superstar. He grabs your attention with melt-your-face-off action and bold design, and then serves you a story that backs up the bravado with compelling characters and propulsive plotting. The black-and-white artwork—with sporadic cosmic-colored backgrounds—gives the book an extra level of rawness, keeping the focus on the power of Johnson’s inking. A brush is mightier than a chainsaw sword in his hands, and his passion for this world and its characters comes through in every page.
Chainkata (Image Comics)
Silent Jenny by Mathieu Bablet (November 25)
To give an idea of how much thought Mathieu Bablet has put into the world-building of his graphic novel, Silent Jenny (Magnetic Press): he drew topographic maps for the terrain. Silent Jenny is a genuine feat of visual design, with each aspect of this dystopian sci-fi world depicted in meticulous detail. The titular character is a researcher in a future where the disappearance of insects has led to the end of pollination, leaving huge swaths of land infertile. Living on a mobile island (a “monad”) with other survivors, Jenny makes her way across sprawling environments in search of bee DNA, and each phase of her journey is an opportunity for Bablet to introduce new machinery, architecture, gear, flora, and fauna. The sense of wonder contrasts with a growing feeling of dread as Jenny starts to recognize the futility of her mission, and the psychological horror elements bring out the more expressive side of Bablet’s artwork as he delves deeper into Jenny’s deteriorating mental state.
Silent Jenny (Magnetic Press)
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