Welcome to our latest monthly comics preview, where we recommend new books to check out over the next few weeks. This September, The A.V. Club has made five exciting picks, including a body-swap coming-of-age story, an exploration of Salem’s witchy history, and a fictionalized account of H.P. Lovecraft’s final moments.
Cannon by Lee Lai (September 9)
The professional kitchen is a uniquely high-stress environment, cramming people in a hot space where they’re working against the clock to create something that others are going to ingest. The titular character of Lee Lai’s new graphic novel, Cannon (Drawn & Quarterly), juggles her restaurant job with caring for her ailing grandfather and maintaining tense relationships with her best friend and mother, and she’s not handling it very well. The book opens with her sitting in her restaurant’s destroyed dining room, then jumps back in time to trace the events that led to the wreckage. Lai’s award-winning debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, established her as a major new talent with a sensitive but pragmatic perspective and exceptional ability to use visual elements to bring characters’ internal feelings to the surface. A flock of birds serves that purpose for Cannon, crowding her when she feels overwhelmed and swirling around her when she unleashes her repressed exasperation and anger.
As evidenced by the enduring appeal of the Freaky Friday franchise, the body swap is an excellent plot device to explore the challenges of young adulthood. In Ngozi Ukazu’s new graphic novel, Flip (First Second), a shy Black teen switches bodies with her popular white male crush, putting them both in drastically different social positions. Whether she’s writing gay hockey players in Check, Please!, financially struggling college students in Bunt!, or young space-gods in Barda, Ukazu is always attuned to the circumstances that shape her characters’ emotional states. With Flip, she uses body-swap fantasy to highlight the very real struggles faced by a young woman of color in a predominantly white environment. She embraces the inherent humor of the concept while also taking full advantage of it as an empathy machine, with vibrantly animated artwork that exaggerates character acting to sell the frustration and panic of a person inhabiting a new body.
(Image: MacMillan Publishing)
The Last Day Of H.P. Lovecraft #1 by Romuald Giulivo and Jakub Rebelka (September 17)
H.P. Lovecraft was responsible for creating mythology that inspired a century of horror stories, but he was also a white supremacist who supported Adolf Hitler. Writer Romuald Giulivo and artist Jakub Rebelka delve into Lovecraft’s troubled legacy in The Last Day Of H.P. Lovecraft #1(Boom! Studios), confronting the author with the sins of his past as he lies on his death bed. Originally published as a graphic novel in France, this miniseries is a biography infused with the dreadful terror that defined Lovecraft’s work, with Rebelka’s painted artwork taking readers to stunning hellscapes rooted in the aesthetics of German expressionism. Rebelka is a modern master of comic-book horror, and he depicts Lovecraft’s surreal ideas with hallucinatory imagery that contrasts with the cold, sterile scenes of the dying author being cared for in a hospital. It’s a bold intersection of Lovecraft’s flawed humanity and infernal imagination, never shying away from the darkness that permeated both.
(Image: BOOM! Studios)
Marvel/DC: Deadpool/Batman #1 by Various (September 17)
Marvel and DC haven’t had a crossover since JLA/Avengers in the early ’00s, and with the comic-book industry in an extended state of disruption since the pandemic, it’s the right time for the Big Two to team up and sell a shitton of comics. Deadpool and Batman are facing off in two separate issues — one from each publisher — featuring big-name creators across the main story and the slew of back-up tales featuring even more cross-publisher pairings. For Marvel/DC: Deadpool/Batman #1 (Marvel), writer Zeb Wells and artist Greg Capullo handle the Dark Knight vs. the Merc with a Mouth, which is a nice full-circle moment for Capullo, who drew Deadpool in X-Force early in his career and later had a landmark run on Batman.
Writer Kevin Smith returns to two superheroes he reinvigorated in the past as he tackles Daredevil and Green Arrow with artist Adam Kubert, and writer Kelly Thompson and artist Gurihiru reunite to pit two animal superstars against each other as Jeff the Land Shark and Krypto go head-to-head. The new Captain America run by writer Chip Zdarsky has quickly become a standout title at Marvel, and he’s working with iconic Wonder Woman artist Terry Dodson to bring those two heroes together. There’s also some cosmic action courtesy of writer Al Ewing and artist Dike Ruan, who give us the odd-couple pairing of Green Lantern and Rocket Raccoon. But the biggest creative coup is Frank Miller writing and drawing Old Man Logan vs. the grizzled Batman from The Dark Knight Returns, a fitting face-off for the elder statesman who left an indelible mark on both of those characters.
(Image: Marvel/DC)
More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey (September 23)
American history has no shortage of atrocities, but the Salem witch trials are a particularly prominent blight, a lasting warning of what can happen when religious extremism and widespread paranoia go unchecked. In his new historical graphic novel, More Weight: A Salem Story (Top Shelf), cartoonist Ben Wickey delivers an exhaustively researched examination of Salem over centuries. The book is set in three different time periods, recounting the trials in 1692, the exploits of writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Salem in the 1860s, and Wickey’s own experience immersing himself in Salem’s past and seeing how it speaks to the country’s present. The art style shifts for each time period, tapping into the visual traditions of the respective eras to showcase Wickey’s versatility as well as his commitment to historical detail. He drew this over the course of 10 years, and all of that work shines through in the final product: strong graphic composition, characterization that leaps off the page, immersive environments enhanced by evocative coloring and grayscale work, and expressive lettering that brings the voices to vivid life.
