5 new comics to read in April, including weekly G.I. Joe Silent Missions

Sci-fi intrigue and cooking competitions are two tastes that go surprisingly well together (see: Natalie Riess’ Space Battle Lunchtime), and Magda: Intergalactic Chef (Graphic Universe) serves up a delectable all-ages take on this combination with the titular 12-year-old competing in the kitchen for her planet’s future. Written by Nicolas Wouters with art by Mathilde Van Geluwe and translation by Anne Marie Boulanger, Magda: Intergalactic Chef is a visually lush journey through alien terrain and cuisine, and the stakes are heightened by the book’s climate-conscious perspective. The grand prize of the Intergalactic Cooking Tournament is a precious resource, Nector, that can save dying worlds, and Magda has to deal with the stress of the competition while also trying to stop a secret society from stealing the Nector for itself. The high concept is executed with charm and finesse, particularly in Van Ghulewe’s striking design work, bold characterizations, and layouts that turn cooking into dynamic action.

Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle has built his reputation on autobiographical travelogue comics that showcase his ability to transport readers to a specific time and place, and it’s a skill that makes his historical biographies especially immersive. 2017’s Hostage showed the minimalist side of this as Delisle recounted the 1997 kidnapping of Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe André and the three months he spent handcuffed in solitary confinement, but for his latest biography, Muybridge (Drawn & Quarterly), Delisle significantly expands the scope of the story and visuals. Eadweard Muybridge was a pioneer in motion photography and projection, creating the first motion picture in 1878’s The Horse In Motion, and Delisle, with translators Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall, details the dramatic path that led Muybridge to this innovation. Delisle captures 1870s California and its residents in precise detail that reveals the amount of research that went into the book’s creation, presented with a loose, cartoonish line that brings extra energy and character to the page. It’s an engrossing art history lesson, enhanced by Delisle’s examination of Muybridge’s ambition and the challenges he has to overcome in order to make his dreams a reality.

Paul Auster put a fascinating postmodern spin on the detective story with his New York Trilogy of novels in the 1980s, using the mystery genre to explore philosophical ideas around mortality, identity, and creativity. The first installment of the trilogy, City Of Glass, was adapted into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli in 1994, and the long-out-of-print work is finally being republished in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (Pantheon), along with new adaptations of the other two books. Lorenzo Mattotti tackles Ghosts while Karasik adapts The Locked Room on his own, and each adaptation is an extraordinary example of how different artistic voices can illuminate and deepen pre-existing texts. 

The City Of Glass team tells the story with a nine-panel grid that gives it the most visual density of the three, and it encourages Mazzucchelli to experiment with individual panel compositions as well as how these panels engage with each other within a tight structure. Mattotti’s Ghosts is more akin to an illustrated novel rather than a comic book, primarily pairing big chunks of Auster’s writing with a single drawing evoking the text’s central ideas, but as the story continues, the interplay between visuals and text begins to shift. Karasik’s The Locked Room wraps up the trilogy with a celebration of the infinite narrative and design possibilities offered by the comic-book page, amplifying the themes of Auster’s work with visuals that find expressionistic new ways to present the source material.