5 new comics to read in July, including a Fantastic Four MCU tie-in

All of Yvan Alagbé’s new graphic novel, Misery Of Love (New York Review Comics), is depicted with two horizontal rectangle panels per page, each one a canvas for a striking piece of art that could stand on its own. Alagbé’s virtuosic use of ink washes, combined with this straightforward layout, brings incredible immediacy to this story of a woman confronting her past as she returns home for her grandfather’s funeral. Alagbé’s 2018 work, Yellow Negroes And Other Stories, was a transfixing collection of stories that highlighted the artist’s poetic voice and stark visual aesthetic, exploring the expressive possibilities of line weight and negative space. An extension of one of those short stories, Misery Of Love, continues delving into the same themes, namely the ways that French colonialism has had a lasting impact on personal relationships by dividing people along racial and national lines. With sparse dialogue, Alagbé relies on imagery to shape these relationships, offering enough visual information for readers to make connections in an interactive way.

The cover of Yudori’s new sapphic historical fiction graphic novel, Raging Clouds (Fantagraphics), is tailored for fans of sweeping lesbian romances like The Handmaiden and Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Two women hold each other in front of majestic clouds against a bright pink background, but their differences create tension between them—the opposite eyelines, the ways they wear their hair, the pattern or lack of in their dress. Set in the 16th-century Netherlands, Raging Clouds follows a woman in an abusive marriage who becomes enchanted by her husband’s new slave mistress, developing a romantic and intellectual connection that fuels a desire to break free from their misogynist tyrant. The sensuality of Yudori’s linework brings both tenderness and heat to the romance, with meticulous attention to historical detail to immerse readers in the world of these characters, enhancing the tension as the lovers fight against the confines imposed on them by society.

Cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky is fascinated by cults. A cult plays a major role in her debut graphic novel, Boys Weekend, a horror-comedy about a trans woman attending the bachelor party of a college friend, and Simplicity (Pantheon) goes even further with the cult exploration, sending a transgender academic to investigate a cult in the Catskills in the year 2081. This new dystopian future setting allows Lubchansky to incorporate sci-fi elements that enhance the scope of the story and create new design opportunities for the characters and environments, but the ideas surrounding individuality, groupthink, and oppression speak directly to the current moment. The exaggeration of Lubchansky’s character acting keeps an undercurrent of humor going even as the dramatic stakes intensify, and the tonal contrast amplifies the moments of surreal horror that become more frequent later in the book.