Drawn & Quarterly

Creative Team

Description

A serial buddy comedy like no other from the mind of Cedar Van Tassel Appleguy & Beefwood’s rapid-fire dialogue and tightly wound humour is reminiscent of classic buddy comics as wide-ranging as Calvin and Hobbes or Mutt and Jeff. Van Tassel’s wiry, delightfully jagged characters walk and talk as the world grows both physically and spiritually around them. This approachably hilarious take on the existential and esoteric distills the absurdities of the modern everyday into four panels with forthright wit and a discerning eye.

Creative Team

Description

Mary Pain’s hit rock bottom with nothing left to lose … but she’s also absolutely free. Mary Pain might just be the patron saint of second chances. Unemployed and all out of options, she buys a one-way bus ticket to the dead-end town she grew up in—where time stands still. Everyone sharing the same old gossip she’s been running from for ages. Back in her childhood home, she needs to find a way to save the house from foreclosure, care for her ailing grandfather, and make peace with her mother’s ghost, whose telephone calls still come in on the old kitchen landline. Not that it keeps her down: She picks up men for midnight trysts in the park, and remains open to deepening connections with childhood friends, new lovers, and precocious altar boys. Lola Lorente’s slick black inkwork feels sophisticated and voluptuous, and her rendering of idiosyncratic townsfolk and their customs is a sensorial delight. Translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg.

Creative Team

Description

A romantic thriller exploring the dark corners of human desire and isolation with quiet eeriness--for fans of Moto Hagio and Nick Drnaso. Choi Sungmin’s Narrow Rooms follows a young woman who leaves her rural hometown to study in Seoul and seek self-improvement. But once there, she quickly becomes the target of unwanted attention from her teacher, and the whispers of other students only deepen her alienation. Living in a cramped, poorly soundproofed room, the suffocating atmosphere begins to further distort her boundaries and perceptions. Longing for escape, she fixates on a handsome new neighbor, her fascination spiraling into obsession: She secretly rummages through his mailbox, collects his discarded cigarette butts and teabags, and hoards his trash. But when she discovers something unsavory about the object of her desire, will she be forced to confront the morals of her own behavior? Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong.

Creative Team

Description

A heartwrenching memoir of a daughter losing her father and a scathing indictment of the medical industry Arizona grieves at the hospital bed of her father, a man she hardly knew, brain dead after a fentanyl overdose. Doctors encourage her to act quickly to recast him as a hero. Distraught, Arizona makes a decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life. As she struggles to come to terms with her father’s death and her role as next of kin in making his life’s last decision, she uncovers inconvenient truths about the organ donation industry’s own codependence on the opioid crisis. Her parents were bohemian wild kids of 90s Montreal. He was a talented skateboarder, charming guitarist, and visual artist. She was an aspiring writer and outcast. They lived with other teenagers in the Plateau in a messy apartment filled with drugs, alcohol, and black-market animals. The city’s macabre history—McGill Medical School, the Mount Royal Cemetery, ancient cadavers at the Maude Abbott Medical Museum—takes center stage as Arizona sorts out fact from fiction. Opioids and Organs is a damning critique of an industry that takes advantage of society’s outcasts. A muted yet striking pastel palette and a dolllike fantastical elegance belie both the gruesomeness of the book’s topic and the rage of its author.