I always hope WWACommendations can be a joyful roundtable to come back to each month. I like writing silly and sometimes unhinged intros for it, sharing pictures of my cat on her birthday (she’s 12 now!) and reflecting on the current moment. This is a very hard moment, and I’m a bit too wrung out to give much to this intro. I hope you are finding ways to organize where you live. If not, perhaps look into finding a USPCN or JVP chapter. If you have money to give, check out Operation Olive Branch and e-sims for Gaza. I hope our comic recommendations help you find some needed escapism to reset your brain, then go back out and keep doing the work.
Alenka Figa: May is a month of many things, including the end of the school year and graduations! As someone who works with teens this can be an intense and emotional time, which means it was the perfect moment to read Bunt! written by Ngozi Ukazu (Check, Please!) and illustrated by Mad Rupert. Bunt! is about Molly Bauer, a Peachtree local who has always dreamed of attending PICA, the renowned art school in her hometown. When Molly learns that her PICA scholarship is no longer being funded she desperately searches for a tuition loophole and finds an unexpected answer: softball! If she can corral a crew of art students onto a softball team and win a single game they can earn free tuition, and Molly is just the intense workaholic to make it happen.
Mad Rupert’s art is a great match for Ukazu’s fun, fast-paced writing. Molly’s energetic and often frantic personality is a main driver of the story, and Rupert pairs her personality perfectly with bright colors, dramatic facial expressions, and emphatic body language. Art students are not a subdued type and Rupert and Ukazu appropriately allow them to explode off the page, whether it’s through their own art — which includes everything from ornate chairs to horny gay muscle men — or sharp dialogue. Impossibly, Ukazu and Rupert have crafted a story that highlights the horrors of school debt as well as the ways college campuses gentrify towns and overwrite their histories, all while making the reader laugh out loud. This is a perfect comic.
Kathryn Hemmann: Shima Shinya’s four-volume sci-fi manga Glitch opens in a mundane setting in contemporary Japan: a high school student named Minato Lee has moved to a small rural town with her mother and younger sister Akira. Minato notices that there’s something strange about their new home after a fragmented hole in reality emerges from the ceiling of her classroom. Two of Akira’s friends confirm Minato’s experience, telling her that only some people can see the distortions. The four girls consult with the clerk of a neighborhood corner store, a mild-mannered man in flip-flops with a Biblically accurate angel for a face. He tells them that since the town was constructed on top of open fields thirty years ago, various visitors have been emerging from a mysterious forest. He should know, as he’s one of them.
Shima is a big fan of Star Wars and co-author of The High Republic: The Edge of Balance manga series. Glitch captures the fun “weird creatures in rundown environments” spirit of Star Wars, but the manga also engages with the deeper themes expressed in the movies, especially regarding how the small-scale actions of a diverse coalition are necessary to undermine the mundanity of evil. Glitch handles its portrayal of diversity in a light-handed and clever way, and the “evil” confronted by the characters isn’t what readers might expect. While its story takes time to develop, the strength of Glitch’s art is immediately apparent, as Shima mixes the dynamic poses and expressions of Disney-style animation with the detailed backgrounds and dramatic panel compositions of indie manga. The manga’s fourth and final volume was published in July 2023, and I’m grateful that Yen Press is releasing the series in English translation.
Emily Lauer: I recently read Brittle Joints, by Maria Sweeney, a gorgeous debut that will be coming out from Street Noise Books in July. Sweeney is a painter, and her lush paintings fill the panels of her graphic memoir with a lot of depth. Brittle Joints is about Sweeney’s life with Bruck syndrome, a rare and debilitating bone condition that is getting worse in her adulthood. While most of the book focuses on how she deals with the pain of her condition (and the added pain and frustration of dealing with any chronic condition in our current medical dystopia), I really appreciated that Sweeney also emphasizes other aspects of her life, such as her excellent friends, her romance with her partner, her interest in comics’ depiction of time, and her appreciation of small and beautiful moments like sunsets. All of these add a richness to the details of her focus on her physical pain and deteriorating health. We see Maria Sweeney as a whole person who loves and creates beauty, and that while suffering is a giant part of her life, it does not define her. I’d like to see this book assigned to medical students.
Carrie McClain: Kathryn, I’m screaming a little because I read Shima Shinya’s Lost Lad London and wanted more of their work–thank you for coming through with your rec! Glitch sounds so right up my alley manga-wise, and I’m so interested in the Star Wars work as my nephew and his dad — my older brother — and I are working our way through the current line of Star Wars books. Also if anyone is like me and happens to fall down internet rabbit holes with mangakas at times, please look at Shinya’s Instagram–the Star Wars universe art and fanart alone makes it a fun account to follow!
I purchased The Cartoonist Co-op NSFW Comics Bundle back in February, and I’m just now getting to reading everything — some 20 plus items! One of my faves in the entire bundle was the Ardent comic collection–a work containing explicit erotic material intended only for adults over the age of 18. NSFW! At 97 pages, the PDF I received is a collected edition of ancient fantasy themed comics and art that were serialized on Filthy Figments from 2021-2022. I thought the art looked familiar, and I was happy to discover that it was by Seya Wynn–an award-winning writer & drawer of comics & prose– pseudonym of an artist whose work that I already adore! Ardent focuses on three ancient fantasies, titled The Mariner’s Altar, The Shepherd’s Offering and The Legend of Tomalin.
All three stories are set in ancient times but differ wildly in character with each corresponding story growing in length. My favorite in the collection is the last one: The Legend of Tomalin, which is written as “an erotic retelling of the classic tale” [of Tam Lin] that makes me want to run and look up the original story! Peigi is a healer and the beginning of this comic finds her in a menstruation hunt with herbs and remedies with her dear sister–a wonderful surprise as I love seeing glimpses of what having a period could have looked like in the ancient world. When she finds her own garden of herbs washed out by a storm, she ventures into the forest and finds a small bounty of them offered to her by a mysterious person: Tomalin. He’s a beautiful man who is quite tall, and that she’s slightly wary of, until he kindly offers her what she needs and ushers her to safety.
Peigi, the humble healer gets to know the gentleman and wants to free him with his consent and they work up a plan to do so. This story is my favorite as it delves into grief: the supernatural kind and the kind that bleeds into real life. This story is also my favorite as it connects a narrative that marries the power of autonomy, survivor’s guilt and learning how to progress forward when a life has been stolen. I loved all the small details that the author Wynn includes like moss in the menstruation hunt and someone mentioning pulling a cask of butter from the bog. The artwork here hits a perfect balance of tender and erotic, and I’ve always loved the author’s dedication to illustrating and normalizing naked bodies: body hair, texture, and more. This last story illustrates how two people can find happiness on equal terms that still leaves me swooning every time I reread.
Masha Zhdanova: Nina’s Magic Chest by RD is going on Webtoon Daily Pass in a few days as of me writing this, so I binged it while I could and wow. It’s a very powerful and dark story about addiction and the effects it has on not only your life but your interpersonal relationships, how anyone can develop addictions, and how breaking the cycle isn’t only a matter of willpower but also requires external support. And it does it all using the concept of a magic chest that grants wishes!
Nina just moved to Seoul by herself and is having a hard time when she stumbles on a sparkly pink chest in the trash. She opens it and finds three cards that say “write down your wish,” so she does and is transported into the pastel world of the chest where those wishes come true. But time in the chest passes half as fast as outside, so an hour in the chest is two hours in the real world, and soon Nina is losing sleep and getting fired from her part time job while the world in the chest fulfills her every desire… but only in the chest. And then the chest’s previous owner comes looking for it.
The cute and simplified art style makes it easier to binge through some pretty violent sequences. There is a lot of cartoon gore, some death, abuse, and addiction to a fantasy object. But it’s very clear and intentional about its messaging, and the characters it uses to make that point feel believable to me. I’ll be thinking about it for a while.
