My Favorite Graphic Novels of July 2024

I don’t know what’s more impressive: how many good comics there are every month, or my ability to curate them. You’re right, it’s probably a tie.

Don’t hesitate to let me know any of your favorites I may have missed via dave@comicbookherald.com!

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Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You

There are approximately 4-5 public sources I trust for comics recommendations these days: Sktchd, Comics Beat, Book Riot, CBCC, and my local library. The rare 6th option is floating past a rec on the artist formerly known as social media, which is exactly how I learned of Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You, a rom-com manga from Junishi via SquareEnix Manga. As is my way, an inability to find the manga via any of my normal sources led me to purchase a copy through my local comic shop (my decidedly not “with it” cashier said, “Here’s the one you ordered… uh… it has a long name.”) It’s hardly going to be one I hang on to pass on to my children, but it’s a simple, sweet and silly manga that provided just what I needed to detox with in between more serious works.

The premise is that a middle-aged man stuck in a boring corporate job has but one joy in life: seeing the young beautiful cashier who sells him cigarettes. While many jokes are made at his expense, it’s a deliberately non-sexual infatuation, which only grows as that cashier puts on a disguise and begins – you guessed it! – smoking behind the supermarket with the clueless, sweaty guy (you can put that description on my tombstone). Tonally, it reminds me a lot of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, although it’s nowhere near as funny. Nonetheless, it’s a nice, feel-good read and a light change of pace.

Mark Twain’s War Prayer

This Fantagraphics graphic novel is a bit of a historical/literary curio, as Mark Twain’s War Prayer is a satirical, poetic short story written in 1910 (the year Twain died). Illustrator Seymour Chwast accompanies Twain’s scathing indictment of religious celebration of war – Twain is particularly savage towards prayers for the troops, and all that entails for the other side – with a mixture of cartooning, collage, textual design, and artistic virtuosity. Chwast really finds their groove selling the indignity and atrocity of war as Twain hits his stride with the actual parodic prayer and lines like “help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land.” It’s perfectly and sadly evergreen dark humor poking right at the heart of our many, many modern religious crusades, and a fresh reminder of Twain’s vitality.

My Fairy Godfather

Here’s the challenge with My Fairy Godfather, a new Fantagraphics graphic novel out now from Robert Mailer Anderson and Jon Sack: It plays like a classic movie. This is both praise and my hesitation in evaluating the work. On one hand, the characters and world of My Fairy Godfather, where a teen girl loses her parents and moves in with her gay godfather in the decidedly conservative Liberal, Kansas, are pitch perfect. Anderson writes deeply compelling interactions and small-town tensions, and Sack sells the characterizations with the skill of Daniel Clowes at his most earnest. It’s teen angst mixed up in middle-America bigotry, with a healthy side of finding connection through art.

What’s the hold up?

You know this story. You know every beat of this story. There are no alarms, and no surprises throughout the entire work. So yes, while I enjoyed and recommend the read, somewhere past the halfway point I realized that everything was playing just a bit too much like a movie I’ve seen before. Nonetheless, My Fairy Godfather is a really well-produced affirmation of found family, queer acceptance and allowing people to improve.

Korgi: The Complete Tale

You may never forgive me for this, but I have to speak my truth: I don’t like dogs. I didn’t have dogs growing up, and was chased and threatened by them multiple times. Subconsciously, I associate dogs with a similar threat level to seeing a coyote walking down the street, except I’m more confident the coyote will run away. Now, as an adult I’ve known many wonderful, loving dogs, and certainly respect the bond between canine and pet-owner. But I also know quite clearly that until my kids start to demand a pet, and I inevitably lose, I won’t be a dog person.

Fortunately, this is no way impedes my ability to enjoy Christian Slade’s Korgi. Slade is a preposterously gifted illustrator, launching a young girl and her dog into all kinds of wordless fantastical journeys with nothing but a heavily detailed pen. Korgi is reminiscent of Jim Woodring’s Frank, another wordless series of strange black-and-white worlds driven entirely by their creators artistic prowess and ability to sell story entirely through visuals. There’s a real thrill to the endless possibility of one cartoonist’s pen in Korgi, with weird, strange mystical fantasy that always take four left turns you don’t expect, and looks great doing so.

The Last Delivery

Evan Dahm is a fantastic cartoonist, and The Last Delivery is a gorgeous yet sinister glimpse into the haunted house of their imagination. This anthropomorphic fantasy world finds an innocent Turtle delivery boy seeking to deliver a single package, only to sink deeper and deeper into an Edgar Allen Poe-esque party of horrors, where each new party-goer seems more deranged than the next. There’s a surprise nausea to the madness as the cute and deluded designs indicate a light-hearted comedy, and the ensuing fever dream of Alice in Wonderland inspired head-chopping is anything but light.

This would all be enough to satisfy that classic appetite to see Kermit the Frog tortured endlessly, but where Dahm excels is through a flexible metaphor for the impact on the grotesquely rich on the genuine salt of the Earth committed to their meaningless work. So, yes, there’s the shock from watching our poor last deliverer sustain near mortal wounds, but there’s a more unsettling effect via a work that reminds me I’m wasting my damn time on a dead end job! Far be it from me to use nausea multiple times to sell the effectiveness of a comic I quite like, but it works, dammit!

Barda

I love that DC’s committed to a middle-grade line of graphic novels, but mostly they haven’t been for me (often quite literally: I’m only middle-grade at heart when someone starts blasting Linkin Park). Ngozi Ukazu’s Barda is a rare exception, a compelling and heartfelt look into the early days of Big Barda and Scott Free on Apokolips. Ukazu’s Check, Please is among my favorite comics of all time, but it’s fascinating watching her navigate Jack Kirby’s 4th World with reverence, horror, and awe, and very little of the webcomic humor that made Check, Please such a runaway hit.

The graphic novel is at its most effective exploring the traumas Granny Goodness inflicts upon Barda and her Female Furies to bludgeon them into the weapons Darkseid’s Apokolips requires. If you’ve read Kirby’s 4th World – or virtually any DC Comic involving Barda since – you know how this ends, but Ukazu still sells the difficulty of Barda overcoming the pain and manipulations inflicted upon her, and the lessons she’s been taught all her life. The saga of Aurelie is particularly haunting, even within the confines of middle-grade, and Barda renewed my passion for the Fourth World as a whole!

Age 16

At an absolute minimum, I love Rosena Fung’s structural ambition and scope in Age 16, out now from Annick Press. The gorgeous graphic novel tracks one Chinese-Canadian family line, a grandmother, mother, and daughter, with chapters of what each of them were like and experienced at the Age of 16. So we begin with 16-year old Roz, in the more familiar (for me at least!) setting of Toronto in 2000, before cutting back to her mother’s time in 1972 Hong Kong and her mother’s time in 1954 Guangdong. It’s a brilliant way to examine why parents act the way they do, and what forces shaped them to fixate on the things that occupy their brains. Fung not only expertly illustrates how Roz’s mother (Lydia) plays into her developing eating disorder, but how Lydia experienced similar cutting comments from her mother about her weight and eating in Hong Kong. Fung draws consistent mirrors between the women’s experiences at 16 despite their vast regional and cultural differences. It’s the kind of rare insight every 16 year old craves when they look at their parent and shout “Why are you like this?!”

Fung is a wonderful artist, capable of expressive character action and strategic yet captivating color choices dictating the flavor of each shift in era. The Toronto era teenage angst reminds me in part of the recent, critically-lauded Roaming by Mariko Tamaki, with the blending backdrop of history that made Feeding Ghosts one of my favorite graphic novels from earlier in the year. Age 16 is a striking portrait of 50 years of shared family history, and how the past shapes behavior and relationships across generations.

Food School

Jade Armstrong’s 2022 Shortbox Comics Fair entry gets a physical graphic novel release from Conundrum Press, and it’s another common win for the Zainab Akhtar curated comics fair. Food School is Armstrong’s self-described Josei slice-of-life look at young non-binary character named Olive as they navigate a three month stint in a program designed to help with their eating disorder. Armstrong treats the illness with compassion and careful examination, but also finds plenty of space for comedy, characterization, and relatable relationship drama. Armstrong’s cartooning is simple which belies the complexity of facial expression selling emotion and feeling. Likewise, the clean panels help exaggerate the Manga-influenced explosion of emotion during pivotal scenes.

At 78 pages and an adorably wee package, it’s a literal light read, but perfectly satisfying in narrative density. Armstrong is an immensely talented cartoonist, and when I wasn’t laughing or learning, I was impressed by Armstrong’s subtle ability to weave in gender dysphoria into a work already full of complicated, sensitive topics.

Final Cut

There’s a real comfort, an excited relief, in sinking into the work of a celebrated comics master. I find this especially true for living legend cartoonists who so clearly see the literary potential of graphic novels, and trod along at their own pace and process far outside the week-to-week grind of the direct marketplace ecosystem. It’s the feeling I have with new comics by Chris Ware, Emil Ferris or Lynda Barry, last year’s Monica by Daniel Clowes, and now Final Cut by Charles Burns. Readers most likely know Burns via Black Hole, an all-time great work completed from 1995 to 2005. Otherwise, apart from the oft-overlooked X’ed Out trilogy, Burns’s oeuvre is a bit less clear than say Clowes’ or Ware’s, making them a more mysterious, seemingly reclusive cartoonist. That changes to some extent in 2024 with two releases from Burns: Kommix, a series of comic book covers from imagined comics of the Silver Age, and Final Cut, a full graphic novel released via Pantheon.

In Final Cut, Burns returns to the lens of confused young adults set amid a backdrop of nostalgic vague Americana. The work centers on a young man’s artistic obsessions, and how these dreams interfere with human connection. Through the lens of Brian, the young would-be filmmaker, and his lead actress, artistic muse, and crush, Laurie, Burns subtly blends reality and filmmaker’s visions into a coalesced whole where it’s not always clear what is or isn’t happening. Unlike the X’ed Out trilogy, though, Final Cut never fully succumbs to Burns’ more surreal nightmares. There’s ample tension created by the B-movie horror obsessions, particularly with Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, but Burns never quite lets on whether or not the work is about to go full pulp. It’s a challenging blend, adding a layer of gripping uncertainty to what would otherwise be a fairly straightforward story of young artists finding their way through a project that can never quite measure up to the visions they have for it. Burns fully inhabits Brian in particular, through gorgeous alien invaders and versatile sketchbook drawings of everything from alien self-portraits to lushly rendered sketches of Laurie. It’s a lived-in, esoteric and compelling work that encourages re-reads.

Attaboy

Holy Samus Aran, I love this comic. Attaboy is the self-published graphic novella of cartoonist Tony McMillan, now given wider publishing by Mad Cave Studios, and it’s the secret in-depth history of a classic video game that may or may not be real. The author sets out to describe and document an instruction manual of their memories of the childhood favorite, unlocking the unreality of the mysterious classic as the book progresses. It’s a gorgeously illustrated love letter to Megaman and Metroidvania, with an unexpected gut-punching message at the center.

McMillan works in the DIY tactile style of Michel Fiffe (Copra) or Jesse Lonergan (Planet Paradise), with this brilliant blend of childlike enthusiasm of taking colored pencil to paper, and the completely untouchable skill of a tenured professional. Attaboy is awash in swirling, kinetic dreams of a videogame universe, as the narration builds towards deeper meaning and understanding how art helps us process the real struggles of our day to day. It’s particularly focused on absent father figures and single mothers, and how children relate to both, but even more broadly Attaboy uses its svelte weight to reiterate the power of our entertainment at its best. This is one of my absolute favorite comics of 2024, and I can’t wait to read more from McMillen in the future.