Marvelous Market: Best Comics to Buy March 27

Reason number one to check this book out? The creative team. Drawn by Mike Allred and colored by Laura Allred, this book is guaranteed to have a retro style with modern sensibilities. Combine that with writer Mark Russell of the infamously good Flintstones comic, who worked with the Allreds on the Eisner-nominated Superman: Space Age (the spiritual precursor to this one), this book is a guaranteed hit. Buy it sight unseen.

1956. Kootenai National Forest, Montana. When smokejumper Nathan Garrett perishes in a raging wildfire, his surviving family’s hopes and happiness turn to ashes. Now, one year following Nathan’s death, wife, and mother of two, Jolene Garrett, takes her crumbling family to the Morning Star lookout seeking solace through closure–to scatter her husband’s remains. But something far beyond the reach of their wildest imaginings awaits the Garrett family in the Montana wilderness–something more powerful than their anguish and torment. Something that transcends space and time. No telephones. No electricity. No transportation. No escape.

This debut graphic novel by an up-and-coming star of the German comics scene is an audacious allegory of female resistance and radical acceptance. In the sleepy German countryside live the Annas, cursed to be too tall for their small town. Laughably long-limbed and gangly, their bodies refuse to conform with societal norms of delicate femininity, and the trauma of being different ripples across generations. And yet, there may be a blessing to their burden; like the mighty mountains surrounding their town, they find that there is resilience and strength to be gained from their heightened perspective. Drawn with delightful exaggeration and formal inventiveness, Anna is a tongue-in-cheek, modern-day fairy tale about being “too big” for a narrow-minded world. 

After a trip to Paris, Ingken returns home ready for a break from drugs. Their supportive partner, Lily, is flushed, excited about a new connection she’s made. Although Ingken wants to be happy for her, there’s a discomfort they can’t shake. Sleepless nights fill with an endless scroll of images and headlines about climate disaster. A vague dysphoria simmers under their skin; they are able to identify that like Lily, they are changing, but they’re not sure exactly how and at what pace. Everyone keeps telling them to burn themself to the ground and build themself back up but they worry about the kind of debris that fire might leave behind.

In this real-time work of graphic journalism (posted serially on Facebook), the cartoonist Igort uses the medium of comics to depict the telephone testimonies of Ukrainians as Russia invaded in 2022. In vignettes that grow ever more horrifying ― infiltrating spies, bombed cities, recorded accounts of children whose parents were murdered in front of their eyes, and more ― Igort also relays the events that led up to the invasion, such as the torture and killing of human rights activists. He tells stories of individual struggle and suffering with no resolutions because they are still happening: Of Tetiana, who fled in the middle of the night with her children and whose car broke down on the steppe. And Maksim, who lived in Belgium and went for a five-day family visit and who could not return home when his mother died of COVID due to martial law.

An epic, emotional tale, The Last Queen follows Édouard Roux, a veteran of World War I whose face is left disfigured from fighting in the trenches. Édouard takes refuge in the studio of animal sculptor Jeanne Sauvage, who gives him a new face in the form of a prosthetic mask. The pair embark on an intense romantic relationship. She introduces him to the artistic community of Montmartre, Paris, and Édouard shows her the majestic mountains of his homeland, the Vercors Massif. He tells her the story of the last queen to live in the region, a bear he saw killed as a child. In the heart of the Cirque d’Archiane valley, he reveals to Jeanne an amazing piece of art, seen by few others, which inspires her to create the masterpiece that will make her famous…

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