Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies by Léonie Bischoff
The cartoonist Léonie Bischoff traces the life of the prolific writer in this lushly colored graphic novel. It begins with Nin struggling to reconcile the man she married (who had artistic aspirations) with the banker she finds herself living with in the Parisian suburbs. Soon, her obsession with June Miller leads to inspiration. Nin’s life and art, the truth and fiction, are further intertwined as she recounts her many sexual liaisons including those with Henry Miller (whom she and her husband subsidize so he can write the controversial Tropic of Cancer), her psychoanalysts, and even her father.
Dear Mini: A Graphic Memoir, Book One by Natalie Norris
This debut graphic memoir (the first of two books, with Book Two coming in 2025), is a bittersweet coming of age story that chronicles the author’s teenage experiences with sexual assault, PTSD, and resiliency. Dear Mini is not a cautionary tale, however, it is a vivid (at turns hilariously and uncomfortably so) depiction of adolescent agency in the face of trauma, tracing Norris’s journey from wayward wild-child to harnessing her adult voice after almost a decade of silence.
Minami’s Lover by Shungiku Uchida
Originally appearing in the underground/alternative manga magazine Garo in the 1980s and adapted for television several times, the Japanese pop culture sensation Minami’s Lover is the raunchy, moving, funny story of two high schoolers’ romantic relationship when one of them shrinks down to six inches tall.
The Planetoid And Other Stories by Joe Orlando and Al Feldstein
These stories, illustrated by Joe Orlando and scripted by editor/writer Al Feldstein, serve up classic O. Henry–style shock endings, including a mind-bending time-travel twister in which a man visits the past and (unknowingly) romances his own mother (think about it), a gender-switching look at a future where women are the breadwinners and men are the homemakers, another future where marriages are limited by law to three-year contracts, a good old-fashioned “planets collide” shocker, an animal rights parable, plus lots of rollicking space opera, aliens, and, of course, interplanetary monsters (some of them human).
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