Etelka Lehoczky

M.T. Anderson's new graphic novel — with gorgeous art by Jo Rioux — adapts the old legend of the drowned city of Ys, giving it better, fuller female characters and a timely environmental message.

Europe's favorite cartoon Gaul has bopped plenty of Romans, but he's never really hit big in America. A rebooted version of Asterix, with a new translation from the French, is aimed at changing that.

Bishakh Som's new comics collection is uncanny and hard to categorize — science-fictiony, mythic and humanistic, without making any particular assumptions about where humans as a species are going.

Nicholas Gurewitch scratched images into clay with a stylus for this tale of Death's visit to an analyst — who helps him come to terms with Death Jr.'s lack of interest in the family business.

Passmore's timely new graphic novel is set in an unnamed city whose football team has just won the Super Bowl, setting off fiery riots. It's a biting satire of political action, race and capitalism.

Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg's beloved young adult comic returns with a collection of old and new stories — and this time, our art-loving heroines are a little more grown up.

Gou Tanabe's graphic novel adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's novella makes its monsters both terrifying and weirdly human. Even if space spheres aren't your thing, Tanabe's art still prompts wonder.

Filmmaker and author Darcy van Poelgeest's sweeping dystopian epic sometimes falls short on plot and character, but it's redeemed by virtuoso work from its illustrator, colorist and letterer.

Comic artist Lynda Barry has a new book, Making Comics, and a MacArthur Genius Grant (though she says she hung up on the MacArthur folks repeatedly because she thought it was a robocall).

Spoiler alert: Cecil Castellucci never became a filmmaker, despite her Hollywood dreams. But her new graphic memoir winningly recounts how she found her way as a novelist and comics writer.

Connor Willumson's graphic novel follows the trail of a mysterious athlete, or possibly an actor — gawky, pale, never takes his mirror shades off — running through the desert outside Las Vegas.

Artist Peter Kuper has adapted Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness in a way that undercuts Conrad's depiction of Africa as a place of existential horror, and centers the African characters.

Writer Ben Blacker and artist Mirka Andolfo put a lively twist on the classic Stepford Wives story in their graphic novel Hex Wives, about a reincarnating coven of witches and their male adversaries.

Legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch's new book is packed with monkeys, cartoon magpies, and even Jesus; it starts with an account of killing time after eye surgery and gets wilder from there.

Graphic novelist and illustrator Jon J. Muth's dreamy paintings expand the scope of Stanislaw Lem's story about an astronaut in a cramped one-man spaceship, who finds himself stuck in a time loop.

Ware's new graphic novel follows six extremely ordinary people — a teacher, a bully, a father — and meditates on the significance of their everyday actions, and the webs of connection between them.

This month sees the arrival of a handful of bold new graphic novels aimed at young adult readers, with unexpected topics and settings from a contemporary Chinese American community to the Old West.

Magical realism can be tricky, but Tillie Walden gets it right in a spare yet powerful tale of two women on a road trip through West Texas who pick up a possibly magical cat.

Graphic novelist Hazel Newlevant's memoir of their time on a youth forestry crew addresses issues of race, class and gender with delicately shaded imagery that asks readers to slow down and think.

Natasha Tara Petrović and Ali Leriger De La Plante's tale of a lonely robot sentry is packed with gorgeously inhuman visuals — but it's also packed with interesting ideas that never quite pan out.