There were three major comics memoirs by women in the fall of 2025, all about the same cluster of topics: eating, cooking, family, and how those things are connected. I don’t know if it’s going to be surprising to anyone that many women have issues around both eating (their bodies are often policed by others)…
A Brief History of a Long War: Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian DominationBy Mariam Naiem, Yulia Vus, and Ivan Kypibida112 pages/Ten Speed Graphics/19.99 As the horrific Ukraine War continues, nearing its fourth anniversary, along comes this wonderful graphic novel. A Brief History of a Long War: Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian Domination niftily blends a contemporary account…
Most lives don’t have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn’t form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements – there’s at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras – but that only means better raw materials for a biographer….
For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format – maybe just from an assumption that’s how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots…
Brian Michael Bendis’s Hollywood memoir-in-comics Fortune & Glory  was republished about two years ago, for no obvious anniversary- or thematically-related reason. At the time, I thought it was just a random new edition, but now it’s clear that it was setting up for what we might as well call a sequel. Fortune & Glory: The…
Most books like this have a subtitle, but not this one. It is just Sartre . Take him as he is, or walk away – those are your options with the book, as it is with all things Sartrean. This is a French graphic novel, written by Mathilde Ramadier and drawn by Anais Depommier. And…
The Velvet Underground were famously the band who had only a very small fanbase while they were around – but, the joke went, every single one of those fans started bands of their own. So they were massively influential, which is nice, but not usually what people start rock bands to achieve. Koren Shadmi’s 2023…
With supposedly-nonfiction books, I’ll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that’s pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we’re being told, how constructed they are, to know how…
The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking. But I don’t want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that’s hugely important for everybody – we all gotta eat, and the vast majority…
The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition. And this is all true, as far as I can…
How do any of us choose the next book to read? Looking at a big list of possibilities – all things you don’t know well, all things new and different – what sparks the thought “that one”? This time, it was hair. On the cover of Time Under Tension , her major 2023 graphic memoir, creator…
Babies are hard. I think everyone knows that intellectually, but maybe not emotionally. My own first child was a needy, demanding, unhappy baby – I don’t want to claim too much; this was a quarter-century ago, and I wasn’t the main caregiver, either – so I have some insight but nothing like expertise. The mother…
