by Matt Peters Content advisory: Strong language and brief depictions of criminal violence and traumatic injuries In Shadow Doctor, writer Peter Calloway and artist Georges Jeanty tell the story of an early-career doctor in the 1930s whose entry into the medical profession took a perilous detour. Set in Prohibition-era Chicago, the graphic novel follows the early life of Peter Calloway’s real-life grandfather, Dr. Nathaniel Calloway. Dr. Calloway was a Black physician who was steered into a world of underground clinical care, serving one of Chicago’s most notorious gangs. Running a secret clinic in a downtown apartment, Dr. Calloway… Read More
Surgeon X – The Path of Most Resistance
by Matt Peters Surgeon X: The Path of Most Resistance is a graphic novel that blends dystopian fiction, mystery, and medical drama in a fast-paced story about a global public health crisis. Set in London in 2036, Surgeon X imagines what will happen as the world enters a post-antibiotic era, a time when bacterial infections become increasingly difficult to treat, because bacterial evolution has outpaced pharmaceutical science. In this imagined future, antibiotic-resistant strains have emerged, leaving clinicians all but helpless when treating pneumonia, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, and other infections. In the real world of today, medical experts have predicted that… Read More
Navigating With You
by Soph Myers-Kelley The fictional story Navigating With You centers around two new students entering Durham Western High School. Neesha Sparks has spastic diplegia cerebral palsy and is a vocal disability activist with a knack for costume design and love of the (fabricated) manga, Super Navigator Nozomi. Gabby Graciana is a bubbly surfer type who also happens to love the same manga. Both are BIPOC, young teenagers, and stand out (though for different reasons), leading to an immediate clash with the school principal. The principal, having been made aware of Neesha’s accessibility needs via her mother, still incorrectly says Neesha’s… Read More
Navigating With You
awaiting review
Cyclopedia Exotica
By Sarah Tillery Cyclopedia Exotica is a graphic novel for an adult audience that covers the various trials, tribulations, and discriminations that a minority goes through in the everyday acts of living. It does so through the metaphor of the fictional people, the cyclopes, who–in Cyclopedia Exotica’s world–have lived in tandem with their two-eye brethren, but not always easily. A typical cyclops (the singular like person, while cyclopes is the plural, like people) is a humanoid vaguely related to the creatures of Greek Mythology, who possess one eye and one pectoral, as opposed to the two-eyed humans two eyes and… Read More
Chunky
by Paul Mitchell Published by Katherine Tegen Books/HarperAlley, imprints of HarperCollins that are aimed at younger readers, Chunky describes the high school experiences of Yehudi (‘Hudi’) Mercado whilst living in Texas with his Mexican Jewish family. When not playing with his sister’s Barbie dolls, Hudi spends his time daydreaming about being a famous comedian on Saturday Night Live. Accident prone and overweight, an asthmatic kid with only one lung, Hudi has a hard time fitting in with the culture of athletic excellence that is encouraged by his school and embodied by his father. As we are told at the outset,… Read More