by Kevin Wolf Content Advisory: These books include a tormented character killing himself. The crisis Lifeline number in the U.S. and Canada is 988, in the U.K. it’s 999; and for elsewhere go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines. In honor of May being Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) month, my graphic novel book club at my local library had read the two-volume series by Gene Luen Yang entitled Boxers & Saints about the attempted expulsion and killing in the year 1900 of Chinese-converted-Christians and non-Chinese (“foreign”) people (including Americans, Europeans, Russians, and Japanese) from China. Throughout my reading and notetaking for… Read More
This Land is our Land – A Blue Beetle Story
By Emiliano Aguilar Jaime Reyes’ teenage years are spent navigating not the fictionalized spaces like Gotham and Metropolis, but the real-world around us in El Paso, Texas. In Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo’s reimaging of Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle’s origin story in This Land Is Our Land: A Blue Beetle Story, Jaime faces making sense of the extraterrestrial world that a strange artifact opens up to him and the xenophobic concerns around “illegal aliens” in his hometown of El Paso, Texas. The artifact, a scarab that fused to his spine, grants Jaime access to a durable, shape-shifting exosuit. Through the exosuit,… 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
Welcome to the New World
awaiting review