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Comics Plus Spotlight: July 2024 | Rob’s Advisory

by | Jul 3, 2024 | Comic Spotlight, Comics Plus, Resources

New additions to Comics Plus

Here at Comics Plus, we call this time of the year the “Summer Swoon,” as it’s Summer Vacation for most of our school customers and our youngest readers’ have more competition for their time and attention. This also means more titles for our older readers will be appearing on the main Popular list for the next several weeks.

While I always have some great selections for younger readers to spotlight each month (especially for our ever-growing Picture Book collection), I’ll leave them in the honorable mentions below so I can keep it short and sweet. This month, I’m spotlighting picks for our older readers, especially those who, like me, spent their own childhood Summer Vacations with their noses buried in a comic book.

TEEN

My sole earnest suggestion for teens this month has to go to the courageously insightful Becoming Who We Are: Real Stories About Growing Up Trans (A Wave Blue World), an anthology of nine true stories, each sharing unique perspectives on individual journeys of self-discovery. Some stories are quite challenging, while others are wildly encouraging, but each one is insightful and engaging in their own way. This is exactly the sort of book that can serve as an invaluable tool for understanding the challenges and triumphs of young trans members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

YOUNG ADULT

The YA crowd has some fun new titles to choose from this month — so long as those choices are all Science Fiction!

Arca (IDW) is a classic “dystopian-sci-fi-with-a-twist” tale that fans of settings like Logan’s Run, Snowpiercer, and Fallout are sure to get a kick out of. I’m also definitely a big fan of the liminal space aesthetic, so the ever-weird George Wylesol’s (Internet Crusader, Curses) eerily surreal 2120 (Avery Hill) checks a lot of boxes for me. Structured like a classic choose your own adventure (complete with the requisite page flipping) suffused with an old skool video game feel, this book reads like an existential point-and-click adventure through The Backrooms… without the benefit of actually clicking through. Set your reader to the “Show 2 Page” option and be prepared to do some jumping around if you want to experience the book “properly.”

Once again, though, it’s the work of Owen D. Pomery (Victory Point) that takes my #1 spot for YA titles this month with The Hard Switch (Avery Hill). In a past advisory, I described Mr. Pomery’s style as  “the charm of Mœbius meets the precision of Chris Ware,’ and this is just the sort of book that allows him to flex those muscles to the fullest. It’s easy to let yourself get lost in the details of the many ships, structures, vistas, and alien characters that populate every carefully crafted corner of this graphic novel, but its characters and concepts pull you through them with the force of gravity. All good sci-fi is allegorical, of course, so in a galaxy where all the fuel that allows for interstellar travel is about to run out (a stern echo of our own fossil fuel crisis), will a clever crew of scavengers risk becoming stranded away from all civilization in their search for an alternative energy source? Plus their spaceship’s engineer is a telepathic octopus! Maybe I should have led with that…

ADULT

For our mature readers, there are plenty of new selections as well… so long as you like the unsettling, that is.

First up, horror mogul Joe Hill (Locke & Key, Road Rage) expands on his legacy with Rain (Image Comics), a terrifying apocalyptic vision of a world transformed overnight when deadly crystalline needles begin to rain down all over the world. Many of your favorite dystopian tropes are on full display — societal collapse, doomsday cults, personal despair, as well as a deeper puzzle to assemble if you’re paying attention — all adding up to an intense thrillride from start to finish. And speaking of disturbing horror, Gannibal (Ablaze), the manga which inspired the Hulu series of the same name is a different sort of thrillride, sorta like Hot Fuzz meets The Hills Have Eyes, set in very rural Japan. This one’s worth the read just for the intense pacing alone.

My #1 pick for adult readers goes to the raw, visceral, yet extremely well-researched piece of historical fiction, The Day the Klan Came to Town (PM Press), which serves as a poignant window into a deeply troubling event in recent American history. I admire creators of stories inspired by true events who are able to cleverly “fill in the gaps” left by history, but considering how precious little is recorded about the victims of a KKK rally-turned-riot in 1923’s Pennsylvania, this graphic novel serves a seemingly wider purpose. Only a few recorded lines survive, mostly in the words of their enemies, but the fictional characters serving as surrogates for the very real people from a very real time and place are a commendable way to remember the lives and experiences of American citizens whom history has sadly forgotten. It’s another important read in our ever-growing library of important reads.

Honestly, that’s just a small sample of the great comics, manga, and picture books added to Comics Plus last month. With literally thousands of titles to choose from across a wide range of genres, I could keep writing forever! Be sure to check in every month for more highlights, and browse our expanding list of past Rob’s Advisory selections.

Until next month, here are some more honorable mentions that (mostly for space reasons) didn’t quite make my list, but you may also enjoy checking out:

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Rob Randle is the Production Director for LibraryPass, and has worked in and around the comic book industry in various capacities, including as a book reviewer for the NY Journal of Books, and a judge for various comic book industry awards—the 2006 Eisner Awards, among others. Before joining LibraryPass, he had been the Director of Publishing for iVerse Media LLC since 2010, and prior to that was a purchasing manager for Diamond Comic Distributors where he helped to manage the monthly Previews catalog for close to a decade starting in 2002. Additionally, Rob occasionally does freelance work as a comics creator, and is the author of the critically acclaimed graphic novel Serial Artist. Rob holds a B.A. of Illustration from the Maryland Institute, College of Art (MICA).