What is Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn? Black and white. Two towers, two parties divided. A playlist for the apocalypse. Children without a country, abandoned twins, an alternate dystopian future of our current dystopic United States. This is one of those books that aims in its three hundred odd pages to tackle the largest and most treacherous fault lines underlying the country. I can't say I understand every part of it, or that I think every scene works. But if you are what some would call a "dangerous reader" I would recommend this as a particularly dangerous book.
The Art of Charlie Hock Chan Chye by Sonny Liew (a frequent collaborator with the MacArthur Grant winning comics artist Gene Luen Yang) paints a picture of Singapore in transition. It does so with a dizzying array of art: photographs, doodles, portraits, and comics drawn from each era of its recent history. All this is juxtaposed with the graphic memoir of Chye himself, the country’s greatest—and unjustly forgotten—cartoonist. But there’s a catch: Charlie Hock Chan Chye never existed! Sonny Liew draws from manga, superhero comics and newspaper strips to create Chye’s body of work. The results are fictional, yes. But it is a dazzling creative high wire act, inextricable from politics, writing in the lives and times of thinkers, artists and revolutionaries who were very much real. The Art of Charlie Hock Chan Chye proves that art is political, and politics a form of personal expression.
On the mysterious island of Barbara, Aoba lives in peace with her guardian and other strange beasts. But in the near future, the dream investigator Watarai struggles to understand why Aoba ate the hearts of her parents (who committed double suicide) and fell into a coma. This is just the beginning of Otherworld Barbara, the newest translated work of 70s manga goddess Moto Hagio and one of the weirdest comics I’ve read in quite some time! There are easier places to start (I’d recommend her classic Heart of Thomas) but there’s a reason this book was the first comic in twenty-three years to win Japan’s coveted SF Taisho Award.
