July 15, 2026
Marvel is back and publishers hope strong sales carry over to 2026’s event. more 
Rachel Hope Cleves alleges that Tillie Walden’s graphic history is an uncredited adaptation of her own book of the same name, published in 2014 by Oxford University Press, while Drawn & Quarterly says it “stands by” Walden’s work and her citations of Cleves’s scholarship. more
Comics have become an integral part of the American Library Association’s annual conference, which this year drew a star-studded line-up of creators including Maia Kobabe, Joe Sacco, Raina Telgemeier, and James Tynion IV. more
Four months after dismissing founder and CEO Mike Richardson, the comics publisher has unveiled a “new three-pillar leadership structure” headed by Tim Wiesch, Vanessa Todd-Holmes, and Melissa Teeman. more
Deniz Camp and Javier Rodriguez’s Absolute Martian Manhunter and Joe Sacco’s The Once and Future Riot are among the nominees for the annual honors, which will be presented at New York Comic Con in October. Notably, the only nominations for the “Big Two” superhero publishers were both for DC’s Absolute line. more
Discover Seeds of Anxiety*, the latest horror series from Masaaki Nakayama, celebrated author of PTSD Radio. In this collection of short stories, the mundane takes a horror twist as we get pulled into increasingly anxiety-inducing scenes. From being stalked at night to seeing faces in our walls, don't miss out on this eclectic collection! (Sponsored) More
This week on More to Come, co-host Heidi “The Beat” MacDonald talks to legendary comics creator Frank Miller, the creator of comics classics The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, and 300 about his life, his art and his new autobiography Push the Wall. more
With San Diego Comic-Con fast approaching, the Eisner-nominated writer of Absolute Wonder Woman is gearing up to take on a new heroine—Buffy the Vampire Slayer. more
The digital manga platform, a relatively new player in the burgeoning North American market, has launched a premium subscription service for English-language titles, expanding on its initial pay-per-download revenue model. more
This past May, the comics creator made history as the first Black woman to be nominated for Best Writer at the Eisner Awards for her work on Street Sharks, Temporal, and Roots of Madness. more
For this feature, we’re soliciting pitches on trends in crime and crime-noir comics and graphic novel series, with new trade volumes releasing between fall 2026 and spring 2027 (new volumes out October 2026–April 2027). more
Billy Bat, the new release by manga master Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki, delivers a headspinning tale of mystery, murder, and comic books set in post-WWII Japan. The book opens with a wacky hardboiled detective tale cast with cartoon animals but quickly becomes the story of Kevin Yamagata, a Japanese-American cartoonist once stationed in Tokyo, who discovers he may have plagiarized Billy Bat, the star of his popular American comic book. Yamagata returns to war-ravaged Tokyo in 1949 looking for the origins of the character only to be dragged into a labyrinthine conspiracy that combines Cold War hysteria with the history of manga and American comic books.
In this 10-page excerpt, we’re introduced to Billy Bat, hardboiled bat detective, and his new client, a beautiful doggy dame who’s in big trouble. This is the original Japanese language manga; panels should be read from right to left on the page and r. to l. within each panel. Billy Bat by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki, translated by Kristi Iwashiro, is out now from the Abrams Kana imprint.
This viciously satiric—and just-plain vicious—first volume kicks off a splenetic crime series led by Grand Theft Auto writer Houser, cofounder of Rockstar Games, with Eisner-winning artist Lapham (Stray Bullets). The soap opera of a storyline plumbs the divisions, addictions, and illusions that power contemporary America. The series echoes Grand Theft Auto’s ethos of pitiless parody, go-for-broke violence, and charged commentary on the corrosive effects of hyper-capitalism and id-driven masculinity. Though this volume wraps before any arcs have resolved, fans of bad-boy crime-comedy who dig outré splatter won’t mind. more
The ambitious graphic novel debut by actor Cusack (Things That Can and Cannot Be Said) features a daring road trip adventure as drawn by Argentinian artist Noé (Aldana). Set in 1972, the tale of two outlaws on the run—taciturn Johnson and skeptical Tina Louise—is divided into three acts. The first, modeled on French New Wave films like Breathless, finds the duo traversing the American heartland and developing a wary bond. Things get weirder in the second act. From there, chaos and otherworldly beings enter the frame as the narrative transforms into an increasingly surreal combination of kaiju films and Hunter S. Thompson. Cusack is unlikely to quit his day job, but this suggests he could have a viable backup plan in comics. more
A Christmas fable gets a sociopolitical booster shot in this unexpectedly stirring holiday tale from Finnish debut creator Hägg and Croatian artist Morian (20th Century Men). In a frozen northern city called The Coalition, Peggy Stones and her fellow workers labor under the rule of the cruel Governor Glass, who pits his subjects against one another as they struggle to get the coal they need to heat their homes by meeting their annual quota of bad behavior. The revolutionary spirit of this fantasy will draw in readers no matter the season. more
Gory murder mystery, social science fiction, and teen dramedy combine in this outrageous and irresistible mutt of a manga from Beastars series creator Itagaki. In a near-future Japan, “humanized” cats and dogs are the answer to declining human birth rates. Itagaki draws rangy dog breeds with visceral delight. She’s fully aware of the outlandishness of her premise, as when all the dog students line up to sniff each others’ rears, but the murder plot is rendered with visual flair reminiscent of classic suspense manga like Naoki Urasawa’s Monster. Readers will want to sit and stay with this one. more
Skelly (Maids) once again tosses cute, sexy, gruesome, and strangely touching comics stylings into a witches’ brew of canny feminist horror. Teenage Catholic schoolgirl Dolores has gymnastics skills and money troubles, so she ventures out to audition at a strip club called Heaven on the outskirts of a desert town. But Heaven can’t always be found, and when the building does intermittently appear, the dancers inside are tormented by a painful noise and blood comes out of the furnace grates. Skelly’s childlike drawings of sweet-faced girls engaged in horrifying activities look like wickedly fun paper dolls. It’s not quite as ambitious as Maids, but this dark fantasy about female friendships and problematic found families has plenty of bite. more
- McDuffie Award Finalists Announced: Flip by Ngozi Ukazu and Crownsville by Rodney Barnes and Elia Bonetti are among the finalists for this year’s Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics, per the Beat.
- DC Cracks Down on Price Gouging: DC is having a lot of success with Absolute Batman, especially because of numerous variant covers, but the publisher has instituted new rules to prevent retailers from price gouging, according to PopVerse.
- Gorilla Grodd Comes to the DCU: Jimmy Tatro has been cast as the telepathic talking gorilla in the upcoming Superman spinoff series starring Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, per Entertainment Weekly.
- ‘Game of Thrones’ Gets Birthday Makeover: The Folio Society is celebrating 30 years of George R.R. Martin’s series with a new special edition of the first novel bound in bespoke “dragonskin” leather—and priced at $2,200.
- Conundrum Press Turns 30: Founder Andy Brown looks back on three decades of independent comics publishing in a deep-dive interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books.
- Kim-Joy Tackles Tech and Anxiety: The former Great British Bake-Off star has announced her second graphic novel, Quiet, about a girl whose mental health struggles are exacerbated by a robot companion, in an exclusive interview with People.
- Star Tours: To mark the 50th anniversary of Star Wars in 2027, an all-new museum exhibition titled Star Wars: The Experience will debut in Philadelphia next year before embarking on a 5-year tour of North America.
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PW graphic novels reviews editor and "Stargazing" cohost: Meg Lemke
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