Moan is one of Junji Ito’s better horror manga collections. It still has the same problems of other Ito books - character motivations aren’t so much underdeveloped as ignored and the endings are bonkers and often abrupt, while the shortest stories, included at the end almost like B-sides, are always the most forgettable - but the stories here are more entertaining than in others.
The Land of Sweet Forever is one of the literary events of 2025: a new book by Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, comprising 8 unpublished short stories - two of which feature her immortal character Jean Louise Finch - and 8 previously published nonfiction pieces.
Joe Wilmot runs the biggest movie theatre in his small town - but things aren’t going well for Joe. Stuck in a loveless marriage and with business failing, he and his wife Elizabeth hatch a plan to commit insurance fraud: take advantage of their double indemnity insurance by faking Elizabeth’s death in a fire then claiming the cashout. Except Joe isn’t as smart as he thinks and the people he’s wronged over the years are lining up to make sure this time he gets what’s coming to him…
Laura has a one night stand with a stranger she never sees again and gets preggo. Deciding to keep the baby, she raises her daughter Emma as a single mother, though luckily she belongs to an upper class Manhattan family which makes things easier. Laura & Emma is the story of the mother and daughter over the course of 15 years.
Lordy, life is difficult for some people, eh? Kabi Nagata’s previous autobiographical mangas have focused on her difficulties with her homosexuality, then becoming a drunk, then dealing with pancreatitis as a result of said boozing, and now her latest book, My Twisted Eating Disorder, is about her bulimia! She even mentions at the end of this book that there are other struggles she’s avoiding discussing so I dread to think what other burdens this poor woman is going through.
Bill “Dusty” Rhodes has it tough - he’d like to go to college but, with his mother out of the picture, he’s got to support his mentally-ailing, recently unemployed father by working nights at the local swanky hotel as a bellboy. There, he has to put up with a difficult manager, but meets interesting people like the gangster Tug and the beautiful Marcia Hillis, a newly-arrived guest at the hotel and an older woman who’s taken a shine to Dusty. Will she be the respite he craves from his life of unending drudgery?
Like a lot of cartoonists who became dads - James Kochalka, Jeffrey Brown, Guy DeLisle, to name just a few - Pascal Girard has made a bunch of comics about his kid and domestic life. Pastimes is a collection of four-panels-a-page diary strips, mostly about being a dad to his young daughter Lucie.
What’s “epic” about a story that’s only 58 pages long?!Ok, before I sound like a complete idiot, let me qualify what I’m about to say by first saying:
Hulk: Gray is a retelling of Hulk’s origin story. So: gamma bomb goes off, Bruce Banner caught in the blast, Ahab-like Ross immediately makes Hulk his white whale, and Hulk smashes army stuff. Hulk was originally gray when he appeared in the comics, hence the subtitle, and then eventually settled into the iconic green shortly afterwards, forevermore.
Ezekiel Farragut is in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. He’s also a heroin addict. There’s no story, just Farragut going through his time at the prison.
Clinton Brown is the best reporter at the Pacific City Courier, a small Californian newspaper - but he has a secret. Horribly maimed in the war after accidentally wandering onto an anti-personnel mine, Brown has left his wife believing their marriage is over now that he no longer has a penis - and worries that, now that she’s returned to try to change his mind, she will tell others about his loss. The only way to keep his secret: murder…
Besides a collection of his unpublished short stories appearing the year after his death in 2013, Picket Line is the first new fiction from Elmore Leonard in 11 years. An unpublished novella from his archive, Picket Line is bundled in with a couple of previously published short stories, Chick Killer and Ice Man, as they match Picket Line’s theme of law enforcement figures butting heads with ethnic minorities.
