Author: Jack Wallace

Comprised of Meredith Gran’s popular webcomic’s first two years of strips, Octopus Pie Vol. 1 tells the story of two twenty-somethings living together in New York. Ning is the uptight one who works at Ollie’s Organix, and Hannah is her friend from kindergarten turned stoner and pastry baker.

As she mentions in her introduction, Kate Beaton would often put off writing essays to do comics for the student paper. She would eventually start putting them online as she continued working on her degree in history. It would turn out that she was able to meld both of these worlds into something truly fantastic.

Published by Dark Horse Comics in 2020, I read the tenth-anniversary edition. This book is a well-deserved winner of both a Harvey Award and an Eisner Award.

In 1972, Terry Eisele’s parents divorced. While that is tragic in itself, it was a benefit to readers as, without it, we would never have got this heartwarming book. The book reads like a thank you letter to his grandmother, Mary Newman, and is a nostalgic look at the weekends that Terry spent at her house.

Alison’s Bechdel’s new graphic novel is billed as a book about exercise, but reaches far beyond that theme into the deep question of why we bother to exercise at all.

Sports and comics have not always gone hand in hand. They seemingly sit at different lunch tables, one celebrating the victories of the Cleveland Cavaliers, while the other laments the death of Wolverine. This book unabashedly declares its love of both subjects.