Welcome to our BF Staff Picks for September! Before the pandemic BF’s Staff Picks feature had run for many years, with members of the team giving a weekly overview of recommended new releases. Now, retooled and reimagined to fit the site’s current ethos, it returns as a monthly feature designed to spotlight a few key releases that appeal to us. This is not, then, intended as a comprehensive, exhaustive or extensive round-up but rather to point you in the direction of some top projects that caught the eyes of BF contributors. Please also remember these aren’t intended as reviews and full coverage of the comics/books below may follow in due course!
Comic of the Month
Adrift on a Painted Sea (Avery Hill Publishing)
Tim Bird has been wowing us here at Broken Frontier with his psychogeographical work for well over a decade. His Grey Area comics and longer-form work like The Great North Wood from Avery Hill Publishing have proven to be tour-de-force examples of comics that recreate sense of space, time and memory. Bird was justly the winner of the Best Comic category in the British Comic Awards in its final full year of existence.
Adrift on a Painted Sea is his most intensely personal work to date, juxtaposing the paintings of his late mother Sue with his own comic explorations of her life and their relationship. Whether it be one of his minicomics shorts, or his full-length work, one never comes away from a Tim Bird offering without feeling deeply affected. Our Comic of the Month for this edition of Staff Picks. Read a full interview with Tim Bird on Adrift on a Painted Sea here at Broken Frontier.
– Andy Oliver
Ocultos (Fantagraphics Books)
Since reading and reviewing Laura Pérez’s fantastically uncanny Totem earlier this year, I’ve kept a keen eye out for any of her future projects. It seems I’m in luck, as Ocultos, a new short story collection from Pérez and Fantagraphics will be published this September. Drawn in Pérez’s signature wispy charcoal sketches with splashes of colour, Ocultos is a collection of vignettes exploring how the occult touches on our everyday lives, whether this be through physical interactions or vivid dreams.
Once again translated from the original Spanish into English by the fantastic Andrea Rosenberg, Ocultos seems to capture the same feeling of liminality between our world and the unknown which was so prevalent throughout Totem. Promising to leave the reader ‘spellbound’, Ocultos certainly seems like an ideal eerie read as we move into the autumn months.
– Lydia Turner
Final Cut (Pantheon)
Hot on the heels of Charles Burns’ Kommix from Fantagraphics comes another release of the Black Hole creator’s work this month. Final Cut was originally published in three parts in France and is now being collected in one complete volume by Pantheon.
This dark tale of a group of friends travelling to a remote cabin in the woods to film their own science fiction horror movie on an 8mm camera takes familiar elements of the genre and refocuses them through a Burns-ian lens. Expect stunning art, psychological terror, reflections on artistic expression, and a muddying of the waters when it comes to the boundaries between reality and imagination.
– Andy Oliver
Lord of the Flies (Faber)
I was very surprised when reading the description on Faber’s website that their graphic novel remodelling of Lord of the Flies is the first ever graphic adaptation. How exciting! Based on William Golding’s literary classic, artist Aimée de Jongh takes on the dramatic highs and lows of Lord of the Flies in graphic novel format. When a plane full of schoolboys crashes on a desert island, and with no help to be seen, the boys must construct a hierarchical society in which to survive. However, the group soon begins to turn on each other, with dangerous consequences…
Lord of the Flies can get pretty graphic and grisly, so it will be interesting to see how de Jongh depicts this through her illustrations. If it’s anything like the level of detail in 2022 publication Days of Sand, then I’m very much looking forward to getting stuck in.
– Lydia Turner
They Shot the Piano Player (SelfMadeHero)
SelfMadeHero have become known for a number of different strands of comics storytelling over the years. One they have particularly excelled in is bringing editions of international graphic biographies to wider readerships, as they do this coming month with They Shot the Piano Player.
This documentary-style book centres on the disappearance of musician Francisco Tenório Cerqueira Júnior, a pivotal figure in the Latino musical samba-jazz movement Bossa Nova, who mysteriously vanished in 1976 after playing a concert in Buenos Aires. Believed to have been abducted by the dictatorship’s security forces and executed shortly thereafter, his ultimate fate remains unknown for sure. Writer and artist team Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal set out to investigate the facts. They Shot the Piano Player has also been adapted as an animated documentary film.
– Andy Oliver
When to Pick a Pomegranate (Silver Sprocket)
Drawing on elements of traditional Persianate storytelling and taking inspiration from manuscripts in its detailed illustrations, When to Pick a Pomegranate immediately caught my eye. This is a collection of meditative short comics from Asmeen Abedifard in which her central character is mirrored in a personified pomegranate, with whom the protagonist is both repulsed and intrigued: “I want to tear these thoughts out of my flesh. How could I forget just how rotten I am?”.
Visceral and intimate, Abedifard’s illustrations take on various styles, tones and colour palettes as her main character and her mirrored-self evolve into complex new roles, exploring what they really mean to each other. A lyrical journey through some heavy themes, and definitely one to look out for.
– Lydia Turner
Processing: 100 Comics that Got Me Through It (Drawn & Quarterly)
Whether it be in the haunting atmosphere of Nocturne or the raw explorations of mental health awareness in Things to Do Instead of Killing Yourself (in collaboration with Jon-Michael Frank) there’s an undeniable emotional immediacy about the illustrative style and approach to the page of cartoonist Tara Booth.
Processing: 100 Comics that Got Me Through It is described by publisher Drawn & Quarterly as “deeply honest comics that will get you through it (or at least help)” and an “exquisitely woven collection of pure and nasty magic.” Expect uncompromising slice-of-life reflections aching with honesty when this one hits the shelves in September.
– Andy Oliver
