Lorena Alvarez has followed up her beautiful Nightlights with this sequel. Hicotea: A Nightlights Story goes with Sandy, the young artist in the first book, on a school field trip. To what’s almost a literal field — they’re in nature, down by the river in the wetlands. There, Sandy has a fantastic journey into a glorious museum found inside a turtle’s shell. It’s a symbolic way of indicating just how much knowledge there is out there, how even shells or […]

It doesn’t surprise me that Tom Haugomat has an animation background, since Through a Life is broken up into tiny, cinematic moments about seeing. It’s a unique format. Most two-page spreads consist of a small image establishing the setting on the left, with a date and place line showing where Rodney is and what he’s looking at, and then on the right, a picture of what he sees. (The format is occasionally opened up for a particularly important image that […]

This gorgeous, oversized picture book will create new appreciation for nature, obviously, but also for cultures around the world. Under the Canopy: Trees Around the World is written by Iris Volant and illustrated by Cynthia Alonso. Each page describes a particular type of tree — such as willow, coconut, birch, or eucalyptus — accompanied by a lovely illustration of a legend or key moment associated with them. The apple tree, for example, gets a picture of Isaac Newton thinking about […]

Mean Girls Club: Pink Dawn by Ryan Heshka is a visually-driven fantasy that puts classic glamour girls in exaggeratedly violent situations. I was curious, because I read his earlier one-shot with the same characters but didn’t remember it. I wondered if a longer format would provide more substantial content. Yes and no — we get brief descriptions of what brought these women to this place, and a story where the underdogs fight back, but it’s still driven primarily by the […]

Audubon: On the Wings of the World — written by Fabien Grolleau and illustrated by Jérémie Royer — is a handsome historical hardcover that gives a stunning portrait of the American wilderness in the early 1800s. It also reminds us what artists may suffer when driven by creativity, as well as the sacrifices of those around them. John James Audubon is still known today for his gorgeous paintings of the birds of North America. Instead of the stiff scientific art […]

The New Ghost by Robert Hunter is another in Nobrow’s line of single-issue author spotlights. It’s been out for more than five years, but I only found out about it recently through, of all things, a well-targeted Amazon recommendation. (Sometimes the computers get it right.) And since it’s a stand-alone, it doesn’t matter when you read it. Our unnamed protagonist is the new ghost of the title, following his companions through pages of deep blue night populated by faceless, formless […]

Nightlights is a gorgeous parable by Lorena Alvarez. Although I’m not entirely sure I grasped the meaning of everything that happens in it, it is absolutely beautiful. (And a work that leaves you thinking isn’t a bad thing, either.) Sandy is a young artist, drawing constantly. At night, she sees sparkles of light that fire her imagination, leading to luscious, expansive spreads of collaged images, all richly colored in fuchsias and purples and blues. At school, she meets a ghostly […]

Corinne Maier writes and Anne Simon illustrates these three graphic biographies of notable figures whose thinking changed the world. They’re handsome European-style hardcovers, allowing for pages packed with detail, putting readers in the day-to-day moments as well as capturing the major discoveries. Those accomplishments become part of the flow, which is more realistic, as people rarely realize the significance of a discovery when it happens. Maier gives as much space to domestic concerns, providing a full portrait of the subject’s […]