Wendy (Walter Scott)

Wendy is about art majors who, not content with the many problems they inherited by being born when they did, spend most of their time creating more problems for themselves. I could leave it there if I wanted to be sort of uncharitable, but Scott makes a strong case for why highbrow art has such a pull on these people, why they can't be content doing anything else and why they'll sacrifice so much of themselves in pursuit of it--it's a fantastical world in which all your hopes and anxieties and weird little self-centered theories about how the world works will be validated, if you play the game well enough. As you might expect, the game is weighted in certain people's favor.

Ducks (Kate Beaton)

Just massively good, like those autobio strips Beaton used to do but for 400-some pages. It'd be reductive to say it's about how everything sucks, but it is in part about that, and it's the kind of thing that parses everything sucking in such a way that it makes you feel less alone. Be aware that it deals with misogyny up to and including outright assault.

City (Keiichi Arawi)

City does a thing that I don't particularly remember its antecedent Nichijou doing so much, though maybe it's not that weird in the broader realm of comedy manga. What I mean is, the chapters are structured like one-off jokes, with absurd visual gags and asides that you'd assume are mostly reader-facing, but in fact everything is diegetic and subject to being followed up on later. It's like a long improv exercise, 13 volumes of total commitment to the bit, launching off the rails and then multi-track drifting back onto the rails, and you have to respect it.


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