Nobody Likes You Greta Grump

In this middle grade graphic novel from the acclaimed animator/cartoonist, Greta and her friend (and pet tortoise!) have to solve the mystery of Friendlytown. Greta is a handful, until her pet turtle, Nobody, teaches her to soften her ways. The two team up with her new friend, Gabby, to discover why the kind-hearted people of Friendlytown have turned so mean. Equal parts high-flying adventure and deeply felt inquiry into essential goodness of human nature, Greta Grump features tech-whiz cats, ornery gopher librarians, and gangs of squirrels in matching sweater vests. The warmhearted allegory of this graphic novel makes it perfectly calibrated to the present moment, when the need for us to look after one another is stronger than ever.

This issue of the award-winning magazine of comics interviews, news, and criticism focuses on the relationship between animation and comics. Gary Groth interviews this issue’s cover artist Cathy Malkasian (Eartha), the PBS/Nickelodeon animation director (Curious George, The Wild Thornberrys) turned graphic novelist, about her first middle-grade GN, NoBody Likes You, Greta Grump. In addition to this issue’s featured interview with Cathy Malkasian, MLK graphic biographer Ho Che Anderson shares his animation storyboards, and Anya Davidson talks to Sally Cruikshank about how the underground comics movement influenced the latter’s aesthetic in a career that encompasses indie shorts and Flash animation, as well as work for feature film credits and Sesame Street. Other features include: an unpublished Ben Sears (Midnight Gospel) comic, and Jem and the Holograms cartoon creator Christy Marx talks about the behind-the-scenes advantages and disadvantages of both art forms. Plus! Sketchbook art by Vanesa Del Rey (Black Widow), an interview with Amazon warehouse worker-turned-cartoonist Ness Garza, Paul Karasik’s essay on an unseen gem, and much more. For more than 45 years, no magazine has chronicled the continuum of the comic arts with more rigor and passion than The Comics Journal.

2008 Eisner Award winner for Most Promising Newcomer: an absurd but hopeful cartoon fable for these strange times we live in. Cathy Malkasian has made the jump from animation to the printed page with a graceful, delicate leap. She deftly uses her pencil to create thick, expressive characters moving through the twilight of a shadowy Orwellian world. Humorous and bewitching at the same time, Percy Gloom is a unique gem of a story.

Aglaia is a simple sea nymph. One day, a Merman seduces Aglaia, forever altering her life’s course. She is cast out of Oceanid by her chauvinistic father, forcing her to wander many days and nights, until one day she finds herself at the benefit of one Mr. Kite, whose traveling circus welcomes her (including the star attraction, a waltzing Horse named Henry) and once again alters her fate, sending her down many more unexpected paths. The Song of Aglaia is the first solo graphic novel by cartoonist Anne Simon, presenting a beautifully crafted female spin on the classic heroic myths of Greek literature, tracing the journey of a victimized and then almighty woman with a graceful understanding of human relationships and loving nods to the Bronte sisters, David Bowie, and the Beatles.

Cartoonist and animator Cathy Malkasian follows up her 2007 graphic novel Percy Gloom (a minor classic) with the further adventures of the small, immortal man with a light-up head. In Wake Up, Percy Gloom, kindhearted Percy awakens from (what he thinks is) a 200-year nap and finds himself in a strange new land. As Percy goes on a quest to locate his mother, he encounters many inspired inventions and bizarre, and sometimes dangerous, characters and situations, such as singing goats and furniture parades. Through it all he pines for his long-lost love and soul mate, Miss Margaret―but his love may not be as doomed as he thinks. Malkasian’s lush and detailed pencil drawings, surreal humor, absurdist characters and stunning visual storytelling ensure that fans of the first graphic novel will find the sequel just as fantastical, touching, and hilarious; new readers will discover a gorgeously rendered world of luminous landscapes, gentle humor, and a cast composed variously of wise, naive, and flawed characters in a wide-ranging story that stands on its own.

Do ideas of war and enemies hold a people together? Is a culture of conflict too seductive not to be irresistible? These are the questions Cathy Malkasian explores in her second graphic novel,Temperance. Malkasian creates, as she did in the critically acclaimed Percy Gloom, a fully realized, multi-layered world, inhabited by vividly realized characters. After a brutal injury in battle, Lester has no memory of his prior life. For the next thirty years his wife does everything to keep him from remembering―and re-constructing―a society, Blessedbowl, that elevates him as a hero. Blessedbowl is a cultural convergence of lies, memories, stories, and beliefs. Its people thrive on ideas of persecution, exceptionality, and enemies, convinced that war lurks just outside their walls. They have come to depend on Lester, their greatest war hero, to lead the charge once the Final Battle begins. Malkasian creates a densely textured social context, masterfully conveying the idiosyncratic physical domain with its spiraling structures and quasi-medieval architecture along with intimate yet plastic portraits of her characters in a rich, tonal pencil line. Temperance is a galvanizing work of empathy and violence by one of today’s the most thoughtful and accomplished cartoonists.

Malkasian’s stunning landscapes and depictions of nature, gestural character nuance, and sophisticated storytelling are on display in her latest graphic novel. For a thousand years, the unfinished dreams―sex fantasies, murder plots, wishful thinking―from the City Across the Sea came to Echo Fjord to find sanctuary. Emerging from the soil, they took bodily form and wandered the land, gently guided by the fjord folk. But recently they've stopped coming, and Eartha wants solve the mystery. Without thought or hesitation―the city isn’t on any map, or in anyone’s memory―she ventures into the limitless waters, hoping to find the City.

Once, the world lived in harmony. People trusted and aided each other, dreamed freely, and communed with their ancestors. And then one day the eggs appeared. One thousand black eggs, heavy as pure lead, which by some mystical property, provoked greed and violence in all who came in contact with them. A family of brutish men managed to hoard the eggs and build a misogynistic dynasty that held all of the land in an iron grip. Years later, Arna, an orphaned young woman immune to the beguiling power of the eggs, is charged with a monumental mission: hunt down these formidable men, pilfer their eggs, and release the bright from the heavy. Along the way, she falls for the enchanting Sela, who shows her how beautiful the world can be. In The Heavy Bright, masterful cartoonist and animator Cathy Malkasian propels the reader into a lushly watercolor, Ghibli-esque fantasy world tinged with equal parts whimsy and menace. Her characters are vulnerable and relatable, made real through deep, psychological underpinnings. Perhaps Malkasian's most ambitious and impactful work to date, The Heavy Bright is an allegorical graphic novel that grapples with the themes of greed, corruption, ignorance and bigotry, toxic masculinity, female empowerment, gender and queerness, love, death, and the urgent necessity for all to come together to heal our ailing world.