The Girl from the Sea takes the classic Little Mermaid set-up and gives it a queer, modern spin.
It has to be a dream, right? Until she shows up at your home the next day saying true love’s kiss has turned her into a human. When you’re rescued from drowning by a beautiful girl in the sea, what do you do? If you’re Morgan, a closeted gay teen in a tiny fishing town, you kiss her. Much like its opening dedication, Cyclopedia Exotica plants itself as something “for those who don’t feel seen,” with a lightness visible to just about anyone. Helped by Dhaliwal’s playful, dynamic cartooning, the struggles of the cyclops characters stand true as metaphors for sexuality, race, disability, and a multitude of other oppressed groups while never reading as diminutive or didactic instead using the grey areas of existing in a marginalized body as a way to connect characters, as well create a connection with the reader. Eventually landing on the present era, the focus shifts towards loosely connected relationships between cyclopses, using each individual thread to tell stories about a world both accepting and yet somehow not always accommodating. Originally serialized on her Instagram account, Cyclopedia Exotica opens with a history of cyclopses and their tumultuous relationship with the more dominant “two eye” standard. Regardless, Dhaliwal’s new book Cyclopedia Exotica feels like a breath of fresh air among a sea of heavy-handed (and self-indulgent) inclusion narratives. Image: Aminder Dhaliwal/Drawn & QuarterlyĪminder Dhaliwal’s debut graphic novel Woman World should have been the first sign that the cartoonist was a hilarious but extremely on-the-ball voice for a diverse - if not entirely jaded - generation. It’s a master at work, depicting numerous varying iterations of the same core concepts within this collection, and it’s thrilling to read as you get to witness how different execution leads to different results. And it’s all too visible here, as you see the foundations of something that would go on to be a cultural juggernaut. He is an absolute giant of the form, remaining to this day one of the best action storytellers on the page. It’s the perfect place to begin with an artist whose entire oeuvre still remains staggering. This is the first time his iconic ’70’s Super Sentai comics have been collected into an English volume (published by Seven Seas Entertainment), and it’s a historic collection of an icon’s work. Heralded as a father of Tokusatsu alongside the likes of Eiji Tsuburaya ( Gojira, Ultraman), Ishinomori is the creator of Kamen Rider, as well as Super Sentai - which would go on to spawn the iconic Power Rangers series.Ī hugely under-appreciated and under-read figure in the west, Ishinomori’s done comics of every kind on every kind of subject: economics to jazz to biographies and more. He is the undisputed King Of Comics in Japan.
Shotaro Ishinomori, the apprentice of the legendary Osamu Tezuka, the mentor of the inimitable Go Nagai, and so much more. But there is another who holds that title. You may know of Jack Kirby, the King Of Comics.
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