It’s a new week, and thankfully, mercifully, wonderfully, there was nothing of interest in regards to the Diamond bankruptcy for me to contend with. So, let’s all breathe a sigh of relief as we dive into another edition of Comics Disassembled, where I talk about ten things I liked or didn’t like from the week of comics, including the latest from a personal fave.

New Trung Le Nguyen, Coming Soon!

If you’ve read Trung Le Nguyen’s graphic novel The Magic Fish, you already know why this takes the top spot. A new comic from Nguyen is a wonderful thing, and that’s what I recently discovered is coming, as the cartoonist’s next major project is coming…shockingly soon! It’s called Angelica and the Bear Prince, and somehow it escaped me until this week despite the fact it’s releasing in October. But the point is, I know about it now, and it sounds absolutely wonderful.

Like The Magic Fish, this is a young adult release from Random House Graphic that has a bit of a fairy tale feel to it — you can’t have an unknown Bear Prince without feeling a little fairy tale-ish, even if it’s a modern story — but that’s where the comparison ends. This isn’t semi-autobiographical, and instead, it sounds like a bit of a coming of age romance. It stars a girl who couldn’t do wrong — until that changed completely — and the bear prince mascot of a local theater who helped her turn things around thanks to his encouraging messages on social media, with the former taking a job at said theater to try and discover who this mystery person actually is. It sounds delightful, and more than that, you know it’ll look incredible, as Nguyen’s a singular artist that stands out even amidst a sea of other great artists.

While I can’t wait to read it, I did want to shout out one random standout thing about the book. I love how its cover echoes The Magic Fish’s one, with a solid color background, more full color figures in the front, and a background figure that connects the more fairy tale elements to them. It looks good in isolation, but it’s the type of thing that could easily help someone who sees both know that the same person made them, like they are echoes of one another. It’s lovely work, and I’m excited to see it in print when Angelica and the Bear Prince arrives on October 7th.

Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize Winner

In the week’s most delightful story, it was announced that cartoonist Tessa Hulls won a Pulitzer Prize in the Memoir or Autobiography category for her graphic novel Feeding Ghosts. That makes it the first graphic novel to ever win for a regular category, and helps continue a string of awards Hulls has won for this memoir about three generations of women in her family — including herself, her mother, and her grandmother, who was a journalist during the Chinese Communist Revolution — and the history they share and lived through. I somehow missed it in my deep dive reading for 2024, but you can trust me when I say I’m going to change that now. It’s a heck of an honor, and by all accounts, a well-deserved one as well.

Something that delighted me in particular, though, was the story of how Hulls discovered she won the award. Little did I know that Hulls now lives in my state of Alaska — in Juneau, the state’s capital — working in the capitol building’s lounge/cafeteria, where she makes and serves foods for state legislators. Evidently she was in the midst of the lunch rush when she received the phone call telling her the news, and the entire room of lawmakers broke out in a round of applause when they learned of her win. Even better, she appreciated the sentiment until she realized, as she told the Alaska Beacon, “I’ve got to go back to making sandwiches.” That’s incredible. I’ll be in Juneau later this month for a comics event, and I hope our paths cross when I visit. But even if they don’t, congrats to Hulls on the big win.