The show follows Luz Noceda, a magic obsessed a 14-year-old Dominican-American human girl who accidentally stumbles upon a portal to the demon realm, known as the Boiling Isles. There she befriends - and becomes an apprentice to - a rebellious witch named Eda Cawthorne and starts studying at Hexside School of Magic and Demonics, despite not having magical abilities. The series aired on Disney Channel between 2020 and 2023 and was widely praised during its run for its writing, world-building and LGBTQ+ representation.
Feng Yitong is a Berlin-based illustrator from Xi'an, China whose comic and hand-drawn imagery addresses migration, cultural shifts and embodied experiences in heavy, tactile forms of oil pastels. Using skills learned from her bachelors and masters degrees in illustration at the Berlin University of the Arts, she sketches her emotive scenes, then scans before using a light table to transfer them onto A4 and A3 paper. Coloured with oil pastels, she achieves her sharp visual effects by using kitchen cloths to remove or mix thick marks to create defined edges and distinct segments of her dense images.
She constructed "Early Earth," the setting of two of her graphic novels, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013) and The One Hundred Nights of Hero (2016). The former is a collection of creation myths for Early Earth, while the other is modeled on One Thousand and One Nights and its frame story of a woman delaying a man's predation by distracting him with storytelling.
Ula Zuhra is a Bali-based illustrator, cartoonist and writer behind the full length graphic novel, Aca & Ica: Collected Stories. In the debut piece, the artist explores themes of "feminism, class, eroticism, mythological, and esoteric practices in Indonesia through a tongue-in-cheek satirical lens," the artist says. Throughout Arca & Ica, Ula often opts for a heady balance of high contrast black-and-white, set aside moments of vibrant colour.
Craig Thompson's new book is an intricate blend of memoir, graphic novel, and social commentary, set against the backdrop of ginseng farming in 1980s Wisconsin.
