WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 41Review_FICTION
For example, she fantasizes about mur-
dering a seagull perched outside, but
moments later mentions she doesn’t need
more than “eighteen hours of windowsill
sleeping” to be happy. Stevens employs
his detailed and stylistic realism to nice
comic effect, especially during a flight of
fancy when Penny imagines herself tra-
versing another dimension, “one with the
cosmos.” The emphasis on Penny’s feral
impulses results in a kind of satire of the
typical cat-humor collection (“Am I
watching the people sleep to be sure
they’re ok? Or am I waiting for them to
die so I can eat them?”). Stevens’s clever
send-up should delight the feline faithful.
Agent: Meg Thompson, Thompson Literary.
(Apr.)
Billionaires: The Lives of the
Rich and Powerful
Darryl Cunningham. Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95
trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-77046-448-3
Cunningham (The Age of Selfishness)
cogently combines portraits of the lives
and careers of Rupert Murdoch, the
Koch Brothers, and Jeff Bezos into a
graphic treatise that considers both the
responsibility that wealth and power
demands and the inevitability of such
power corrupting absolutely. In chapters
on Murdoch and the Koch Brothers,
Cunningham portrays young men of
privilege corrupted by a relentless desire
to amass wealth and power at the expense
of others, whether in Murdoch’s collusion
with conservative leaders and his brutal
suppression of unions, or the Koch
Brothers’ efforts to bring fringe Libertarian
philosophies into the Republican political
mainstream. Cunningham then demon-
strates how Bezos’s comparably modest
upbringing didn’t prevent him from
building an empire that exploits its
employees. The minimalist color palette
and pared-down visual style render this
complex study on the machinations of
billionaires consumable in a single sitting.
Cunningham jumps from shot to shot
through panels infused with irony and
symbolism, such as the recurring motif
of money emerging from industrial pipes,
or giant hands and feet grabbing and
crushing. The result is a witty but brutal
critique of capitalism and corruption.
(Apr.)
Adler
Lavie Tidhar and Paul McCaffrey. Titan
Comics, $16.99 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-
1-78276-071-9
Set in an age in which an ailing Queen
Victoria’s kept alive with a steampunk
apparatus by Dr. Jekyll, this thrilling
comic bursts with reimagined period
characters and features Sherlock
Holmes’s adversary Irene Adler, who
must thwart Ayesha—the warrior queen
of H. Rider Haggard’s novel She—from
declaring war on Great Britain. Irene is
aided by a wide cast of real and fictional
Victorian figures including Jane Eyre,
Miss Havisham (younger, livelier, and
more energetic than Dickens’s), and the
little orphan, Annie. Even more obscure
cameos like that of Carmilla, Le Fanu’s
gothic vampire (and literary predecessor
to Dracula), are organically woven into
these spirited capers. The concept owes
much to Alan Moore’s League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen, but WorldFantasy Award
winner Tidhar
(By Force Alone)
keeps a con-
stant breathless
pace of chases
that are swash-
buckling
enough to for-
give the rela-
tive simplicity
of the plot:
stop Ayesha from bombing London with
Marie Curie’s radium, which has been
weaponized by Nicola Tesla. The art by
McCaffrey (Anno Dracula) complements
the script with vigorous fight sequences
and sharp character design. While, per-
haps forgivably, not as developed as a
Doyle-original Holmes mystery, the
mash-up offers solid light entertainment
with strong crossover appeal, as well as
twists and derring-do aplenty. (Mar.)★ The Secret to Superhuman Strength
Alison Bechdel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24 (240p) ISBN 978-0-544-38765-2B
echdel (Are You My Mother?) makes a welcome
return with this dense, finely wrought deep dive
into her lifelong fixation with exercise as a balm
for a variety of needs: “My reasons... run the gamut
from the physical to the mental to the emotional to the
psychological to the more numinous.” Progressing
chronologically, from the 1960s through to the 2020
pandemic, Bechdel’s early, whimsical efforts to adopt
various regimens such as running and karate (at a
“feminist martial arts school”) bloom in adulthood
into often-obsessive attempts to achieve enlightenment.
Eventually she begins to suspect that her fanatical focus
on a variety of exhausting workouts offers her a way to avoid difficult issues, par-
ticularly in her relationships: “I’d managed dad’s death so well because I hadn’t
managed it at all. Who knew you were supposed to have feelings!” Throughout,
Bechdel conjures the histories of literary figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Margaret Fuller, Jack Kerouac, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom wrote about their
own attempts at inner transformation with philosophical movements such as
romanticism and transcendentalism. Bechdel’s ever-elegant drawings, with
nuanced coloring provided by her partner Holly Rae Taylor, perfectly match the
tonal shifts of her kaleidoscopic narrative, alternating between soul-searching
angst and dry self-satire. At the close of each chapter, the colors disappear and
are replaced by a warm gray wash, symbolizing seemingly a hope for harmony
and oneness. Grappling with the desire for spiritual transcendence in the most
intensely personal terms, Bechdel achieves a tricky—even enlightening—balance.
Agent: Sydelle Kramer, Susan Rabiner Literary Agency (May)