Ditch Life #[nn]

Amy Lockhart's Ditch Life announces itself with an unsettling, deadpan intensity: a green-skinned face fills the cover, mouth agape, blue eyes wide, while small seed-like shapes drift through the warm tan background around it. Lockhart's flat, matter-of-fact linework gives the image a strange calm that somehow makes it more arresting than any conventional shock tactic. This 2019 Fantagraphics hardcover feels like a genuine artistic statement from a cartoonist working entirely on her own terms.