SPX Haul 2025: Reviews Part 6
Come one, come all, to a grand double feature of 22 page delights!
Back in September, I traveled down to Bethesda, Maryland and picked up a whole host of comics. Some are long, some are short. Not sure if all are good as I haven't read most of them. That's what we're here to find out. As I read through my pile, I'll be typing up reviews and sending them out. Some installments might have a few, some may have one. All depends on how much I feel I need to write and how many I've read.
In this sixth installment, we have another double feature! One comic from an established artist, a long-time SPX attendee and Keeper of the Lore, and the other from a newcomer, a student! One is preview of a long-form fantasy story (more "Chrestomancy" than "Earthsea") and the other an autobio. Both I wrote around 900 words about. Whoops.
Settlers of the Storm Worlds (Preview)
Carla Speed McNeil is a very generous artist. When I attended my first SPX, she was one of the first artists I encountered. I had a vague idea of who she was from the volumes of “Finder” I’d picked up through ComiXology (now forever trapped on, ugh, Kindle. Come on Dark Horse!! Make more of your stuff DRM free…) Of course, I had no idea what I was doing and she very graciously made the time to chat with me for what felt like an hour but was probably only two minutes.
She talked SPX history, her own work, and just about anything I could’ve asked (within reason.) It felt like I was talking to the Keeper of the Lore. She’s one cool dude.
Eventually I moved on, picking up a copy of No Mercy Vol. 1, and made it a point to chat every year after. Those years between then and now haven’t been too kind, like a major flood taking out her stock of trades or, you know, a pandemic. She’s probably documented these things on her patreon (wink wink) but Patreon’s indexing is craptastic and trying to find anything on an active patreon that’s more than a year old is like fighting against a riptide.
Because of this string of Life Happening and a serious case of burnout, Carla hasn’t had a new comic out in all those years - “No Mercy” with Alex Di Campi and Jenn Manley Lee having just ended (well, “ended”) with the final volume out the April before my first year at SPX. I wouldn’t actually get to read that final volume until over 5 years later but that’s a story for another day.
There have been a scattering of single issue appearances or guest spots in other comics, “Empowered” and “Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” being two that come to mind. I guess “Finder: Chase the Lady” was also technically done during this time, its official pub year being 2021, but it doesn’t count. 90% of the comic was out in “Dark Horse Presents” prior to 2018 and the rest just needed to be inked over the finish line.
All this is to say, I had never read a new Carla Speed McNeil comic…until “Settlers of the Storm World.”
So, what do I think? In short, it’s fun! “Settlers” is about a young wizard, Ellery, who’s forced by his family to leave home so they can…well, I’m inferring here but settle a new world on the other side of a massive storm, if the image of a wagon train and the title is to be believed. See, the copy of “Settlers” I have is a preview of a much larger graphic novel. It only collects the first 20 or so pages and that means I have precious little to judge.
Could I say that it ends on a weird note and that the pacing is off? Well, yeah, but that’s only if this was its intended format rather than a special advertisement, a taste, for a wickedly fun looking longer comic. “Settlers” scratches that itch for a new fantasy comic that’s pulling from the “boarding school” tradition of books while completely flipping the “Harry Potter” dynamic on its head.
Ellery is a wizard being forced to leave his magical home for an unknown, dangerous, scary new life. They’re literally driving into the eye of a massive storm! What works so well, though, is McNeil doesn’t focus on this aspect of the journey but instead fully sinks us into Ellery’s head and his worries.
He worries about the comfort and familiarity he’s leaving. He worries about his friends forgetting him. He worries about his mom and, it seems, some feelings of inadequacy fostered by his older brother and his dad. He’s annoyed by his sister who seems to be taking it all in stride, is excited even, and seems like a flake who maybe assumes others will always get her out of her jams.
McNeil’s casual portrayal of magic is maybe the highlight of this preview. It’s all fully realized with no exposition necessary, though Ellery’s bragging narration at the start certainly helps set the mood “Fountains of fire. Of rainbows. Of gold.” Dragons walk around like dogs and people are flying on what look to be broomsticks but turn out to be tubas. Tubas! That go “paarmpp” when they fly by! How can you not be charmed by that?
Her art is also gorgeously textured and funny. The page of Maeby, Ellery’s sister, flying across town after being summoned by a magical dinner bell (A+ gag, by the way) had me cackling. She’s stiff as a board, completely nonchalant, and eating popcorn while chaos reigns around her. I can’t wait to find out more about her.
I could go on. Carla’s one of the best in the indie B&W space, with a clarity of illustration that many an artist could learn from. Every page has something to love and something to admire. The best news is the comic is serializing free on Carla’s patreon (though paid supporters get pages early) and is well ahead of where it was back in September 2025.
Do yourself a favor and read it, then read “Raccoon Crime Squad” which is shaping up to be a different kind of wickedly fun story.
Not In My Nature
A difficult one for me to review! The subject matter is heavy and personal and I feel weird about reviewing it. “Not in My Nature” touched a nerve in me. Autobio does this often, particularly the more serious stuff. Maule put herself out there and onto the page. It is a raw comic about difficult, personal subjects. It is distanced enough from specifics to feel like I’m not overstepping into her life as a reader. Still, I can’t help but be worried I am committing some infraction by talking about the reality of an artist’s lived experience.
But I said I’d do it and so do it I shall. I picked this comic up from Carla’s table, as Madeleine was one of her students tabling with her, and the comic came recommended. The cover caught my eye with its underwater theme and ethereal atmosphere. I did not notice until much later that the spine of the comic is, in fact, a drawing of a human spine.
“Authentic to the bone” indeed.
“Not in My Nature” is trying to do a lot and I commend the effort, which I mean genuinely and not as a polite way of saying it’s unsuccessful or bad. The effort shines through, and makes me very excited to see where she goes from here.
This is quite good comic, though somewhat scattershot, split between wanting to be a more straightforward memoir - this happened, this is what I thought or felt - and something more subjective and dreamlike. I don’t think it all quite coheres but I thought the individual parts worked and worked well.
The back half of the comic is more successful, visually, though it is also way more cluttered. So much environment in every panel! In the first half, the linework is very inconsistent. Page 3 is shaky and like a first sketch while page 5 is a hauntingly detailed anatomical drawing of a hand.
The watercolors, too, are sometimes too murky during the first half, obfuscating what is going on in a panel or making the linework sink into the background rather than sit atop it. Despite this, it was rarely distracting and in some cases actively enhanced the grimey, uncomfortable feeling of some pages. I also found the choice of color a nice touch - the comic is colored with the colors of the Ace flag (purples, mostly, with greys and black and whites making up the rest.)
“Not in My Nature” is, in some ways, a traditional coming out story as Madeline chronicles her journey to recognizing that she is asexual. There is the struggle to be recognized and accepted in a society not primed to understand sexuality as a spectrum or in an expansive and nuanced manner. There is the identification and the exploration. There is the journey to love (or towards, as her story is still ongoing) and all the messiness in-between.
It’s not really what the comic is about, though. Maule’s comic is more of a raw expression of her relationship to her body, of which her asexuality is one (large) component The comic opens, after all, setting up her eating disorder after a disastrous night out with her older sister. We’re put in 16-year old (and then 17, 18, etc) Madeleine’s head. What she’s thinking; how she’s seeing the world; her anxieties and self-loathing and the habits she picks up to cope.
Bones litter the comic. Panels shaped like ribcages; skulls baked into her home like a ghost; spines cascading down the middle of a page. On one page, femurs make a cage that traps Maule within, the panels made by the slats forming 12 hazy, watercolored images of her disappearing into inebriation and sex, trying to disentangle her feelings of love with her lack of feelings during sex.
In these pages of physical (sexually related) intimacies, she becomes hyperaware of herself; her teeth; her tongue; her fingers; her breathing; and thus we do too. These pages are cluttered and dark. One gets the feeling of racing thoughts and confusion and not quite revulsion but a deep discomfort with the situation.
Reading these pages feels like putting on the glasses from They Live, and not only because the big skull that looks like it’s an MRI image on the “It’s sex” page really freaks me out. Suddenly the world as I know it is flipped on its head and I can see what it feels like to not experience the same physical sensations while kissing or during sex as her partner seemingly does. This is the power of art.
It is also what I mean that the comic is about bodies. Maule knows she’s Ace, confidently. It’s not about her discovering that for herself, or even about trying to communicate this to others. Instead, she is wrestling with the relationship between the (very hard to describe in a nebulously bodied way) feeling of love that she desires and the physical sensations related to physical arousal that she is told stand in for, or are expressions of, that love.
In doing so, she is identifying this aspect of how romance is discussed in American society and the primacy that sex (and its related intimacies) has within expressions of love. Maule emphasizes how the world around her reinforces, implicitly or explicitly, that without sex she won’t find love. Ergo: if sex or kissing doesn’t evoke a feeling, or a strong, specific feeling, then there must not be love.
It’s not true, of course, but that’s the journey. That’s what she brings us along to discover and express. It’s why the second half is set underwater, in her head, a primal scream for understanding from others, and from herself.
Elias Rosner
Elias Rosner
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