Today I’ve got a stack of comics from various series, including a couple new titles and a couple that will be released a little later this summer!
Unicorn Boy and the Slumber Party of Doom! by Dave Roman
I wrote up the first Unicorn Boy book back in 2024: Brian is just your average middle school kid with a unicorn horn, who discovers that he can transform into a magical version of himself (with flowing pink hair). But despite rescuing his friend Avery from the shadow dimension, he’s still not entirely sure of himself.
In this book, he’s been invited to a Unicorn-Only sleepover by Skye, the most amazing unicorn. Skye lives in a castle in the sky and has all the best everything. Aside from Skye’s two best friends, Brian also meets two other unicorn guests, Wendal the Uniclops and Glasgow, a unicorn with bad-boy vibes. Brian hopes that he might learn some more unicorn magic that will help break the curse that turned Wylit into a talking muffin, but once he gets to the party he’s busy enough trying to deal with his own social anxiety and wondering if he’s cool enough.
Brian has to figure out how to do what’s right in the face of social pressure pulling him in multiple directions, and ultimately face up to a surprise villain who might ruin everything. These books still have a bit of the weird, random humor that my kids fell in love with in Dave Roman’s Astronaut Academy series, but with a more linear storyline instead of tiny vignettes.
The Books of Clash Volume 7 written by Gene Luen Yang, pencils by Kendall Goode, inks by Alison Acton
This series, based on the Clash Royale videogame, has focused on the various teammates of the Jazzypickleton Cucumbers, the winningest royale team of all time. Each book centers on one or two of the characters, giving them a backstory that distinguishes them from the other seemingly identical characters on the other teams. This time, the focus isn’t on a team member, but on King Bernard of Jazzypickleton. It seems his team is falling apart—Yolanda and Pam are going on tour with a goblin band, Zeke the wizard has fallen ill, and several others have decided to stay on the mysteriously mysterious Mystery Island (of Book 6). King Bernard soon learns what it’s like to lose a match and has to learn to love the game—while recruiting and training a new team. In the meantime, Bernard’s brother, King Roland, has been stewing away in prison. He’s always been a sore loser, and now he’s come up with an evil plan: to destroy all the royal arenas, so there can’t be any winners or losers!
This volume feels a bit like season finale episode: it’s wrapped up some story arcs that were hinted at earlier in the series, but also opens up the team to some changes. What happens now that the Cucumbers are the challengers instead of the reigning champs? Will we see the original team members back in action, or will the new roster be the stars of the next few books? Either way, my daughter and I will be along for the ride!
Unico: Awakening and Unico: Hunted written by Samuel Sattin, illustrated by Gurihiru, based on manga by Osamu Tezuka
This series is based on Osamu Tezuka’s manga of the same name that was originally published in 1976. According to the afterword, there was a series of animated films in the 1980s that made it popular in the US, though I wasn’t familiar with it myself.
Unico is a small unicorn whose curiosity led him to meet Psyche (the one from Roman mythology, sort of), and their bond created a powerful force that made Venus jealous. She attempted to have Unico abandoned with his memory wiped, but instead the West Wind took pity and set him free in the mortal world—though then she would reset his memory every time his powers awakened.
So then in Awakening we come across Unico in the modern world, with almost no memory of who he is. He is befriended by Chloe, a housecat, but then they soon find themselves on their own in the forest. They meet an old woman whom Chloe insists is a witch (and therefore will take care of them), but she seems to be somebody who is actually just down on her luck and has a bad memory. Meanwhile, Venus has figured out that Unico is still free, and has sent her minions to track him down to finish him off.
In the second book, Hunted, Unico has been whisked away (after saving the day, of course) and finds himself in a totally different world. It’s a polluted city, almost entirely uninhabited, ruled by machines. The only people left are a young child and her grandfather, trapped because the machine in charge thinks the girl is its daughter. Unico works together with a family of friendly rats and the fey who live underground to challenge Mother, even while Venus works to regain her power in the hopes of hunting down Unico again.
The books are a mix of cute little animals and some pretty horrible circumstances. The second book in particular is quite dystopian, but in both books Venus is just a vengeful goddess who can’t stand Unico’s power. Unico himself doesn’t quite understand how his magic works, particularly since his memory keeps getting reset, but his biggest strength is the way that he wants to help others who are in need, and his ability to convince others to follow him. The third book, Lost, is expected this summer, and looks like it will bring back some of the characters from the first book.
The Raven Boys written by Maggie Stiefvater, adapted by Stephanie Williams, illustrated by Sas Milledge
The Dream Thieves written by Maggie Stiefvater, adapted and illustrated by Sas Milledge
These comics are based on a YA series that originally started in 2013; I remember seeing them on the shelves but never read them myself. It’s a series that involves magic and mystery, visions and dreams. “Raven Boys” is the nickname given to the students at Aglionby, an all-boys private academy. Blue Sargent has nothing to do with them; her family is psychic, though she doesn’t seem to share their abilities. She’s been told since she was young that if she kissed her true love he would die—so she’s resolved never to kiss anyone.
Then she meets a gaggle of the Raven Boys (or should it be a murder?), and becomes tangled up in their strange explorations. Gansey is searching for a long-lost Welsh king, supposedly buried along the ley lines of West Virginia. His companions are a motley crew: Ronan, always ready for a fight; Adam, who doesn’t come from money and feels a bit out of place; Noah, who says he’s been dead for seven years. When the boys come to visit Blue’s mom, asking for advice about the ley lines, Blue decides to join them on their quest (despite being warned against it by her mom). They find a strange, magical world: places where time moves differently, hollow trees that give them strange visions, and somebody who seems to be looking for the same thing.
The second book, The Dream Thieves, turns its focus on Ronan Lynch. He has many secrets, but the biggest one is that he sometimes pulls things out of his dreams. Gansey is still searching for that lost king, but now the magical forest has disappeared, and there are weird power outages in the town that seem to correspond to the flickers of magical energy. Ronan is trying to figure out a mystery around his father’s death, but his trips into his dreams have become more and more dangerous.
These books are fascinating and have a dreamlike quality to them even when the characters are in the waking world. You are never entirely sure who you can actually trust: Blue’s own mother and colleagues all seem to have their own hidden agendas. I really enjoyed reading these and may look up the original novels to catch up on them: there were four books in The Raven Cycle and another three in The Dreamer Trilogy that followed it.
Total THB Volume 2 by Paul Pope
I wrote about the first volume of Total THB in this column at the end of 2025: it’s a sci-fi tale on Mars, featuring a young girl named HR Watson and her strange companion/bodyguard, a rubbery “mek” named THB who shrinks down to a small marble but explodes into being when doused with water. HR’s father is the head of a robotics company, and when he takes a trip out of town, HR suddenly finds herself pursued by several different factions, all of whom have a vested interest in the future plans of Watson Robotics. In the first volume, HR managed to slip away from her pursuers and made her way across the desert to another city, where she joined up with some of her friends. But word made it back to her home city and the “bugfaces” are persistent, sending more agents to hunt for her.
Paul Pope explains that he had worked on THB up through 1995, and by the time he resumed work on it in 2000, he had worked for a manga publisher in Japan, which heavily influenced not only his style but also his understanding of the comics format itself. As he describes it, he shifted from using characters to tell a story to using the story to reveal the characters. The shift in tone and style happens about 45 pages into this volume, and it’s quite abrupt. There are battle scenes with various meks (robotic agents) where there’s not a lot of dialogue and a whole lot of motion and sound effects, and there are also passages that depict HR’s internal thoughts as she’s processing even in the middle of a fight.
It’s interesting, because in terms of story there’s not as much that actually happens in the 200+ pages of this volume as there was in the first one: much of the story takes place within the building where HR and her friends have been trapped and are trying to get free, though we do get interludes where we see the bugfaces plotting and planning, or glimpses of other characters. Instead, we are meant to get to know HR (and some of the other characters), to see what drives them and how they see the world.
I’m not entirely sure I liked this volume as much, though not necessarily because of the shift in focus. Paul Pope’s illustrations have always been very busy and full of details, and since the comic is in black and white, it can sometimes be hard to understand what I’m looking at. The extended fight scenes have a lot of “blur,” plus Pope really turned up the sound effects, so it gets a bit chaotic. But I suppose I probably do have more of a western mindset in terms of wanting to see where the story goes, too. Good thing Volume 3 arrives in December!
My Current Stack
I’ve been working through some of my stacks of comics—I’ve still got a big stack of biographies, plus some more books from series. I’ve also been reading some sci-fi, some from my AI-related stack and some involving space travel (and some with both!). There’s been some good ones there, so I’ll have those for you in an upcoming column.
Disclosure: I received review copies of these books. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org support my writing and independent booksellers!
