Fans of graphic literature have waited a long time for My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two (Fantagraphics, May 28), the conclusion to Emil Ferris’ 2017 debut, a thematically rich, visually stunning work that seemed destined to take its place alongside classics such as Maus and Fun Home. The book is framed as the diary of Karen Reyes, a young queer girl growing up in 1960s Chicago who imagines herself as a werewolf while setting out to solve the murder of her upstairs neighbor, a troubled Holocaust survivor. I can’t even begin to do justice to the swirling, densely crosshatched artwork done in ballpoint pen on notebook paper. Monsters is simply the kind of book that people obsess over—just go check it out, if you haven’t already.

Which is to say that when we began planning our second annual Graphic Lit Issue this spring, there was really only one choice for the cover. When Emil Ferris agreed to contribute a never-before-published self-portrait for the cover—werewolf included!—that just sealed the deal. Read Ferris’ interview with contributor Connie Ogle, which includes the exciting revelation that there’s already a prequel to Monsters in the works.

Elsewhere in the issue you’ll find interviews with artist/authors John Vasquez Mejias, Johnnie Christmas, and Maia Kobabe, whose debut graphic memoir, Gender Queer, remains one of the most challenged books in America—testimony to the singular (and, for some, threatening) power of storytelling in words and pictures. Our editors also highlight outstanding new graphic literature for all ages in their columns and booklists.

While the format grows with such innovative new work, there’s also been an overdue push to recognize the artistry of comics past. One of the most thrilling additions to the graphic lit canon is Frank Johnson, Secret Pioneer of American Comics: Volume 1, edited by Keith Mayerson and Chris Byrne (Fantagraphics, Feb. 24). Johnson was a genuine outsider artist who began drawing a comic called “Wally’s Gang” in 1928, when he was just 16; he worked variously as a musician and shipping clerk while continuing the comic, drawn in pencil in ruled notebooks, for 50 years. It was never published—and quite possibly never seen by anyone—until Johnson’s death in 1979. The new book collects the “Wally’s Gang” comics from 1928 to 1949, along with a stand-alone called “The Bowser Boys” (1946-1950), about some Bowery bums on a perpetual quest for the next bottle of wine—an underground comic avant la lettre, as Mayerson observes. I can’t wait for future volumes.

Meanwhile, a mainstream cartoonist like Ernie Bushmiller (1905-1982)—whose “Nancy” comic strip has remained in print since 1938—is increasingly recognized as an artistic pioneer whose style had an impact on everyone from Andy Warhol to Joe Brainard. “Nancy” has now been collected in multiple volumes, the latest being Nancy & Sluggo’s Guide to Life: Comics About Money, Food, and Other Essentials (New York Review Comics, May 14), which finds the frizzy-haired kid and her foil hustling for the better things in life. The volume highlights the ingenious simplicity of this beloved, occasionally reviled, strip, which seemed to formulate the elemental vocabulary of comics as it went.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.