Cousins Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki have collectively produced some of the best comics of the last decade. Their last collaboration, This One Summer, is a modern coming-of-age classic, winning multiple awards, including Caldecott Honor book. Their first one, Skim, was also an award-winner, a groundbreaking look at a queer teen romance.
Individually, Mariko won the Best Writer Eisner in 2019, among many other awards, and wrote Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, another book that’s as beloved as it is acclaimed. And she’s been tearing up the DCU as a scripter while running her own imprint at Abrams, the queer themed Surely Books.
Jillian is a much admired illustrator, while her graphic novels SuperMutant Magic Academy and Boundless are equally admired looks at young adulthood and relationships, and she also won the Governor General’s Award for Skim.
So what I am trying to say is that these two coming together for another book is huge, huge news. And Canada’s Drawn & Quarterly has just announced that they have acquired the rights to a new project by the cousins Tamaki, a still untitled book that will cover their wheelhouse themes and be published in 2023.
It’s spring break, 2009. High school best friends Zoe and Dani are now freshman college students, meeting in a place they’ve wanted to visit forever: New York City. Tagging along with Dani is her classmate Fiona, a mercurial art student with an opinion on everything. Together, the three attempt to cram in as much of the city as possible, gleefully falling into tourist traps, pondering so-called great works of art, sidestepping creeps, and eating lots and lots of pizza (folded in half, of course). Untitled is a New York story about the highs and lows of international travel and starting your twenties.
“In 2010, Jillian and Mariko exploded the YA graphic novel market with a nuanced queer goth coming of age story filled with subtext. Skim raised the bar on what we consider young adult both in subject matter and art style,” said D+Q Publisher Peggy Burns. “With this new book, they’re now shifting their focus to early adulthood, capturing female friendship and the perils of growing up via an eye-opening trip to NYC. Their magic of being able to completely intertwine their individual art forms into a cohesive, spectacular whole is on display yet again.”
To say this book will be one of the major publishing events of 2023 is an understatement. We can’t wait!
