By Zack Quaintance — For the past month or so, Fantagraphics has been running an excellent line-wide digital comics sale, and now it’s coming to an end. Before it does, however, I’ve assembled my picks for the best comiXology sales: Fantagraphics summer edition. Some of the best graphic novels of recent memory can be found below…enjoy!

Best comiXology Sales: Fantagraphics Summer

Angels and Magpies - Love and Rockets
Writer/Artist: Jaime Hernandez
The sublime, the superpowered, and the senior citizen converge in Angels and Magpies, which collects the Gods and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls and Love Bunglers storylines from the Love and Rockets: New Stories series, as well as Hernandez’s 2006 serial for the New York Times. In the latter, Maggie pays a visit to Queen Rena, who is living out her twilight days on an island after a lifetime as a wrestler and an adventuress. In the Ti-Girls segment, superheroics get a screwball spin when Angel of Tarzana and Maggie square off against Dark Penny Century. In the "Love Bunglers," held as perhaps Hernandez’s greatest masterpiece in his thirty-five-year career, and one of the great graphic novels of all time (it was hailed by Slate and Publishers Weekly as one of the best stories of the year), the past and present converge as Maggie and Ray’s reunion is threatened by long-buried family secrets.
Why It’s Cool: The most recent collection of Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets work, this book is a must-read for fans of one of the greatest cartoonists to ever do it. This book is a bit bifurcated, with a first half that serves up Jaime’s interesting take on capes and things, and the second half that is Love Bunglers, an original graphic novel that is among the highest points of any of Jaime’s Locas stories to date.
Price: $6.99
Buy It Here: Angels and Magpies

The Cloven Book One
Writer: Garth Stein
Artist: Matthew Southworth
From Garth Stein, the author of the #1 bestseller The Art of Racing in the Rain, and Matthew Southworth, the co-creator of Stumptown come a raucously funny and fast-moving series of graphic novels. James Tucker is the most successful Genetically Modified Human Organism ever created. Half-man, half-goat, Tuck's story unfurls like an action-packed fever dream spanning the Pacific Northwest, from a homeless encampment to a secret sanctuary in the woods where elites perform ritual goat sacrifices. The Cloven Book One features a special full-color four page fold-out spread.
Why It’s Cool: This book was very much under the radar, but it was absolutely fantastic. It’s a rich take on a certain type of sci-fi adventure story that most people familiar with comics will recogonize, but it does everything relentlessly-well and also subverts expectations across the board. Highly recommend this one.
Price: $6.49
Buy It Here: The Cloven Book One

Poison Flowers and Pandemonium
Writer/Artist: Richard Sala
Just a couple of months before his tragic passing in March 2020, cartooning master of the macabre Richard Sala completed his final book ― or, actually, his final four books. Poison Flowers and Pandemonium collects all four of these original graphic novellas in one beautiful hardcover worthy of Sala's legacy. First up in Poison Flowers is "House of the Blue Dwarf," a 125-page thriller featuring master criminal the Bloody Cardinal, who leaves a wake of mayhem and madness everywhere he goes. "Monsters Illustrated" is a fun, 64-page monster movie riff that showcases Sala's visual imagination. A young woman in a dusty bookstore reads a strange bestiary ― the "book within a book" showcases a series of Sala's gorgeous watercolor and ink drawings. But when she gets to the end, she finds the bookseller drives a hard bargain. "Cave Girls Of The Lost World" is a campy, 60-page romp about a team of young women whose plane crashes in a land forgotten by time and rife with dinosaurs, carnivorous plants, and apemen ― but these intelligent, brave, and resourceful women are ready to rumble! Rounding out the book is "The Amazing Adventures of Fantomina Fantomella," a 45-page graphic novella of violence and non-stop action. Priest and his mob thought Fantomina was dead. So how is it that she's come back with a vengeance? Poison Flowers & Pandemonium is a perfect showcase of Sala's gorgeous watercolor artwork and his love of B-movie horror, silent film-era archetypes, and femmes fatale.
Why It’s Cool: There’s not much I can add here that senior staff writer d. emerson eddy didn’t already cover in his excellent Poison Flowers and Pandemonium review.
Price: $9.49
Buy It Here: Poison Flowers and Pandemonium

The Rough Pearl
Writer/Artist: Kevin Mutch
Xeric Award-winning cartoonist Kevin Mutch skewers theory-spouting academics, sleazy art dealers, and obnoxious over-sharers. In this graphic novel, Adam Kline is an aspiring digital artist stuck in a thankless university adjunct position, married to an ambitious woman sick of supporting his pipe dreams, and is completely ignored by the New York art scene. Miraculously, though, his fortunes seem to be turning around. However, there's just one problem ― his mysterious medical condition keeps blacking him out at the most inopportune times, and slowly blurs his perceptions of reality and fantasy… And, if that wasn't enough, he has to content with eerie, pitch-black void, flesh-eating zombies, and a vast, secret network of bug-eyed, bald-headed aliens.
Why It’s Cool: This book was one of my favorite graphic novels of 2020, and I can’t recommend it enough — a trippy and dark sendup of the fine arts world in New York, as well as what it’s like to work in academia while harboring grander ambitions.
Price: $7.49
Buy It Here: The Rough Pearl

Young Shadow
Writer/Artist: Ben Sears
Young Shadow usually protects sci-fi Bolt city by making deliveries for the food bank and rescuing pets. But one night, he discovers the Sludge Team, a conspiracy composed of a CEO of a chemical plant, trust-fund punks, and suspicious cops. To stop their evil plan, Young Shadow must don a couple of batons, knee pads, and a small black mask, and team up with Spiral Scratch — another benevolent protector in the fight — and metal-clad nuns. Drawn in bold yellows and blacks, this is a socially conscious YA action/adventure kid superhero tale.
Why It’s Cool: I already wrote a full extensive review of Young Shadow, but to re-iterate — this is a really smart and timely book, a razor sharp YA-skewing story that feels like a wholly new take on both superheroes and young adventures, reflected through Sears’ understanding of the stakes and challenges of the present day. A must-read graphic novel for all audiences.
Price: $4.99
Buy It Here: Young Shadow

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.