Oni Press will release Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition, a new annotated version of the controversial bestselling graphic novel by Maia Kobabe, in February, the company announced. The new edition will present the comic pages with adjacent notes (see page examples in the Gallery below) from a wide variety of contributors, including all-star creators, academic experts, and Kobabe.
Commentary topics include the comic creative process, growing up queer and genderqueer, and notes from people that appear as characters in the book.
“Queer and trans cartoonists, comics scholars, and multiple people who appear in the book as characters contributed their thoughts, reactions, and notes to this new edition,” Kobabe said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “There are comments on the color design process, on comics craft, on family, on friendship, on the touchstone queer media that inspired me and countless other people searching for meaningful representation, and on the complicated process of self-discovery.”
Kobabe contributed comments to the new edition, noting, “Revisiting these pages today, in a radically different and less accepting political climate, sparked a lot of new thoughts for me as well.”
Other contributors include cartoonists Jadzia Axelrod and Ashley R. Guillory, cartoonist and editor Justin Hall, cartoonist and educator Kori Michele Handwerker, designer and animator Phoebe Kobabe, author Hal Schrieve, cartoonist and comics professor at California College of the Arts Rani Som, co-creator of Lumberjanes and editor Shannon Watters, original Gender Queer acquiring editor Andrea Colvin, and academics Dr. Sandra Cox (professor of English at Southwest Missouri State University), Ajuan Mance (professor of illustration, California College of Arts), and Matthew Noe (Lead Collection & Knowledge Management Librarian at Harvard Medical School).
This is the third edition of Gender Queer; the paperback edition was released in 2019 and a deluxe hardcover edition in 2022.
The title was the most challenged book in libraries in 2023 (see “Graphic Novels Most Challenged“), a period when it was also a bestseller, driven by the publicity surrounding book bans (see “Top 20 2023 Author Graphic Novels“).
Click Gallery below for sample pages!
Source: ICv2
