Drawn and Quarterly has announced it has plans to publish five new titles in early 2021, all of them by well-known creators whose previous work has earned them awards and critical praise.

Red Flowers, by Yoshiharu Tsuge: While he is not well known (yet) in North America, Tsuge is well known in Japan as a pioneer of the gekiga movement, the gritty, adult manga that became popular in the 1960s in Japan.  Like his brother, Tadao Tsuge (Trash Market) and his fellow creator Yoshihiro Tatsumi (The Push Man), Tsuge published his manga in the avant-garde magazine Garo.  Drawn and Quarterly has licensed his work and has just published the first of seven planned volumes, The Swamp.  Red Flowers is a collection of vivid short stories that feature unusual characters, strong contrasts, and deep emotion.  It is scheduled for release in January 2021 as a 296-page black-and-white hardcover with an MSRP of $24.95.

Heaven No Hell, by Michael DeForge: This graphic novel will be a must-buy for many readers, as DeForge is a celebrated creator with a large following. Heaven No Hell is a collection of short stories that feature DeForge’s characteristic mix of body horror, anxiety, and humor, drawn with a meandering line and embellished with the brightest of colors.  Heaven No Hell is scheduled for February 2021, will be a full-color (of course) 200-page hardcover, and will have an MSRP of $21.95.

Tono Monogatari, by Shigeru Mizuki: Mizuki is best known in Japan for his comics featuring yokai, or spirits, and Drawn and Quarterly has just finished publishing all his Kitaro stories in a kid-friendly format.  Tono Monogatari is a very different work, created after Mizuki had stopped churning out commercial manga and dedicated himself to more personal projects.  The original on which this is based is a book of yokai stories collected by two folklorists and published in 1910, as the modern world was beginning to displace Japanese traditional culture. Mizuki depicts himself traveling through the Tono region, telling the stories as he goes, and brings the book to a close with a sequence in which he discusses the work with one of the original authors.  Translator Zack Davisson, who has translated many of Mizuki’s other works and authored several books on yokai and Japanese folklore himself, is the translator of this manga and adds his own essays to deepen the non-Japanese reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the stories.  Tono Monogatari will be published in March 2021 as a 296-page, black and white paperback with an MSRP of $24.95.

Billionaires, by Darryl Cunningham: At a time when political discourse is focusing increasingly on the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else, Cunningham brings his straightforward explanatory style to the question of why billionaires exist at all and what their existence says about the American economic system.  Cunningham debunked bad science in How to Fake a Moon Landing and chronicled the life and misdeeds of Ayn Rand in The Age of Selfishness.  Darryl’s work is both painstakingly researched and highly entertaining, as he manages to pull out the most interesting facets of his topic and always takes care to put them into context.  Drawn and Quarterly will publish Billionaires in March 2021 as a 264-page full-color paperback with an MSRP of $24.95.

Cyclopedia Exotica, by Aminder Dhaliwal: Two years ago, Dhaliwal’s Woman’s World lit up the indy-comics world with its acid humor.  Now she’s back with a collection of short comics, first published on Instagram, about the lives of humanoid cyclops, one-eyed people who live as a minority among their two-eyed brethren.  These little stories zero in on the absurdities of dating, family life, art, and the perils of being in the minority.  (In one gag, a bully taunts a cyclops child who is wearing glasses by calling him "two-eyes.") The book will be published in April 2021 as a 260-page, black and white paperback with an MSRP of $24.95.

Drawn & Quarterly’s Fall 2020 list was led by Lisa Hanawalt and Michel Rabagliati (see "D&Q Fall 2020").