Drawn and Quarterly has announced that they’ve acquired Julia Mata‘s debut graphic novel, Crisis!, with plans to publish it in 2024.
Mata is one-third of Spicy Mango Comics, along with Daisy Ruiz and Rachelle Hall. They are a New York-based small-press imprint that’s been releasing comics, prints, apparel and other items from all three creators, including Mata’s Crisis! zines.
“Julia’s characters—Dania and Mayra—are complex and layered and filled with possibility. I love watching their friendship come to life in all its realness,” D+Q Senior Editor Tracy Hurren said in a blog post. “Crisis! does one of my favorite things: it captures young women living messy, complicated, busy lives and coming out stronger. It’s fiction at its best.”
Here’s the description from D + Q:
Crisis! follows two twenty-something roommates struggling to get by in a cold northeastern city, where even your side hustle has a side hustle. Mayra is a short, colocha, biracial Hondureña studying software engineering, whose thesis is a meet-up app for connecting Jews of Color. Dania is a lanky Salvadoreña working as a waitress and struggling to come to terms with her depression, her sexuality, her poetic ambition (or lack thereof), and her future more generally.
The graphic novel will be released in the spring of 2024.