By Katie Fricas. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. Softcover, 356 pages, Colour, 2025. In which a queer library worker searches for love, artistic validation in New YorkCity, and the perfect book An aspiring cartoonist and book lovin' lesbian, Louise works a dead-end day job at a shoe store, where she spends most of her time brooding over a coworker who will never quite love her back. By night, she works diligently and obsessively on her graphic novel—the true story of a carrier pigeon who rescued a battalion of soldiers in WWI. When Louise unexpectedly lands a new job at a private library on the Upper East Side, she feels like her graphic novel will finally take off—surely the oldest library in New York has excellent holdings on pigeons and WWI. But what she finds in the stacks might be less revelatory than her discoveries between the sheets and buried in her own family history. A graphic novel set against a perfectly cartoony NYC backdrop—complete with landmark haunts, street fashion, and quintessential characters of the city—Checked Out is at once a valentine to libraries and New York, and the story of an artist working to make her dreams come true. Drawn in a delightfully vivacious style, Checked Out buzzes with Katie Fricas’s vibrant energy, quick wit, and storytelling aplomb.
