Panel Mania: ‘LaGuardia’ By Nnedi Okorafor

June 21, 2019 | 1 book mentioned

In this engaging graphic novel, Nebula Award-winning sci-fi author Okorafor wittily turns New York City’s LaGuardia Airport into LaGuardia Interplanetary Airport and into a pointed allegorical indictment of the United States’s current racist anti-immigration policies.

Set in a future in which Nigeria has welcomed and benefited from extraterrestrial immigration (although not without conflict), Nigerian-American doctor Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka flees from Lagos to New York, where she grew up. She is pregnant, but also smuggling an intelligent plant-like alien—a refugee, in other words—that is fleeing violence.

Okorafor perfectly captures the absurdity and calamity of our current political moment and her artist co-creators render it in vividly and richly colored drawings.

LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor and artists Tana Ford and James Devlin will be published in July by Dark Horse/Berger Books.

This piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly and also appeared on publishersweekly.com.

is senior news editor of Publishers Weekly and editor of PW Comics World.