Conundrum’s Spring 2026 Lineup
Conundrum Press is thrilled to announce an exciting spring 2026 lineup highlighting new work from established Conundrum artists.
Starting the spring season off in April is Elisabeth Belliveau’s Birth Story, a graphic memoir about pregnancy, birth, postpartum depression, and new motherhood as an artist. It explores the physical and psychologically altering birth process: pain, transformation, trauma, healing, and the window of time around the birthing body. Struggling to find representations of birth and postpartum depression in popular culture and art, Belliveau interweaves other’s stories, friendship, and travel to help make sense of it all. This personal birth story is an effort to remember and contribute to sharing strength in all women’s voices.
Next up in April, Chris W. Kim’s Closing Act examines the complex networks that make up a city and finds a strange, shifting environment within it, one where its inhabitants face a looming existential threat. Lea walks her usual route through the city when a young man steals her bag. She chases him into an alley but quickly loses her bearings—each alley leads into yet another alley, the sounds of the city fade away, and the thief is nowhere to be seen. Hopelessly searching for an exit, she eventually encounters Dee, one of the alleyfolk who obsessively makes maps of his surroundings and is convinced that the alleys have been gradually narrowing over time. The more of these alleyfolk Lea gets to know, the more she sees that they agree: the labyrinth they inhabit is shifting, creating a state of deep uncertainty. When the presence of the thief becomes a subject of contention, Lea finds herself entangled in the affairs of a world fated to end soon.
Come May we launch, Alison McCreesh’s The Short Years! After her highly acclaimed graphic memoirs about travelling the north, McCreesh turns her uncompromising lens to the domestic everyday work of parenting three small children. Combining gag humour and individually moving comics McCreesh gives an insiders perspective over seven years. There’s a fair amount of talk about death, as well as love and music and art, there’s heartbreak about family friends moving away, there’s some talk of gender, and there are plenty of those general existential questions that kids ponder so well. More than that though, there’s something deeper that comes from these comics spanning so many years. The kids are simultaneously changing AND remaining themselves, as their personalities develop and become more defined. The family dynamics evolve. They lurch around like the exhausted millennial parents that they are, navigating the simultaneous intense love and extreme annoyance that comes with living with small kids. A good mix of fuzzies, feelings, and laugh-out-loud humour, all of which confirm that these years are indeed short – and very long.
At the end of May we celebrate Conundrum Press turning THIRTY YEARS OLD (!!!) with 30×30: Thirty Years of Conundrum Press, an anthology of graphic shorts from 25 Canadian artists. Featuring a preface by Andy Brown on thirty years of publishing activity at Conundrum, 30×30 collects all the books in the CONUNDRUM 25 pocketbook series in celebration of the 30th anniversary of this highly acclaimed publishing company. Featuring veteran cartoonists, archival work, and fresh new talents this anthology expands what a graphic short can be.
Wrapping up the season in June is Cole Degenstein’s Dear Kenneth. Alone in Japan, a travelling artist writes to a beloved poet while trying to reignite the urge to draw. Continued correspondence reveals loneliness and desperation that stretch far beyond the isolation of solo travel and the typical self-reckoning that comes with it. Composed as a series of illustrated letters, Dear Kenneth is a sensitive work of comic auto-fiction that touches on themes of projection and selfishness set to the backdrop of a months-long trip to Japan. Rendered entirely in graphite and coloured pencil, Degenstein examines the desperate act of taking things and making them into what we need them to be, rather than trying to connect with them in a genuine way; when desperate enough, anything can be projected upon: a person, a poet, an artist, a city. Numbed by medication and burning under the Kyoto sun, the artist is forced to self-evaluate, face the consequences of running from oneself, and confront what it means to make artwork out of misery.
~ PRE-ORDER THESE TITLES TODAY ~