July Underwater

As dusk falls over the lake, Lina’s world is beginning to dissolve.

It’s a typically sticky Toronto summer and Lina’s spending her first couple of weeks after graduation reading and hanging out with her best friend Cara. Everything’s calm—until she finds out that her childhood friend Alicia has died.

With her high school friends quickly drifting apart and her parents out of town, Lina tries to make sense of what has happened on her own. Hoping for answers, she turns to Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt.

As Lina reunites with her friends for a final party on the shores of Lake Ontario, she finds herself wondering what it means to have known someone, and who they’ll all become when they’re no longer anchored to each other.

Winner of the Expozine Awards, July Underwater is an early work of Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) based artist Zoe Maeve, now available to widespread audiences for the first time.

“July Underwater is about big universal themes – transitions, friendship, death, romance, incomplete childhood memories, and trying to know the unknowable. I love this little, beautiful book, which magically feels saturated and spacious at the same time.” —Keiler Roberts, My Begging Chart

About the Author

Zoe Maeve is a comics artist originally from Tkaronto/Toronto who is now based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She studied visual arts at Concordia University, where she worked in oil painting, printmaking, and textiles before finding comics.

In 2021 her first book The Gift was published by Conundrum Press and she was nominated for an Ignatz Award for Promising Young Talent. Her book July Underwater, which was the recipient of Best English Comic at the 2016 Expozine awards, will be released to a widespread audience with Conundrum Press for the first time in 2022. She currently shares her home with her partner and two feisty black cats.

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-177262-069-6
96 pages, 6.25 x 7.7.5 inches
full colour, trade paper