Some Italian series recently started serialization in English:

Mediterranea #1, written by Giuliano Monni and drawn by Gianluca Maconi, reminded me of Ythaq except with way less clothing on the heroes, somewhat less compression in the intro, and allusions to Pharaonic Egypt and classical Greece. Hmm.

A Skeleton Story #1 by Alessandro Pak has more action, more clothes, more blue, and more of a Disney-meets-Burton feel. The Skeleton goes on an interesting walk after being driven off the road and into a lake... Then things get weird but I have even less of a clue where the plot's going with this one. Go figure.

Meanwhile...

7 Psychopaths #3 ends this arc of the Sept series with a lot of bangs, a twist I totally didn't see coming, and an interesting point about the Great Man Theory of history.

Nylon Road : A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran by Parsua Bashi reminded me of Persepolis at first (both are memoirs of women who grew up in Iran then moved to Europe), but reading both is worth it. Living in Zurich in 2004, Bashi gets in touch with her inner child - or more accurately, visited by everyone from her inner 6-year-old girl to her inner 36-year-old woman. The scenes range from realistic modern-day and flashbacks to surreal diagrams to more, and even cover history before Bashi's own life as well. The visuals are in greyscale and sepia tones instead of B&W, and with more detail in the drawings. BTW, if you want to read it in the original, one more difference is that Satrapi wrote Persepolis in French and Bashi wrote Nylon Road in German.

Sky Doll : Lacrima Christi (2 volumes long) offers some more backstory to the setting of Sky Doll: more on the 2 rival popes, Lodovica and Agape, of Papagaea and religious life and horror on that planet and Aqua (there's even a follow-up on what happened after Noa left in Sky Doll vol. 2, "Aqua"!). Barbucci and Canepa invited 5 other visual artists to illustrate 6 short stories and some more art pages, a la Sky Doll : Spaceship Collection.

Tales of the Dragon Guard : Into the Veil vol. 1 (actually vol. 4 of Tales of the Dragon Guard), "Brisken," shows more of the bigger picture the Dragon Guard live and work in. It includes the roots of the Guard, more recent palace intrigues, male allies, and an epic and tragic battle against zombies...

Whispers in the Walls #1-2, written by David Muñoz and drawn by Tirso, starts off im media res in a noir and gothy barracks before turning out to be in 1949 Czechoslovakia. There, little girl Sarah is the last of her family to survive postwar germ warfare and lives in a castle-turned-"hospital" with secret passages and even more secret notes...

The Chimpanzee Complex vol. 3, "Civilization," jumps Helen and Aleksa ahead again - this time to face mummification, visitors, spacewalks and a ginormous backlog of email... The visuals are very realistically drawn and colored again. There's a lot of suspense, and some flashing back to Helen and Sofia's time together too. Then the trilogy ends by having things spiral way further than I expected, and as for finding Sofia...

After another flashback The Scorpion vol. 4, "The Treasure of the Templars," catches up with our heroes in a well-drawn scene of both tension and tedium (yes, it makes sense). Then the plot gets even more interesting and the math gets even more complicated when 2 more treasure hunters with their eyes on 30%-50% of the prize join the team, and the story even manages to take on a Wild West-like tone without anachronism...

Tales of the Dragon Guard : Into the Veil vol. 2, "The Palace Garden," begins in media res, with a group of men under attack in a jungle (very different from earlier parts of the series) before turning to a new recruit at a near-empty Dragon Guard school and piling on more mystery. Vol. 3, "Beyond the Mountains," is a change of pace for anyone who expects cheesecake from Soleil - this time the knights dress for the snow on the slopes. It's also a standalone flashback - and even a good starting point (if you read this then the other 5 books in the series) despite possibly being the last volume Marvel releases in English.

Whispers in the Walls #3-4 starts in media some very weird res, and then switches to an adult finally leveling with Sarah about the "germ warfare." Meanwhile, the other children have their infighting and other adults try to sway Sarah. There's also a family reunion of sorts...

Got one more title to add for now...

Cyclops #1-2, "The Recruit" (were these 2 issues 1 album in the original French?), written by Matz and drawn by Luc Jacamon, is about the UN outsourcing its peacekeeping missions in 2054. Multicorps Security Inc. wins the bidding. Next thing Doug Pistoia knows, he's got a job as a peacekeeping soldier and a camera on his helmet. Multicorps is in the reality show business too (complete with commercial breaks)...but doesn't keep everything on the record...

Cyclops #3-4, "The Hero," goes deeper with recorded disobedience (or was it obeying higher orders...?) and cameras on Doug and Tatiana's marriage. Also, some scenes are behind the scenes, of Doug's employers and their plotting for both military and media. Then reporter Jeremy Fuentes, working for another medium, starts asking questions...

Thanks Michael Heide for recommending Roxanna & the Quest for the Time-Bird! I finally found volume 1, "Ramor's Conch." The visuals are clear and colorful, the story's swords-and-sorcery fantasy works well, and the fauna of the setting even managed to remind me of Dougal Dixon's After Man : A Zoology of the Future all at once. I think I have an idea of where the plot's likely to go (given swords-and-sorcery clichés), but I hope the later volumes prove me wrong.

Meanwhile...

Cyclops #5-6, "The Rebel," starts off with Pistoia on leave in Mexico City, rallying the troops (even Anderson) to find the truth. Then on a job on the Chilean-Argentinian border they find a whole village murdered, Dansky gets yanked for his conscience, and they find out they did massacre other civilians in the name of the show going on. On the media side of things, peopkle listen to independent reporters and a spy leakes a sex tape...