Maria

Maria steps out of the pages of MegaPyton, a Swedish comics publication from Atlantic Förlags AB, making her debut in 1999 at the tail end of the Copper/Modern Age. Born from the creative vision of Julie Doucet and Anne Thorsell — a pairing that signals genuine alternative-comics credibility — she inhabits a world populated by a wonderfully offbeat cast including Monica, Cecilia, Bo, Andreas Lindén, and the memorably named Pappa Y-front. Her catalog footprint is small, but for collectors with a taste for the international indie scene and the distinctive voices that flourished outside the mainstream in the late '90s, Maria is exactly the kind of discovery that makes digging through foreign-language comics so rewarding.