Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures

Yvan Alagbé’s Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures (2018–present, The New York Review of Books) collects a pair of stark, politically charged graphic novellas originally published in France. Alagbé, who serves as both writer and artist, explores the brutal realities of immigration, race, and state violence through spare, expressionist black-and-white drawings. The series matters for its unflinching look at the lives of undocumented African immigrants in Paris, rendered with a poetic, haunting minimalism that challenges the reader’s assumptions. This single-issue volume stands as a vital, if unsettling, work of European comics.