Nominees have been announced for this year’s Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, and it’s good news for Barbara Yelin. Her extraordinary wartime drama, Irmina, has been included in the “Best U.S. Edition of International Material” category.

Set for the most part in the Berlin of Hitler’s Germany, Yelin’s award-winning graphic novel is a troubling drama based on the life of the author’s grandmother. Conjuring the oppressive atmosphere of Nazi Germany, Irmina explores the tension between integrity and social advancement, reflecting with compassion and intelligence on the complicity that results from the choice, conscious or otherwise, to look away.

Chosen as one of The Observer‘s Best Graphic Books of 2016, Irmina has been praised by PopMatters and The Quietus, among many other outlets.

The Eisner Award winners will be announced at the San Diego Comic Con, which takes place from 20-23 July 2017. You can see the full list of nominees here.

Pieter Coudyzer is well known for his animation work, including the short films Tree and My Heart is not Here. Now, he’s turned his considerable talent to comics – and the results are astonishing. Outburst, released this month, is a disturbing, atmospheric and utterly absorbing debut graphic novel, part coming of age story, part contemporary fairy tale.

Tom is the bespectacled class nerd: introspective, clumsy and myopic. When he leaves his lunchbox unguarded, Tom returns to find it inhabited by ants. When he gazes at the cute girl in class, she responds by sticking out her tongue. And when it is time to partner up on a canoeing trip, he is left to paddle on the river alone…

At home, Tom finds solace in recordings of nature and the wild spaces of his imagination. But when he falls prey to a particularly cruel trick, this imaginative wilderness becomes rampant. It wants out. A moment of crisis marks the flashpoint of a slow-burning metamorphosis.

Outburst is released on 18th May and can be pre-ordered from Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles and, with the help of Hive, local book shops across the land.

Italian artist Fabrizio Dori was reading comics at an early age, but like many readers for whom superheroes never really appealed, he lost interest as a teen. Dori, whose graphic biography Gauguin: The Other World is out now, rediscovered the medium in his thirties. It was only then, after studying at Milan’s Brera Academy of Art, that he felt the desire to start making them.

“It’s a strange medium,” he says. “It balances two things [fine art and literature] that are really quite different from one another – things that, in theory, shouldn’t work together. But in practice, they do, and they do well.”

According to Dori, it’s an exciting time to be working in this hybrid form. “Comics is quite a young medium, and it’s going through a transitional phase similar, more or less, to that which transformed the visual arts in the 8th and 9th centuries. During that period, artists were freed from the constraints of their traditional role within society and forged (with some difficulty) a place for themselves in the modern world. Making comics today is challenging, but it’s a special moment, full of opportunities.”

Dori’s biography, the latest book in our Art Masters series, follows the extraordinary life of a man who was by turns a globe-trotting sailor, a brilliant stockbroker and an outcast painter. But it was something else about Paul Gauguin’s life that made him appealing as a subject. “I’m attracted to stories with a mythical and archetypical dimension. This element of Gauguin’s life was the spark that brought the book to life. We’re talking about the story of a man who’s looking for a lost paradise; who finds it; and who, after a hubristic downfall, loses it again.”

Dori developed his ideas in writing before working on the architecture of the story. “I prepare an outline like a musical score; on this I arrange the individual scenes and define the style and the rhythm of the tale. This is a critical phase: if the foundations are not strong, the entire narrative will be unstable.

“The storyboard and script are worked on simultaneously. I imagine and realise the details of each scene at the storyboarding stage. Once that’s complete, I begin work on the final pages.”

The results of this process can be found in the beautiful Gauguin: The Other World, which is available now from all good book shops.

Dancer, civil rights activist, supporter of the Resistance and mother to the “Rainbow Tribe”: Josephine Baker packed a lot into her 68 years. Hers is a life that demands a monumental portrait, and French creative team Catel and Bocquet have kindly obliged: released this month, their latest graphic biography is 500 glorious pages of dancing and dissent.

Josephine Baker was nineteen years old when she found herself in Paris for the first time in 1925. Overnight, the young American dancer became the idol of the era, captivating Picasso, Cocteau, Le Corbusier and Simenon. In the liberating atmosphere of the 1930s, Baker rose to fame as the first black star on the world stage, from London to Vienna, Alexandria to Buenos Aires.

After World War II, and her time in the French Resistance, Baker devoted herself to the struggle against racial segregation, publicly battling the humiliations she had for so long suffered personally.

She led by example, and over the course of the 1950s adopted twelve orphans of different ethnic backgrounds: a veritable Rainbow Tribe. And it was one of her adopted children, Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker, who acted as the Historical Consultant on Catel and Bocquet’s biography, which contains 100 pages of supplementary material.

Josephine Baker by Catel and Bocquet is available now from all good book shops.

In Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie, French comics artist and graphic designer Néjib tells the story of the young musician’s formative years, living and working in a Victorian house in Beckenham, south-east London. Here, Néjib reveals his inspirations and influences, and why he decided to let Haddon Hall itself take the role of narrator.

In Haddon Hall, I wanted to capture the spirit of the time. It’s not purely a biographical work; rather, it’s a snapshot of David Bowie at the twilight of ’60s. I consider this to be the most pivotal period in his creative development. We know that it was between 1969 and 1970 that David Bowie became himself, and these years held a little magic of their own.

At first, I wanted to do it in black and white, and then little by little I was drawn towards Heinz Edelmann’s work (notably Yellow Submarine), as well as the work of other graphic artists from that time — Milton Glaser, for example.

I initially got stuck with my colour choices, and it was by looking at the work of these people that I saw the potential of a fairly limited palette. I tried using a dark blue line and saw that it could be interesting to work in that way. There was a lot of fumbling, but eventually I found a way to pay tribute to the musicians and graphic designers of the ’60s and ’70s.

When I was writing the first draft of the script, something didn’t add up. There was information I wanted to include but it came across too heavily on the page. At some point, I don’t know why, I thought it might be nice if the house became the narrator. The idea won me over right away; I think the story benefits from a loose sense of fantasy. I didn’t think too much about it, but it was a decision that unlocked the narration: when I wanted to say something, it was the house that said it. It also gave the story a narrative thread.

Néjib is a graphic designer and comics artist. He is the art director at Editions Casterman. Born in Tunisia, he now lives and works in Paris. His favourite David Bowie song is “Sound and Vision”.

Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie is available now from all good book shops. It was chosen as The Observer's Graphic Novel of the Month by Rachel Cooke, who said, "What a dazzling book this is. Nejib is wonderfully alive to the influences on Bowie in this crucial period." Read her full review here.