Maia Kobabes’s Gender Queer is one of the most important graphic memoirs of the 21st century. News today from Oni Press of a new annotated edition coming in 2026. Check out some preview pages in the press release below and catch our original 2019 review of the book here at Broken Frontier.
Oni Press to Publish GENDER QUEER: THE ANNOTATED EDITION In May 2026
An Expanded, Hardcover Version of Maia Kobabe’s Seminal Memoir,
Featuring All-New Commentary from the Cartoonist,
Academic Experts, and All-Star Creators
Oni Press, the multiple Eisner- and Harvey Award–winning publisher of groundbreaking comics and graphic novels since 1997, will publish a special annotated hardcover edition of Maia Kobabe’s GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR. The cartoonist’s earnest, heartfelt, and intensely cathartic graphic memoir chronicling eir personal journey of self-identity has been widely heralded as one of the most important and influential graphic novels of the 21st century. GENDER QUEER: THE ANNOTATED EDITION will feature all-new commentary from academic and creative communities to further shed light on the creation of Kobabe’s work, from exploring the technicalities of comic creation to highlighting personal anecdotes from a host of writers and artists discussing their own experiences growing up queer and genderqueer. The new hardcover edition will be published by Oni Press in May of 2026.
“For fans, educators, and anyone else who wants to know more, I am so excited to share the GENDER QUEER: THE ANNOTATED EDITION,” said Maia Kobabe. “Queer and trans cartoonists, comics scholars, and multiple people who appear in the book as characters contributed their thoughts, reactions, and notes to this new edition. There are comments on the color design process, on comics craft, on family, on friendship, on the touchstone queer media that inspired me and countless other people searching for meaningful representation, and on the complicated process of self-discovery. It’s been almost seven years since I wrote the final words of this memoir; revisiting these pages today, in a radically different and less accepting political climate, sparked a lot of new thoughts for me as well. I hope readers enjoy this even richer text full of community voices.”
GENDER QUEER: THE ANNOTATED EDITION promises to be a wonderful educational tool for years to come. Along with commentary from Maia Kobabe, the new edition features annotations from fellow cartoonists Jadzia Axelrod (Galaxy: The Prettiest Star) and Ashley R. Guillory (Queers At The Table), cartoonist and editor Justin Hall (No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics), cartoonist and educator Kori Michele Handwerker (Tiny Book Science), designer and animator Phoebe Kobabe (Gender Queer: A Memoir), author Hal Schrieve (Fawn’s Blood), cartoonist and comics professor at California College of the Arts Rani Som (Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir), co-creator of Lumberjanes and editor Shannon Watters, as well as original acquiring editor Andrea Colvin. GENDER QUEER: THE ANNOTATED EDITION also includes commentary by prestigious academic figures, including Dr. Sandra Cox (professor of English at Southwest Missouri State University), Ajuan Mance (professor of illustration, California College of Arts), Matthew Noe (Lead Collection & Knowledge Management Librarian at Harvard Medical School), and many more.
In 2014, Maia Kobabe—who uses e/em/eir pronouns—thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Then e created GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR. Maia’s autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fan fiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, GENDER QUEER is more than a personal story: It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
Since its original publication in 2019, GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR has been repeatedly cited as one the most banned books in the United States. It has also been widely heralded as one of the most important and influential graphic novels of the 21st century, earning near-universal critical acclaim as a seminal work of LGBTQIA+ nonfiction and ALA Alex and Stonewall Book Awards in the process.
