THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2026! I suspect that Nick Abadzis and Angela Watson’s My Beloved Other: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Optimism in a Time of Denial is justly going to be named as one of the most important comics works of 2026. To be frank it’s one of the most important books of the decade. My Beloved Other is a graphic memoir that takes its creators’ interracial marriage as its starting point to not just explore but to interrogate and dissect the prevailing racism inherent in our society. It’s anecdotal in structure and sometimes metatextual in delivery. And it’s also an incredible piece of comics craft that uses everything that’s unique about the form to communicate its message with eloquence, honesty and power.
Angela Watson is a psychotherapist whose professional perspective here is key to the book’s message. Nick Abadzis you will know from decades of acclaimed comics work, from Hugo Tate in Deadline to the Eisner-winning Laika, through to Doctor Who comics for Titan. In collaboration they spark up a conversational style that for the reader feels like they are being spoken to directly. It opens with the pair’s first date, which is disrupted by Nick being caught up in a London protest, and then takes us through the decades with ever insightful reflections on how racism is embedded in the very social structures that surround us, and the types of toxic reactions they experience to their relationship, both passive aggressive and overt.
My Beloved Other works so well for rejecting a formal structure and instead allowing its creators’ on-page incarnations to talk to us more informally, frequently heading off in digressionary directions that eventually feed back into the main narrative thrust. As a result we jump around from comparative accounts of their family histories, historical moments like the betrayal of the Windrush generation or the establishment of the golly as a racist symbol, contemplations on bigotry across continents from their lives in the UK to their move to the States, and sociological examinations of the very nature of racism itself.
Abadzis’s art also constantly morphs and adapts to fit the tone of different sequences, sometimes even cleverly manipulating the reader’s relationship with the page. From Peanuts-style or serial comics-type pastiches to a kind of cartoony realism, through to imaginative visual metaphor and expressive character work, this is an artistic tour-de-force from a creator who knows intuitively how to work the page to get the exact reaction he wants from the reader.
One of the sections that will stay with you the longest, though, is Watson’s account of her career in New York City and a workplace where systemic racism was embedded, privilege entrenched, and the need to change and adaptation resisted and/or ignored. Set against the backdrop of Covid, the murder of George Floyd, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, this reads like a case study of entitlement and toxic workplace culture.
My Beloved Other: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Optimism in a Time of Denial is a book that will make you angry. It will make you feel outrage. It may even leave you with a consuming sense of righteous indignation. But it will also underline that if that’s all you take away from it then that’s frankly not enough. This is also a rallying call for transformation, a reminder to be active in changing the world around us and, for those of us in positions of privilege, to recognise and own that. That it’s also a masterpiece of graphic memoir seems almost secondary to all of that.
Nick Abadzis and Angela Watson (W), Nick Abadzis (A) • First Second/23rd Steet Books, £26.99
Buy online from Gosh! Comics here
Review by Andy Oliver
Nick Abadzis and Angela Watson are at table C3 in the Bubbleboy Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2026 runs from November 9th-15th with the convention weekend taking place on the 14th-15th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2026 coverage so far in one place here.
Poster art by Núria Tamarit
