Aria Baci

Yudori author profile portrait by Chloé Vollmer-Lo Yudori defies expectations — of genre conventions, of female representation, of queerness as a theme. Her sequential debut was the webcomic series Pandora’s Choice in 2016, which won the Lezhin Comics Award soon after. Her follow-up graphic novel, Raging Clouds, was published in English by Fantagraphics in 2025, and unsurprisingly, nominated for a Will Eisner Award in 2026.

There’s an unspoken (or spoken, depending on the scene at your local comic shop) assumption that cultural products from China tend to be predictable or bland. Paradise Systems challenges that assumption with each book they publish; and most recently, with the anthology Hot Net Hotel. This collection of 15 standalone stories by creators from China offers a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Chinese aesthetic and narrative styles. This is the first volume in a planned series called SYSTEMS.

When I first met cartoonist Caroline Cash, she was a bookseller at Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago. A glint of queer mischief in her eyes made me feel genuinely welcomed into conversations about comics and music and our mutual friends in the global scene. I later learned that she had relocated from Charleston to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cash wrote and illustrated Girl in the World (Silver Sprocket, 2019)in her senior year.