For years, Aidan Koch’s comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, reimagining what a comic can look like and how it can tell a story. Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. Spiral and Other Stories is a triumph of that continuing process.

Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit. Characters yearn for each other, even as they’re pulled toward different lives. Rivers dance together, then diverge as they make their way to the sea.

With an accompanying essay by the author and critic Nicole Rudick, who explores Koch’s craft and her move into environmentally focused comics, Spiral and Other Stories is a showcase of Koch’s mastery of comics as a medium that can contain astonishing forms and offer new kinds of storytelling for our uncertain times.

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