Let’s start here: this isn’t a plot. It’s a moodboard left on your doorstep in the shape of a comic book. This is what happens when you replace the hero’s journey with a perfectly tender road trip across a pastel mutation of Russia, where every pipe leaks puns, every vending machine is sentient and probably flirting with you, and nothing matters more than snacks and vibes.
Lately I’ve been putting down thoughts on what have been some of my favorite things across media over the last several year. Things that are important to me like books that my dad gave me or children’s picture books that have never left me, or my favorite Studio Ghibli movie, and Multiple Warheads is a comic that is always among the first I mention when confronted with the question of what comics I like. It’s not a direct hit, it isn’t definitive, it’s not my everything, its not something that made me feel exposed in how targeted it seemed to be, but it just appeals to a small part of me that doesn’t get enough of this kind of art and that lack of supply just elevates the work you love. Whether it’s Paul Pope, Inio Asano, Jaime, Q Hayashida, or Zoe Thorogood, they just bring an aesthetic that is all their own.
Brandon Graham’s The Complete Multiple Warheads is a comic that dares to ask the question: what if post-Soviet sci-fi body horror was actually about breakfast and sex and being in love and maps that don’t lead anywhere?
Sexica is our heroine, an ex–organ smuggler turned tourist, traveling with her maybe-werewolf boyfriend Nikoli, who uses a magic-egg-powered rocket penis to pee. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s perfect. They’re not running from anyone. They’re not chasing a villain. They’re just moving, tugged forward by a loose thread of wonder, snack cravings, and the vague rumor of a place called the Impossible City, which may or may not exist.
And while they wander, Graham fills every margin with jokes. Signage, graffiti, sidewalks, packaging, it’s a visual mixtape of zine-like irreverence, like reading Heavy Metal by way of Adult Swim while half-asleep. There’s so much happening in the periphery that the “story” becomes less a plot and more a delivery system for attention, a slow, cozy vessel for creativity itself.
Reading Warheads feels like paging through someone’s hyper-stimulated sketchbook brain.m The hand-lettering? Iconic. The panel layouts? Fluid, playful, weirdly tender.
There are organ heists, sure but they’re chill. There’s violence, maybe but only as texture. The real action is emotional, tactile. Quietly kinky. Absurdly sweet.
This is slice-of-life manga filtered through pun-drunk indie comics, with a heavy dash of European visual sensibility. It’s soft Gen-X sci-fi for romantics. Unashamed of being silly, even when it gets philosophical. And when it’s dumb, it’s delightfully dumb in all the right ways, and some of the wrong ones.
Some readers will bounce off the lack of structure. In an era dominated by clean arcs and constant escalation, this comic may make you question your place in time and space. That’s the point. Not every story needs resolution. Some stories just loiter. Just dwell. Just sketch a world soft enough to fall asleep inside. And in a comics culture that still too often equates mature with gritty this is a radical kind of softness.
There’s a side plot about another organ smuggler. There’s a ghost throne. There’s poetry baked into the signage. There’s a city that feels like language spiraling out of control. But the best part? Two people just vibing through a broken world, in love, on a slow train to nowhere.
The narrative is fragmentary, more poetic than sequential. You might hear echoes of road novels or late-Soviet futurism, but stripped of ideology. Stripped of urgency. Lovers are on a journey, yes but the destination is irrelevant. The comic resists arc. The pleasure is in dwelling in the moment, in the line, in that liminal space comics inhabit, between image and word, motion and pause.
Words curl into drawings. Signs comment on the story that holds them. Jokes become architecture. A lesser artist might collapse under the weight of so much whimsy, but Graham maintains rhythm. Cadence. He never lets go of the sketchbook heartbeat.
Comics often aspire to the cinematic. Graham’s work aspires to the personal. The handwritten. And in that ambition, mutated, mischievous, meandering, he’s created something better than a story. He’s created a language to inhabit. Too many modern comics feel like screenplays in waiting. Graham’s feel like they couldn’t exist anywhere else but here, on the page, one impossible line at a time.
There’s a level of writing I can’t quite reach that could explain what feels foundational about Brandon Graham’s comics. Something about their refreshingly open-world spirit. Something about how Multiple Warheads lets you meander. Not plotless, just expansive. A story that doesn’t worry if you wander off.
Take Sexica. She’s a character who oozes cool, effortlessly. Design, swagger, voice, she doesn’t need a costume to be iconic. You recognize her. She owns every panel she steps into. And yet, she walks through pages that, to the impatient eye, might seem like throwaway whimsy. Pun-smeared signage, absurdist architecture, a graffiti-tagged absurdity of a world that seems stitched together in real time. A dream logic comic stitched from late night musings and doodles and vibes.
But I don’t think it’s throwaway. I choose to believe these places mean something, even if they don’t move the plot, they move me. They’re not dead ends. They’re prompts. Corners my own characters might someday turn. Backdrops that nudge toward foreground. A sense of setting that feels as tactile and particular as anything in Taiyō Matsumoto’s Tokyo These Days, a comic as different in tone as it gets, yet similarly anchored in lived-in places. Where Matsumoto’s Tokyo is mournful and ghosted with memory, Graham’s Warhead-world is irreverent, improvisational. But they both feel inhabited.
Place matters to Graham. How people get from one place to another matters. His comics are filled with travel, long shots of characters in vehicles, walking maps, shifting angles that pull back to show you the full breadth of the world. It’s about distance and direction, but also about lingering. What’s around the story. What’s left behind.
I don’t know Brandon Graham. But I wonder, is he someone who’s driven across states with no plan except curiosity? Someone who pays attention to alleyways, corner stores, that bookshop that was open last time and is closed today? Is he the kind of person who sees a road he didn’t go down and wonders what he missed, not with regret, but with possibility?
Maybe we’ll never know. But what we do know is that in his comics, everything gets a name. Everything gets a label. Even if it’s a joke. A pun. A whisper of something silly. That wall isn’t just there, someone tagged it. That storefront isn’t just scenery, it’s got signage, it’s part of the fabric. A spark of life. A breadcrumb. An invitation.
In the end, Multiple Warheads isn’t just a comic. It’s a place. A bath. A puzzle. A mixtape for a trip that doesn’t require movement.
A world of soft apocalypse and weird intimacy, built for dwelling.
And maybe, in a culture obsessed with structure and meaning, this kind of shapeless, affectionate absurdity is exactly the kind of comic we need.