Oracles
Cartoonist: Olivia Sullivan
Publisher: Avery Hill
Publication Date: April 2026
Oracles by Olivia Sullivan is a gorgeous new graphic novel, and in describing it, I am tempted to use the phrase “stream of consciousness.” Tempted, but it’s not quite applicable here, so precise is the cartooning and verbiage and subject matter. To me, Oracles is more of a mediation, one that welcomes any and all thoughts into the specific story it has set out to tell.
At the core of the book are grief and loss. And they are paired narratively with a physical journey, rich with hiking and new locales and immersion in nature. To get at these themes and tell this story, cartoonist Olivia Sullivan uses wonderfully poetic writing, almost none of which finds its way into a traditional, complete sentence. The verbiage in this book is closer to song lyrics than it is to a novel, or even to the captioning typically found in comics.
It’s an effective creative choice that fits so perfectly with the cartooning here. There are a few bits in Oracles that are traditionally sequential, but for the most part, Sullivan deploys her drawing the same way she does her words: in quick snippets that evoke much larger ideas and feelings.
Throughout Oracles, you will find drawings of canned goods, or computer equipment, or wisps of alien fungi weaving through a wood, all laid out neatly in what feels like an invisible grid. And while that all sounds ethereal and haunting (and, at many points, it is) Oracles is not without its humor. There’s a bit inspired by hallucinogens, for example, wherein the caption is subtly being spoke aloud by a racoon.
I think it all speaks to the total creative freedom Sullivan allows herself in this book. It feels trite to say it, but there’s really not another graphic novel quite like Oracles, not just for the story it’s telling but in the way it uses all the techniques I’ve described above to create a sort of unique cadence. This is a graphic novel with an almost-hypnotic beat.
Another quality of the book I appreciated a great deal is its reverence to the mysteriousness of life. I felt like this is a book that is deeply yearning for connection, rather than answers or sense, and I found that to be an emotionally powerful way to tell a story about a physical journey, too.
To circle back to the start, I absolutely loved how much Oracles reminded me of the blissful feeling one gets while meditating, where thoughts come and go, sometimes along a thread, without demanding that you figure them all out or define them.
Oracles by Olivia Sullivan is available now via Avery Hill Publishing
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