As Lina steps into adulthood, she turns to the work of Virginia Woolf and Patricia Highsmith for insight into who she - and her friends - will become
It's a typically sticky Toronto summer and Lina's spending her first couple of weeks after graduation reading and hanging out with her best friend Cara. Everything's calm - until she finds out that her childhood friend Alicia has died.
With her high school friends quickly drifting apart and her parents out of town, Lina tries to make sense of what has happened on her own. Hoping for answers, she turns to Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt. As Lina reunites with her friends for a final party on the shores of Lake Ontario, she finds herself wondering what it means to have known someone, and who they'll all become when they're no longer anchored to each other.
Winner of the Expozine Awards, July Underwater is an early work of Tiohtia:ke (Montreal) based artist Zoe Maeve, now available to widespread audiences for the first time.
"A beautifully illustrated, poetic, at times impressionistic yet straightforward tale that is strongly evocative of the kind of reminiscences and reflections experienced during summer beachfront escapes." - Juror comments, 2016 Expozine Awards"

Zoe Maeve is a comics artist and illustrator originally from Tkaronto/Toronto who now lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She studied visual arts at Concordia University, where she worked in oil painting, printmaking, and textiles before finding comics. In 2021 her first book The Gift was published by Conundrum Press and she was nominated for an Ignatz Award for Promising Young Talent. Her book July Underwater, which was the recipient of Best English Comic at the 2016 Expozine awards, will be released to a widespread audience with Conundrum Press for the first time in 2022. She currently shares her home with her partner and two feisty black cats.

Zoe Maeve's profile page

"This is an artistically rich book perfect for fans of Ghost World." - Booklist
July Underwater is an exploration of nostalgia, loss, discovery, and growing up. All of us have gone through it. It doesn't hammer its points home, but rather touches on them lightly and allows us to come to our own conclusions. - Montreal Review of Books
"A beautifully illustrated, poetic, at times impressionistic yet straightforward tale that is strongly evocative of the kind of reminiscences and reflections experienced during summer beachfront escapes." - Juror comments, 2016 Expozine Awards