Evil Eyes Sea

2026 Max and Moritz Price, Best International Comic Cartoonist Studio Prize Winner, 2025 The Best Graphic Novels of 2024, The Guardian  Best Graphic Novels for Adults 2024, American Library Association A feminist political mystery set in Istanbul during the 1995 elections tells the story of two broke students who witnessed an unusual death on a scuba diving expedition. As the case deepens, they become increasingly entangled with political corruption, religious pressure, and possibly murder. They try to return to their everyday lives, but their lives are increasingly entangled with the political corruption, religious pressure, and economic instability that result from their experience. Samanci says, "The autobiographically-inspired story I tell in Evil Eyes Sea emerged from my college years in Istanbul, my quirky friends, and my struggles with being a young woman in Turkey's male-centric culture. In this book, I share a window into a country where narrow political views limit personal power — a place that can be beautiful, but also cruel."

Ozge Samanci is a media artist, graphic novelist, and Associate Professor at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Digital Media from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2009. In 2017, Ozge received the Berlin Prize, and I was the Holtzbrinck Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Her autobiographical graphic novel Dare to Disappoint (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015) received international press attention and was reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, New Republic, Paste Magazine, and the Daily Beast, among others. Dare to Disappoint received the 2016 New York Book Show Award and the 2016 Middle East Book Award and has been translated into Korean, Dutch, Romanian, Italian, and Turkish. Ozge's illustrations have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The Huffington Post, and The Rumpus, among other publications.