Author of
Squeak Chatter Bark: An Eco-Mystery (Fantagraphics, 2025)
Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories (Fantagraphics, 2018)
Ali Greta Fitzgerald is a writer and artist living on the outskirts of Paris with her wife. A columnist for The New Yorker, she regularly contributes essays and longer comics to the magazine. For McSweeney’s, Fitzgerald has created weekly webcomics, including the cult favorite, “Hungover Bear and Friends.” Her first graphic book, Drawn to Berlin, won the Independent Publisher’s prize and was named one of the top three graphic novels of the year by Vulture. Fitzgerald’s artwork has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and Europe and she has frequently collaborated with museums like the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Haus am Luetzowplatz. She’s been the recipient of several fellowships, including the Cornish Fellowship and the Georgia Fee Fellowship. Fitzgerald often leads visual storytelling workshops, most recently at The American College of the Mediterranean. In 2025 she published a graphic novel for kids called Squeak Chatter Bark and was included in the MoMA’s first book devoted to comics, Drawn to MoMA.
Ali Fitzgerald
Books by Ali
The French Kiss of Death: A Memoir of My Guillotine Obsession
A darkly funny new graphic memoir and queer love story by an acclaimed cartoonist, New Yorker columnist and creator of the McSweeney’s cult classic “Hungover Bear and Friends”.
After Ali falls in love with her partner Nina, a French-Moroccan Parisienne, she moves to Paris – and suddenly the guillotine, the French Revolution’s most potent symbol, is everywhere. And the same question seems to be on everyone’s mind: With the dominance of the techno-billionaire class and the uptick in political violence, are we on our way to a modern version of the French Revolution?
In an attempt to better understand these dark days Ali begins to organize her daily walks, sometimes alone and sometimes with Nina, around sites related to the guillotine—and those most closely connected to it—like Marie Antoinette, who died on the scaffold, Dr. Guillotin, who invented it (though he opposed the death penalty), and Charles-Henri Sanson, Paris’s most famous executioner, whose work quite literally drove him mad. These walks also give Ali a chance to learn Nina’s history of the city alongside its revolutionary remnants. Ali’s drive to learn all she can from Paris’ descent into and away from political violence is intertwined with a deeply personal journey, allowing her to revisit and exorcise the anxiety and shame that marked her lonely childhood and to embrace the life she and Nina are building together, in spite of the times.
Squeak Chatter Bark: An Eco-Mystery (Fantagraphics, 2025)
In this charming middle-grade graphic novel, 11-year-old Hazel McCrimlisk’s scientist parents are kidnapped inside the ecosphere they live and work in. Can Hazel and her friends find them in time?
Hazel and her parents live an idyllic life in a treehouse in the PAW (Perfect Animal Worlds) Biosphere among a series of ecologically controlled environments populated by genetically created and enhanced animals and flora. As scientists working for PAW, together with founder Dr. Henry Nimick, the McCrimlisk’s mission is to create a world that will usher in an era of “good evolution”, populated with animals and plants that can transform pollution and other environmental hazards to make the region clean and habitable. But one foggy night, Hazel’s parents are suddenly kidnapped. With the help of her animal friends Chimi (a multilingual toucan), Nina (a pet-sized elephant who exhibits super-strength), and her human friend (comics lover and mythology expert) Alex, Hazel tracks clues throughout the various biodomes and climates uncovering what happened to her parents and leading her to... a monster?!?
Author Ali Fitzgerald charmingly wrote, drew, lettered, and colored this book featuring an imaginative setting rich with detail and an expressive brush-pen style with a good sense of personality and motion. Her colorful, anthropomorphic characters are bright and funny sleuths alongside Hazel as they follow the clues together. Filled with puns and hijinks, readers will delight in this mystery with an ecological message.
PRAISE
"Lovers of nature and sci-fi will adore the anthropomorphic characters, the idea of transforming environmental hazards into something good and the amazing creativity from the world and bio domes that Fitzgerald has crafted in this stunning graphic novel."― Broken Frontier
"Fitzgerald, a frequent New Yorker cartoonist, fills the pages of this book with lush brush strokes and an appreciation for nature. ... It all adds up to a fun journey that may generate some conversation without being too heavy-handed."― The Revelator
"A solid eco-mystery that will please lovers of nature and science fiction alike."― Kirkus Reviews
"Fitzgerald uses her ability to capture human foibles in warm, accessible figures to pitch the visuals exactly right for the age level, and in two alternating hues, she grows feelings of connection, melancholy, and danger with equal abundance."― Booklist
Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories (Fantagraphics, 2018)
Her students draw images of tragic violence and careful optimism: rafts and tanks, flowers and the Eiffel Tower. In her eight years in Germany, Fitzgerald experiences the highs of the creatively hopeful, along with the deep depression of the disillusioned, all while waiting to stumble onto her own glory like the great Modernists before her. In the gigantic plastic bubble that is the refugee center, worlds collide and echo, and her drawings are compassionate and unflinchingly intimate, perfectly visualizing the fantasy of her Bohemia crumbling in a globalized city. It’s about what she finds when helps lost people.
PRAISE
"One of the finest pieces of comics nonfiction I’ve read in years."― New York Magazine: Vulture
"Fitzgerald celebrates the cathartic powers of art in her memoir recalling comic workshops she led in Berlin’s refugee shelters. This ode to her students isn’t just a portrayal of a city in flux or a people displaced―it is a portrait of the power of art."― Publishers Weekly
"Fitzgerald uses art to illuminate the human dimensions of [the refugee crisis], a situation often sketched in statistics."― The Atlantic
"Beautiful, sensitive, illuminating, and at times quite funny. ... every page is a gem."― LA Review of Books
"It’s quite an extraordinary book―a thoughtful and deeply empathetic examination of displacement and hope, focusing on the situation of immigrants in Berlin, past and present."― The Rumpus
"Warm and occasionally surreal black-and-white drawings profoundly and respectfully humanize people too often rendered as statistics while encouraging contemplation of a more humane future."― Library Journal (starred review)
"Fitzgerald's somber, black-inked drawings are a good match to her serious, introspective tone but still leave room for lightness in the form of white space, expressive and smiling faces, and the off-the-page connections made through art."― Booklist
"Given the current political climate, this feels like an important book."― Book Riot