Mark Your Calendars — Paul Rainey’s ‘There’s No Time Like The Present’ Reprinted And ‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’ Gets A Softcover

Two great books from Paul Rainey and Drawn & Quarterly coming your way in 2025!

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Yes, it’s a fair way off, but sometimes it’s good to let you know way into the future of something VERY good – and that’s just what these two Paul Rainey books are.

The first you’ll have already read plenty of already, as I covered Why Don’t You Love Me? plenty here at Comicon, starting with its serialisation online as part of webcomic weekly here in 2022 before reviewing the beautifully put together hardback from D&Q here, exactly one year later to the day in 2023.

Why Don’t You Love Me? gets a much-deserved softcover edition in 2025. If you need any indication of how damn good it is, here’s some of what I had to say…

‘It’s all about our nice little surburban couple, Claire and Mark, and their two kids. They’re dealing with all the normal modern life things, the troubles with parenting, things with schools, work, their relationship. Except that’s not true. It’s far from a normal little family unit. Claire’s obviously depressed, retreating into the bottle, and Mark’s obviously got his own problems – forgetting the kids’ names being only the start of it.

‘There’s such a brilliance with how Rainey sets it all up – no huge revelations await you, certainly not in the first half of the book, just that deliciously slow and steady unfolding of an unsettling feeling in front of you as Rainey details their hum-drum lives, and does it so very well.

‘It’s quite magnificent to see just how Rainey spins it all out, with an unsettling feel creeping in early on and simply refusing to stop nagging at you. There’s the constant feeling that something could go very, very, very wrong. And then it does…

And if that’s not enough, here’s what some bloke called Neil Gaiman has to say about it…

“When I began to read WDYLM I thought it read like any number of slightly surrealistic slightly vapid early-2000s stories that were basically the cartoonist’s way of telling you they hated everyone and everything. And then it came into focus and it wasn’t that thing at all.

And then it came into focus again, uplifting and heartbreaking and (a word that I use sparingly) relevant. The kind of story, leading to a last panel that’s all pain and joy and delivers the whole thing.

What a masterwork. To understand all is to forgive all.” – Neil Gaiman on Rainey’s Why Don’t You Love Me?

So that’s Why Don’t You Love Me? You’ve hopefully already read it and loved it the way myself and that Gaiman bloke do.

But the second book of Rainey’s being reprinted in 2025 is something you may not have heard of, his earlier work, similarly impressive – There’s No Time Like The Present.

Originally released by Escape Books in 2015 and collecting together a 12-issue self-published series that Rainey had put out over nine years, There’s No Time Like The Present was and still is a graphic novel of beautifully observed characters in classic soap-opera style (that will be wonderfully familiar to readers of WDYLM?) that perfectly incorporates some very inventive, very clever science-fiction ideas.

It’s a kitchen sink time travel epic meander where the main protagonists are first pretty dislikeable sci-fi obsessives and later a group of rather boring, grumpy, obsessive old men. And just like me, you’ll grow to love them in this fabulously different graphic novel.

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So now… a little bit of D&Q PR for the books and then a quick very advance preview for you… I’ll be telling you more when I get release dates…

Why Don’t You Love Me? (Paperback Edition)

A family gets lost in the shuffle of reimagining their lives in this dark, domestic sci-fi comedy

Claire and Mark are stuck in the doldrums of an unhappy marriage. She chain-smokes and refuses to leave the house or even change out of her bathrobe. He sleeps on the couch and can’t distinguish one day from the next. With all love lost for family life, pizza and Chinese food take turns on a nightly take-out dinner menu.

Husband and wife are plagued by the idea that this is all a dream. Why can’t Mark ever remember their son’s name? Isn’t he a barber? Doesn’t he play in a band? Why is Claire obsessively stalking her ex-boyfriend online? When exactly did she stop caring about what the kids wear to school? And just why can’t she be bothered to tell the other mums at pick-up apart? Didn’t Claire and Mark have different lives? As reports of an imminent nuclear war make subtle waves on the radio, the truth begins to dawn on them…

Paul B. Rainey’s critically-acclaimed sleeper hit returns in supple paperback with an all-new cover. Why Don’t You Love Me? is a hilariously terrifying meditation on mourning lost opportunities, rolling with the punches, and confronting reality as it turns on you—one day at a time. Rainey’s tightly plotted relationship drama shifts into a science-fiction mindblower and keeps you surprised until the final heartbreaking panel.

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There’s No Time Like the Present

If time travel existed, would you right societal wrongs or just watch future episodes of Doctor Who?

Paul B. Rainey’s There’s No Time Like the Present continues to upend grand science fiction gestures with a deep desire to understand the emotional lives of the common man (nerd). It’s a simple conceit: time travel is only possible between the invention of the necessary, functioning machinery and the day those machines are shut off. In that finite sliver of space-time, humanity schisms into those who defiantly refuse to look into the future, and those who reap the benefits of doing so.

After all, what would you do if you accidentally found out for certain that you would still be working the same dead end job at the age of 70? What would you do if you could read every future issue of your favorite comic? Or if you traveled back in time and couldn’t afford to travel back? Would your life actually be that different? Can we admit that there might not be such a thing as free will? Is life just a series of denials of reality? Why does that one guy have horns?

There’s No Time Like The Present proves the success of Why Don’t You Love Me? was no fluke, and is yet another brilliant graphic novel by a modern master.