Popverse's top stories

• Justice Gang boss Maxwell Lord will appear in another DC Studios project soon, says Sean Gunn - but he can’t say which one
• The Marvel art that made Jim Lee a superstar is being collected in one massive book
• Magic: The Gathering is giving Liliana Vess the main-character treatment

Marshall 'Major' Taylor was more than a champion cyclist; he was one of (if not the) first Black American global sports superstar, who shattered world records for sprinting and cycling, and shattered racial barriers and pure racism along the way. In the '90s, a TV series was made about him, and in 2007, Nike made sneakers in his name. Now, in 2026, his story is being told as an original graphic novel.

Major Taylor: World's Fastest Man by cartoonist Frederick Noland is a 400-page comics ultramarathon/triathalon, deaing not just with sports, but also the rise of bicycle use in the modern world, and living as a Black man and a celebrity in the Jim Crow era of North America.

"[Noland] thrills in the records Taylor broke and the adoring public he found across North America, Europe, and Australia, all the while showing how the invention of the bicycle changed society," reads a description of the comic by publisher Drawn & Quarterly. "Yet Noland also documents how racism inflected Black life in the post Civil War era: cyclists would collude to injure Taylor, and he faced segregationist policies even in liberal cities such as San Francisco. And while Taylor found respite racing overseas, he also soon found American-style racism exported internationally to sell tickets."

Noland is a cyclist himself, and has participated recently in San Francisco's inaugural Black History Month bike ride, and has spend years profiling real-life Black heroes in his comics.

"Lovingly rendered, exhaustively researched...Fred Noland's indie comic style lends itself well to telling Taylor's outsider story," says K Chronicles cartoonist Keith Knight about this OGN. "And I've seen Fred on his bike too many times to not know that this is the story he was meant to tell."

Major Taylor: World's Fastest Man goes on sale on September 8.

Get ready for what's next with our list to upcoming comics and how to buy comics at a comic shop.