Insectopolis: A Natural History

Shortlisted for the 2025 Wainwright Prize for Illustrative Books


One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2025 • A Booklist Editors' Choice for Best Graphics Novels of 2025 • One of The Beat's Best Comics of 2025 • One of Comics Grinder's Best Graphic Novels of 2025 • One of The Comics Journal's Best Comics of 2025


Award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper transports readers through the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them.

This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their stories and humanity's connection to them throughout the ages. Kuper's thrilling visual feast layers history and science, color and design, to tell the remarkable tales of dung beetles navigating by the stars, hawk-size prehistoric dragonflies hunting prey, and mosquitoes changing the course of human history.

Kuper also illuminates pioneering naturalists, from well-known figures like E. O. Wilson and Rachel Carson to unheralded luminaries like Charles Henry Turner, the Black American scholar who documented arthropod intelligence, and Maria Sybilla Merian, the seventeenth-century German regarded as the mother of entomology.

Galvanized by the sixth extinction and the ongoing insect crisis, Kuper takes readers on an unforgettable journey.