This month’s new graphic novels features 6 that make it inside my 20 favorite books of the entire year, including a new #1! Sign up for the newsletter version to also see how I voted in this year’s Eisner awards!
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To see the full year’s list, check out the best comics of 2026 (updated monthly!).
Robots, Demons and Day Jobs: A Collection of Silly and Strange Comics
This short collection of David Kantrowitz’s self-published comics is a delightful display of some casually virtuosic cartooning. Mike Mignola’s inks meet Juni Ba’s Monkey Meat for some goofy fast-paced gag strips. There’s a meta-comics joke in here that rivals anything this side of Mister Invincible, and that’s some of the highest praise I can even think of!
In this month’s edition of most ridiculous reason Dave almost didn’t read a very good comic, I submit to you: I associated author Frank J. Barbiere with Marvel’s unethical practice of printing an issue of Avengers World with Thanos on the cover that did not include a single relevant Thanos sighting in the actual content therein. Was this Barbiere’s fault? Almost certainly not. And yet, a nerd never forgets, and certainly never forgives. Ridiculous? Yes! Clearly! But it honestly presented an uphill climb for Author Immortal, Barbiere’s new Image Comics series with Morgan Beem. Just know that this inclusion of a recommended comic had to be good enough to overcome Bait-And-Thanos practices. What an achievement!
The Author Immortal doesn’t reinvent the wheel – a revolting professor obsessed with a series of fantasy novels discovers the fantasy may well be real! – but Barbiere and Beem inject the familiar narrative with new, modernized life. It operates on a similar playing field as Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ Die, but with an added focus on a non-binary teen’s relationship with their (again, revolting) father, and a deliberate JK Rowling stand-in communing with some dark shadowy pact. Beem sells both “real world” relationship struggles and emerging fantasy lands, in a quietly gorgeous start to a very strong new comic.
Flore Vesco and Kerascoët’s The Court Charade is a preposterously charming new graphic novel about a young “common” lady sneaking her way into court to become one of the Queen’s ladymaids. It’s a royal fairy tale full of whimsy and spunk, like Bandette merging with The Great into a gorgeous and funny Bandes dessinées. The wit and style make this feel like an easy recommendation for all ages, but there are occasional moments of nudity (sacré bleu!) that keep it clearly adult.
While it was originally published in native French in 2022, The Court Charade is the kind of everlasting fairy tale that feels like it must have been in the world for centuries.
Names and Faces: A Graphic Memoir
Leise Hook’s memoir “Names and Faces” is a collection of 9 integrated stories that reflect on Hook’s experiences as a mixed-race Chinese-American. Hook offers a pristine looking glass into her world of confused identity, feeling not quite Chinese enough but also never entirely “white.” The graphic memoir space has exploded with questions of identity in recent years, and Hook finds intriguing metaphors to help expand the conversation, looking at invasive species of bugs in America and American Girl Dolls to offer perspectives you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
Hook’s an extremely gifted graphic novelist, with a clear sense of using the page’s space effectively as she navigates internal struggle. This is another strong entry in a growing field of AAPI memoirs, and graphic novel memoirs in general.
Faith Erin Hicks is a superstar YA cartoonist, so I fully expected to think highly of Inbetweens. What I did *not* expect was a world so fully realized that I started looking at the fictional twin sisters with the same parental care that I typically reserve for my actual children overcoming the challenges of their own worlds. Hicks captures a depth of feeling and emerging youthful creativity to such a successful degree that I actually saw and felt for my own children. After completion I immediately placed the graphic novel on my 9 year old’s pillow (the secret: you don’t ever suggest a kid read something you like; you just lay it somewhere where they’ll fall into it themselves!).
Inbetweens is about twin sisters Sloane and Ash, both gifted artists who enter a summer school animation program with dreams of professional careers as animators for Disney (Yes, this means the work is set in the late 90s, and no we will not be wallowing in the present day reality that such jobs for humans are endangered!). Hicks nails the energy of young artists, the pressure of trying to live up to ideals and your heroes (even if it turns out your heroes are JERKS), and the power of supportive family and friends. It’s sweet, funny, and allows for some gorgeous rendering of raw animation on the comics page. This might just be my favorite graphic novel from Hicks yet.
Tate Brombal, Jacob Phillips, Pip Martin and Aditya Bidikar craft a melancholic, post Walking Dead zombie masterclass, recently nominated for a 2026 Eisner for best limited series. Phillips has rapidly entered John Romita Jr territory as the son of a comics legend (Sean Phillips) ascending into his own superstardom. Phillips’ resume (That Texas Blood, Newburn, coloring his father across Reckless) is critically adored and near-flawless, and for my money, Everything Dead and Dying is his best work yet, oscillating between the aching romance of the past and violent pain of the present.
Brombal largely avoids zombie fiction tropes by focusing on Jack Chandler, a farmer and gay man, tending to a whole community taken by a zombie virus (that he’s mysteriously immune to). The narrative inversion is that our hero wants to keep the zombies “alive” as they include his husband and their daughter. While this might seem, uh, mentally unwell, the creative team completely sells the emotional conviction of Chandler protecting and surviving despite the encroaching decay. Brombal has proven exceptionally gifted at depicting the experience of being gay in hostile communities (Black Hammer: Barbalien), and that’s the secret here, where Chandler becomes the caretaker for a community that showed him no shortage of bigotry. It’s a gripping, emotionally powerful zombie graphic novel, and great work from everyone involved.
Jared Sarnie’s debut graphic novel (via Fieldmouse Press) is an ice cold bucket of water dropped over your head from the 2nd floor while an aeroplane trails the message “YOU CAN JUST BREAK THE RULES” in the sky above you. Narratively the center here is a young woman, her sister and her mom traveling to Zurich so she can use a “euthanasia pod” aka the “exit shell” via assisted suicide. This sounds much heavier than it is. While there is some emotional resonance and care there, Sarnie’s primarily playing at satirical humor – spoilers: the shell breaks a valve and it doesn’t work!
The real force of The Machine is Broken is style. Sarnie airdrops in and out of cartooning styles like his pen might stop working if he sticks with one mode too long. The end result is a gloriously manic graphic novella that oscillates between Schulz, Clowes, Olivier Schrauwen, Emil Ferris, and honestly I could do this all day. It’s a controlled chaos (mostly), and as the residual cherry coke flavored gases hit our protagonist fully, I’m dead-on David Lynching trying to make heads or tails of what’s real and what’s not.
Easily the coolest graphic novel I’ve read so far in 2026, just oozing with style, for miles and miles (so much style that it’s waaaaasted!). Bérénice Motais de Narbonne’s Metadoggoz (originally published in French in 2023, and translated by Montana Kane for Drawn & Quarterly here) is a surreal cyberpunk explosion of cartooning excellence, channeling Taiyo Matsomoto’s Tekkonkinkreet and the anything-goes black-and-white ethos of Jim Woodring’s Frank. Narbonne’s metastation cities and gap-world creature designs are ferociously pure, rendered with a fearless density. Honestly, trying to color the work would send you straight to a therapist.
While I coasted on vibes for the book’s middle-act, Narbonne brings the work together in a satisfying conclusion of queer-punk outsiders finding their place, whether it was their intention or not. Found family can feel like an overused descriptor, but the purity of that goal is never diminished when it’s weaved this tightly in a genuinely fresh design. This is the graphic novel for anyone who loves shouting “Hell yeah, comics!,” for anyone who thought the third Matrix movie was really onto something, and for anyone who wants to see the future of the medium.
Criminal: Five Gears in Reverse
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are first ballot comics hall-of-famers, probably the surest bet creative team of the entire 2000s, and Five Gears in Reverse, the newest graphic novel set in the Criminal Universe, is the hardest fastball they’ve thrown since Criminal’s return in 2019. These guys have the right to tell their stories however they damn well please, but hey, I’m pleased that heading into Criminal’s adaptation debut on Amazon Prime, they opted for hard, fast, Ricky Lawless crime, where you know every decision is going to be the wrong one, and if you’ve read the second volume of Criminal (“Lawless”) you know exactly what that means for Ricky. Brubaker and Phillip’s greatest trick here is I’m still half-wondering how the hell he walks away.
Five Gears in Reverse is classically tragic and violent noir, but it’s also richly humorous, particularly in the early going as Ricky botches his first job in ways that only “he has a heroin-whoopsie” can quite suggest. This is a prequel 20 years in the making (chronologically, the story is set 2 years before the Criminal Universe launched in 2006), and it’s truly unprecedented how consistent Brubaker and Phillips have been with all things Criminal during that stretch. Let’s be honest, most comics creators don’t return to their hits because things are going great, but with Brubaker and Phillips it always feels like the comics they were put on this earth to make. They can detour in all kinds of truly excellent ways (Fatale, Pulp, Reckless) but it’s Criminal where they’ve announced to the comics world for 20 years and counting that *this* is the creator-owned bar you should all aspire to.
Five Gears in Reverse is my favorite Criminal graphic novel of the 2020s. Long live Criminal!
And now, a very special presentation of the most exciting thing in comics this year:
*Camera pans in slowly on bearded, rapidly aging man sitting softly on couch. He is holding an ice pack on a recently separated shoulder that occurred while playing basketball, this upon his return from a strained calf that put him in a walking boot. He considers whether he is too old to play competitive basketball, but then remembers, “I’m the same age as Steph and KD, and much younger than Lebron,” and is clear in his foolhardy pursuit of hoops nirvana. In his offhand he holds the new graphic novel from Michael Deforge, and opens the front cover.*
“What,” he exclaims masculinely to no one, as he finds a pocket inside the front cover that reads “The Spins,” with an arrow pointing up to a minicomic placed inside.
“WHAT!” he exclaims more shrilly now, as he pulls out the minicomic, which is inside a larger comic.
“LET’S GOOOOOOOOO!!!!” he screams, waking up the baby, as he begins to read Michael Deforge’s minicomic, “The Spins,” which is – and this cannot be emphasized enough – a small comic within a larger comic.
*Camera zooms all the way in on the man’s immaculate eyes and beard, both immaculate, the eyes and the beard, though it would seem excessive to label them both as such in the same sentence. One would not want to seem arrogant. The look on his face is pure, pure joy. The baby wails. His wife is saying something like, “Seriously, Dave?” Pure joy.*
This has been a very special presentation of the most exciting thing in comics this year.
I’ll also note that last year’s Holy Lacrimony was the push I needed to say I’ll read anything by Michael Deforge (it wound up inside my 15 favorite comics of the year). For my money, All the Cameras In My Room is even better, 14 short stories that range from weird, hilarious and insightful to hilariously weird yet insightful. This is my favorite graphic novel from Deforge to date, and it offers the fullest glimpse of the cartoonist’s unfettered vision.
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Would not waste my time on any of these comics.