My Favorite Graphic Novels of April 2025

As I’m now in year two of “All I do is read and recommend great comics,” I’ve begun to notice some trends. The first of which is that April, aka the start of Q2, tends to be absolutely LOADED with phenomenal new graphic novels. We’ve had our chance to catch up on the best of last year, and now it’s time to fully move into a 2025 full of new comics. In general, I seek to hit right around 10 new favorite comics to recommend each month, but for April, I’m easily pushing 15. I’m holding back recs I have so many! It’s such a challenging environment to make any kind of art right now, yet all these beautiful people keep making great comics. It’s wonderful!

You can find the full 2025 list of all my favorite comics this year. I’m over 30 for the year! Don’t hesitate to let me know any of your favorites I may have missed via dave@comicbookherald.com!

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The Cartoonist’s Club

I try to maintain some semblance of critical credibility with comics for young readers, but when my 2nd grader sees what I’m reading, asks if he can read it, then reads it twice in the span of 45 minutes and eagerly asks if there’s more… that book is a clear win! It didn’t dawn on me immediately, but my wife asked me if this meant we shared comics now, and the answer is definitely yes. Be still my heart!

It should come as no surprise that The Cartoonist’s Club is a massive success considering it’s the product of Raina Telgemeir and Scott McCloud, like Kendrick and Beyoncé teaming up for an album. Telgemeir’s only commercial rival is Dav Pilkey (Dogman), and McCloud literally wrote the book on comics (not to mention some excellent fiction like Zot and The Sculptor). One of my absolute favorite things about Tegelmeir and Pilkey is how invested they are in sharing their love of creation, and of comics creation specifically, with young readers. These are creators at the top of the pops who eagerly want to inspire the next generations of readers to make their own art, and their enthusiasm is infectious. There’s perpetual talk about Marvel and DC not reaching young readers the way they used to, and the absence of a How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way for the next gen. Don’t worry; they don’t need it.

Hirayasumi Vol. 4

Ok, fine, dammit, you caught me. I like cozy manga! I hope you’re happy!

I’ll admit, there’s a 99.9% chance that any manga about wanting to create manga becomes one of my favorite manga, and Hirayasumi is no exception (although that’s far from the book’s sole, or even central focus). Keigo Shinzo’s slice-of-life seinen manga about late 20-something Hiroto finding himself and finding purpose has developed a compelling cast of characters, perpetually centered around seeking inner peace, battling the anxiety that comes with that journey, and expressing kindness and calm in the most unlikely situations. The fourth volume of this increasingly popular series, collected in English by Viz Signature, focuses more on Natsumi, Hiro’s young teen cousin, as she starts college and finds community via manga. While Hiroto’s journey floating through Japan with no plans for the future is charming, it’s Natsumi’s challenges fitting in, feeling bullied, being embarrassed to admit she draws manga that all finds a level of deep relatability. The focus on creation isn’t anywhere near the level of, say, Look Back or Bakuman, so much as it seeks to highlight elements of inner growth and the importance of public self-expression.

Hirayasumi captures the feelings of uncertainty about the future about as well as anything in comics. Yet, through its charm and warmth, it shares pure dreams of finding a way through the dark.

Plastic Man No More!

For fleeting glimpses, Christopher Cantwell and Alex Lins’ four-issue Black Label Plastic Man could fool you for the spiritual successor to King and Gerad’s Mister Miracle. Cantwell and Lins strike a remarkable tonal dissonance between Eel O’Brien’s body irreversibly disintegrating on him and the Superfriends era JLA only interested in paying Plastic Man any mind as their comic relief. The point is clear – nobody takes Plastic Man seriously – but the style is gloriously infuriating. I’m not sure I’ve even been angrier at Wonder Woman and Superman, and that includes their pseudo-fashy stint was Injustice dictators. Plus, Lins’ graphic body horror slams headfirst into Jacob Edgar’s Silver Age inspired halcyon League cutaways to create a perfectly strange and dark atmosphere.

In true O’Brien fashion, Woozy and Eel’s plans to prevent Plastic Man’s son from succumbing to his own impending fate go badly awry (you’ll never look at the Metal Men the same). And while the plot threads are pure been-there-done-that comics, Cantwell’s irreverent sense of humor and willingness to sneer at sacred cows (not to mention detective chimps) lifts the affair well beyond your dime-a-dozen superhero mini. If the work never quite ascends to greatness, that’s ok; at a minimum it makes the case for more damn non-Batman Black Label!

Life Drawing

I’ll be honest, when I picked up Jaime Hernandez’s Life Drawing, I assumed it would be an art book highlighting the hall-of-famer’s Love and Rockets work throughout the years. Who better to learn how to draw life than one of Los Bros Hernandez? Even better, Life Drawing is a decade-in-the-making collection of Jaime’s most recent Love and Rockets comics, collecting stories from Love and Rockets Vol. III #7 and #8, and Love and Rockets Vol. IV #1-#2, and #6 to #15.

I was particularly struck reading these issues how playfully Hernandez riffs on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, in the endless charm of the minute Lothario “Go Home, Frank Lopez!” or repeatedly in Tonta’s misadventures. Admittedly, it’s been a few years since I’ve read any Love and Rockets, but damn if it doesn’t wash over easily, regardless of how caught up I feel on Maggie and Ray. I think Life Drawing works well on its own, as an unlikely bonding between Tonta and Maggie forms over Maggie’s fear of the ocean, but it’s also an effective reminder that I should probably stop messing around with all these other comics and just read more Love and Rockets.

Hernandez can sell sexuality with fewer lines than should be possible, and oscillates between comedy and humanity with an ease that few other cartoonists have ever mastered. The master’s current rate of output – a new issue of Love and Rockets comes about every 6 months via Fantagraphics – ensures their status as living legend never quite dissipates, but also never quite catches a groundswell of modern attention.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to catch up on what Gilbert’s been doing in those issues!

Lebanon is Burning: And Other Dispatches

One of the more common refrains about the Middle East (at least from my vantage in the American Midwest) is that understanding is simply too complicated. I have grown up surrounded by a prevailing assumption that the cultures, and regimes, and decades of conflict were really only navigable to the most seasoned political and foreign affairs experts. But like most big issues of our time, ignorance only persists if you avoid, bury, or disenfranchise education. I am not an expert on Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine; but I am reading, and I am trying. It’s less impossible when you try.

Lebanon is Burning is a high quality aid in this effort, a series of 14 essays and works of graphic journalism that tackle modern acts of resistance in Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Egypt and the surrounding regions. The introductory essays and comics are written by Syrian-Canadian Yazan Al-Saadi, with a variety of artists from across the discussed Middle Eastern regions (Tracy Chahwan, Ganzeer, Ghadi Ghosn, Omar Khouri, Sirene Moukheiber, Hicham Rahma, Enas Satir), offering an important grounding in the authenticity of these histories. In the spirit of Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Al-Saadi isn’t faking at an overly polite objectivity that will avoid ruffling feathers. He has opinions and they are clear, and supported in a heavily researched and sourced work published by Penn State University Press. It’s vital, cutting journalism exploring and explaining so many topics we’ve been told are out of intellectual reach.

Purely on the level of comics experiment, it’s invigorating to find such a well assembled anthology of differing art styles, all glued together by Al-Saadi’s narration and the purpose of the work. You’ll find loose Comix inspired cartooning among more textbook historical depictions amid abstract confluences of data, infographic and human suffering. Even if much of these histories and stories are better known to you, it’s compelling to watch all these artists bring them to life for the ignorant like myself.

Parable of the Talents

The most – perhaps only – sensible argument against reading the Abrams ComicsArt adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents is that you should really just read the original book. Yes. Sure. Agreed! Ok, with that out of the way, we can continue to celebrate Damian Duffy and John Jennings’ work adapting the works of Butler, starting with Kindred and Parable of the Sower before returning in 2025 with the sequel, Parable of the Talents. They’re perfect introductions to Butler’s devastatingly prescient literary sci-fi, particularly for those of us more likely to pick up a new graphic novel than a novel from the 90s (sheepishly raises hand/dodges tomato).

For those entirely unfamiliar, yes, you need to read Parable of the Sower before Parable of the Talents. This will not make a lick of sense if you don’t. Talents picks up shortly after Sower, continuing to tell the journey of Lauren Olamina and her Earthseed religion, centered on the philosophy that God is Change, and the destiny of humanity lies in the stars. Butler’s Parables are dystopian, near post-apocalyptic, and strikingly reminiscent of contemporary American politics. Talents is full of a Christian-Nationalist Fascist elected president of America while using the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Have I used the word prescient yet? It’s insufficient.

Butler’s Parables make for extremely difficult worlds, full of horrendous suffering, violence and trauma. Perhaps I’m just shielding myself but Talents felt even harsher than Sower, with an extended period of the work focused on Lauren’s Earthseed commune of Acorn forced into slavehood via control-collars by the most vile “Christian” enforcers possible. Duffy and Jennings tackle these challenges with appropriate care, and a clear reverence for the source material. The adaptation team is particularly adept at pacing out poems and scripture from Earthseed, and the proclamations from the future of Lauren’s daughter Larkin, to break up the narrative and assure readers that there is indeed a future of any kind waiting.

Whether it’s the novels or these graphic novels, the only important detail is that you read Octavia E. Butler.

The Freak

In a wonderful stroke of kismet, I grabbed a signed copy of The Freak from Matt Lesniewski at C2e2 (he dutifully sketched my own personal Freak alongside his signature!), only to later realize the 2019 Eisner-nominated graphic novella just got a 2025 rerelease via Oni Press. That means I get to read, enjoy AND write about it for the best new comics of 2025! Kismet!

Lesniewski’s in a small class of modern cartoonists who completely own an idiosyncratic style while simultaneously delivering a recognizably mastered approach to their artwork. Some cartoonists – for example, Michael DeForge, on this very list! – excel within their idiosyncrasies, but if you waived a copy of their work in front of the average person (I’ve been told I need to stop doing this), they wouldn’t exclaim, “What fine art!”. Lesniewski on the other hand, is among the likes of Daniel Warren Johnson, Jesse Lonergan or Hayden Sherman – wholly themselves and instantly awe-inspiring.

Lesniewski comes from the Geoff Darrow school of kill-them-with-detail, and The Freak‘s black-and-white brutalism highlights every expressive line. From the mud on the streets of this horrible town, to the wrinkles in the Freak’s pants, everything is accentuated to the point that imagining even tracing a panel is kind of overwhelming! Narratively, The Freak is ham-fisted and pure, a story of an outcast literally beaten by angry mobs for looking strange. Broken into 3 chapters, Lesniewski forces us to consider the way we treat our “outcasts,” and whether we want to be a part of the ‘normal’ angry mob, or the freaks hiding below the town. More essentially, The Freak asks us to consider: what if every goddamn page of a 64-page comic was a marvel to behold?

Kaiju No. 8 Vol. 12

One of the problems with Chainsaw Man becoming one of my first mangas I’m caught up on is it spoiled me rotten for expectations from Shonen Jump. Turns out Tatsuki Fujimoto’s sensibilities and skill (and most importantly: uncompromising vision!) are hard to match. A lot of Shonen Jump has felt quite tame by comparison, leaving me gravitating towards works outside that realm (books like Hirayasumi, The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t a Guy At All, The Summer Hikaru Died, and Tokyo These Days).

Kaiju No. 8 is the hardest I’ve fallen for a Viz Shonen Jump title since Chainsaw Man. In a lot of ways, Naoya Matsumoto’s monster-hunting action-adventure is the Blockbuster Movie cousin to Chainsaw Man, full of demonic Kaiju designs and incredible kinetic violence, but with the strangeness of Fujimoto sanded down for consumption. Matsumoto can hang with the best of them on pure monster design, pacing and action, but the secret sauce of Kaiju No. 8 is how remarkably funny and compelling Matsumoto makes the cast.

Volume 12 is spiraling towards a genuinely epic 100th chapter, with impossibly high stakes growing even higher by book’s end. The pedal is practically scraping the asphalt its pushed down so hard; I can’t wait to read the next volume!

Helen of Wyndhorn

Bilques Evely and Matheus Lopes are among the absolute top tier of artist and colorist combinations capable of reaching the heights of wonder offered by fantasy comics. The legend of their cosmic sunrise in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow only continues to grow, and the duo returns with writer Tom King and letterer Clayton Cowles in Helen of Wyndhorn from Dark Horse Comics. Where Supergirl roamed the far reaches of DC Universe space, in Wyndhorn, Evely and Lopes get to create a Conan-meets-Narnia fantasy realm full of monsters, glowing gods, and barbarous tribes as far as the imagination can see. Evely’s work is hyper-detailed, expressive and purposeful, finding as much meaning in the reveal of Grandfather Barnabas feeding a small strange animal in a garden as the more “big-budget” grandeur of angel-eagles slashing through the sky-panels with a jagged sword gripped firmly in her talons. Lopes is perfectly suited to accentuate the moods and textures of these worlds, and together the duo wields impressive patience, knowing not every 3 pages can be a splash page spectacle or the moments lose meaning.

King is a rare tier of superstar writer in modern comics – as I write this, his Love Everlasting with Elsa Charretier was just announced as an optioned movie via Sony, and King is increasingly wandering the writer’s room’s of Hollywood. Though his DC work will forever be the most discussed (rumor has it the man is 20 issues into a run on Wonder Woman, but there’s simply no way to know if this is true), I’ve most enjoyed King’s break into creator-owned works this decade, and Helen of Wyndhorn is his tightest and most easily recommendable book yet. Whereas Love Everlasting is an admittedly intriguing gimmick that just won’t quit, Helen of Wyndhorn, much like gruff stoic Barnabas, is mostly to the damn point.

Structurally, Helen of Wyndhorn follows the Supergirl playbook, with King alternating between the journal of Helen’s Governess, the story of Helen, a young woman who recently lost her father (C.K. Cole the alcoholic, suicidal writer of a thinly veiled Conan the Barbarian analog), and is falling into the bottle as she’s transported to her grandfather’s (magical) estate of Wyndhorn. The work follows fairly predictably with Helen discovering her father’s fantasy was far more real than he’d let on, and finding her purpose in training for wondrous, magical, violent adventures with Grandpa Barny. Again, much like Supergirl, King is a studied and gifted scripter who understands when he’s working with visual dynamite, and he knows when to pass the ball and let Evely and Lopes deliver a slinking sea serpent bursting out of a swamp.

There’s a temptation to collapse into reflections on The King and I every time Tommy ballgame writes a new comic (don’t let me get lost in the King-ism of the non-sequitur scenes through the present-day nerd collector scene). It’s a byproduct of his unique CIA-crafted persona and some BELOVED comics like Mister Miracle that I’m as fascinated by the work as I am. But, in doing that, I’d be committing exactly the sin I’ve railed against in the James Gunn fueled love of Supergirl, which is overshadowing how heavily Evely and Lopes carry that work from mediocre to excellent. Helen of Wyndhorn is a better collaboration – the journals, for example, are far less tedious, far more full of character – and although I suppose it lacks some of the highs Evely and Lopes achieved, it’s simply a better full story. I greatly look forward to what this full team creates for us next.

Holy Lacrimony

I don’t yet have any Michael Deforge comics listed among my 500 favorites of all time, and it’s not for lack of trying (I’m sure he sleeps just fine!). The critically-acclaimed cartoonist has been an indie darling for well over a decade now, but frustratingly, I couldn’t find my road in. It’s been a bit like like listening to praise for Black Midi, appreciating where it’s coming from, but knowing that their math-rock signatures lack the pop sensibilities my brain requires to hit the dopamine receptors. I get why you snobbish intelligentsia enjoy these comics; but for Odin’s sake, where’s the story!

This changes with Holy Lacrimony, Deforge’s latest graphic novel out now from Drawn & Quarterly. The first half of Holy Lacrimony is an alien abduction of the “saddest person on Earth,” a reasonably well known musician named Julie, taken to space for a study of sadness. The premise and execution are reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadore, delivered through Deforge’s patented abstractions and supremely confident pacing, a perfect blend to make an alien race feel well and truly alien. We meet an alien who simply wants to learn – or at least learn how to mimic – Julie’s deep depression, despite a life that is empirically just below average. The “abduction” is strange yet incisive, darkly humorous and sexual amid Deforge’s captivating, twisting, form-shifting visuals.

The back half finds Julie suddenly returned to Earth, seeking confirmation of alien experiences among an occasionally dubious support group. While still fully Deforge’s, the work here shifts more into something tonally resembling Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, albeit with far less interest in excising the nature of conspiracy. There’s no obvious epiphany for Julie, and the work ends as suddenly as the abduction took place. Deforge’s focus is clear throughout, but he still naturally gravitates to the enigmatic.

It’s a great read, full of potential to revisit and explore.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy

It’s a mild challenge to “rank” the full New York Trilogy, a new Abrams collection of 3 graphic novels adapted from the works of the incredible novelist Paul Auster, based on his 3 novellas released sequentially from 1985 to 1987. For starters, the opening salvo, City of Glass, is among my 50 favorite comics of all time, and Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s adaptation has been considered an all-timer since publication in 1994. What we’re really considering, then, with the New York Trilogy is the two freshly released adaptations of Ghosts by Lorenzo Mattotti (art directed by Karasik), and The Locked Room by Karasik. If you simply need a hardcover collection of City of Glass, or an excuse to read more by Paul Auster, what are you waiting for?!

Auster’s New York Trilogy is summarized as literary detective-noir fiction, with connective tissue of three protagonists who become completely consumed by the cases they’re tasked with solving. To be a leading man in Auster’s New York Trilogy is to lose yourself entirely to insular fixations at the expense of everything and everyone around you. Structurally, Ghosts is the least of-a-piece with the Trilogy, and Karasik and Mattotti match Auster’s near-storybook framing (the characters are all a Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, Mrs. Blue, etc) with a single illustration per page standing above the novella’s text. There are pointed exceptions, when text is framed in a different font on a typewriter, but generally we sink deeper and deeper into Blue’s P.I. insulation (he goes on a stakeout that lasts seemingly forever) with Mattotti’s gray-black pencil-shading either matching the text directly or in abstract. There are some particularly excellent translations, such as Mattotti’s depiction of Mr. White in his garish Halloween mask. Matching Auster’s own deconstruction of genre-expectation, Mattotti and Karasik increasingly depart from the initial structure, alternating between pure-text, traditional 3-or-4-panel grids, and finally splash pages full of word balloon dialog. Ghosts is unquestionably the least striking of the trilogy, but I’d also read it again in a heartbeat.

The Locked Room is the true marvel here, most reminiscent of Karasik’s incredible contributions to City of Glass, albeit sans Mazzuchelli. It’s hardly surprising that the comics canon has lost view of Karasik in the shadow of Mazzuchelli (this will happen when you make Batman Year One and Daredevil: Born Again with Frank Miller), but his comics resume is fascinating. Karasik was an associate editor of the esteemed RAW magazine with Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, of course adapted City of Glass, and wrote the famous essay, “How to Read Nancy” (second only in esteem, of course, to Tiffany Babb’s recent Comics Courier essay, “How to Read ‘How to Read Nancy'”)! The Locked Room and this full Pantheon collection of Karasik’s Auster adaptations should cement the cartoonist as his own force for a new generation. Karasik shows tremendous respect for Auster’s writing, with an innate understanding of when to depict events literally and when to operate in the abstract. Like Ghosts, Karasik’s Locked Room begins mostly via familiar modes of comics, with clean gray-washed pencils refusing any overly showy tricks in favor of immersive storytelling. As the author’s journey to find his missing, thought-dead friend, Fanshawe, escalates and consumes him, Karasik opens the bag of tricks. A particular favorite occurs while our narrator is swept up in the seductive, drunken praise of Fanshawe’s mother, and the character is literally lifted out of his seat by the swelling rising speech bubbles. I’ve seen cartoonists play with interactive dialog before, but never quite so literally as balloons! To say the work’s conclusion is a page-turner is an understatement, and for my money, it’s every bit as memorable as City of Glass.

All in all, the full New York Trilogy is quickly one of my favorite collections on my bookshelf. If the rest of the talented cartoonists of the world could promptly adapt the remainder of Auster’s works, that would be greatly appreciated.

Catch up on all CBH’s favorite graphic novels of 2025 right here!