I’ll be honest, through the first three months of the year I was getting worried for 2026, but don’t worry your pretty little head, April’s guide to the best graphic novels is stacked (‘specially in the back!). Most importantly, I have a new favorite ongoing manga, and it’s my favorite new book of the month. Check out all the picks below!
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Tower Dungeon
If you had any doubt that it’s Absolute Batman’s world, and we’re all just living in it, let me present to you the weirdest path to CBH’s favorite manga of 2026! I fell in love with Nihei Tsutomu’s Blame! over the last few years, and excitedly pre-ordered volume one of their new fantasy labyrinth manga Tower Dungeon. I don’t know if it was all the Elden Ring I’d been playing (if you close your eyes and see tarnished, you might be a ringneck!) but something about the video game mechanics of the first volume felt underwhelming, and I mentally set a reminder to reconsider the work after a few years. Then here I am simply going about my business, and I catch a Popverse article (https://www.thepopverse.com/comics-absolute-batman-nick-dragotta-manga-influences) about the influence of Tsutomu’s Tower Dungeon on Nick Dragotta’s incredible approach to Absolute Batman!
Well, if it’s good enough for the guy turning Bane into a venom-Kaiju, I am more than happy to admit I was wrong!
I’m fully caught up on Tower Dungeon now, and fully converted. The journey through Tsutomu’s endless staircases doesn’t have quite the same unreal design of Blame!, but it’s narratively more concise, and I can clearly see what Dragotta might find compelling about the monster design. Whether it’s Dragons, Basilisks or Necromancers eating baby bugs out of their umbilical cords (gross!), Tsutomu puts a unique spin on familiar fantasy, with a charming, slightly playful cast making their way up an endless tower to save the princess (yep, them tropes be tropin’!). So hey, it took Absolute Batman to reconnect me to a new favorite manga, but that’s just the power of the best superhero comic!
The Power Fantasy Vol. 3
Well, that escalated quickly. The Power Fantasy Volume Three takes us through 16 issues of a start-to-finish look at what happens when 6 superpowered Atomics (Think omega level mutants, or quasi Dr. Manhattans) try to shape the world. Spoiler alert: A lot of dung hits a lot of fans! Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wjingaard continue crafting one of the more earnestly reflective and thoughtfully designed commentaries on superheroes-as-nuclear-weapons. While The Power Fantasy has toyed with alternate history, it’s largely window dressing that helps build the world and keeps the focus on the book’s true aim dissecting whether anyone should have this kind of power. And once that power is obtained, what should actually be done with it?
The most interesting thing about this volume might be the inside baseball reflection of what it means for independent comic books (Gillen has shared that the series will continue only as collected trades, and forego single issues). But just on narrative alone, The Power Fantasy remains one of the most satisfying superhero reads in comics in 2026. The thrill of seeing Wjingaard’s design for Masumi’s monster-power or that final page twist are best-in-class. Volume Four will be fascinating, however we read it, and I’ll be there day one. Sure, I hope for approximately 10,000% less utilitarian analysis, but day one I say!
Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here)
As the most notorious Big Daddy in comics criticism, I have felt endlessly grateful that my wife and I had our first babies (how many do we have? Even I don’t know for sure!) right *before* the 2020 pandemic shutdown. I cannot imagine the stress and pandemonium of going to the hospital for the birth of a child during that time. Well, I don’t need to, as Julia Wertz lived it, and documents the experience in her new memoir Bury Me Already: It’s Nice Down Here.
As I learned for the first time reading Impossible People (one of my favorite 25 graphic novels of the 2020s so far!), Julia Wertz is such a phenomenally funny, honest, emotive cartoonist. That package is fully on display here, as Wertz covers her full pregnancy experiences, from consideration to miscarriage to emergency caesarian and beyond. Much like Liana Finck’s How To Baby, Wertz is able to capture the full impossible, miraculous journey to motherhood, warts and all. Simplifying Bury Me Already as Wertz’s “Mom” book is a disservice, even though that’s the tether.
Nights Vol. 3
In basketball analysis, they talk a lot about players ‘making a leap,’ aka a clearly talented individual taking their game to the next level and elevating from star to superstar. As a Bulls fan, this usually happens once our players leave the team (Go and get it Coby and Ayo!), but it’s thrilling to see potential achieved. This is more of a rarity in independent comics, where market forces tend ot put an undue amount of weight on how a series *begins*. I’m certainly guilty of this as well, although I make an effort to consider ongoing comics with some longevity as seriously as I consider shiny new opening arcs (on CBH’s best of 2025, I included 5 new volume ones and 6 stale old ongoings in the middle of their runs!).
The first volume of Nights was among my favorite comics of 2024, but I felt the second volume didn’t measure up. Reading volume three – aka Season Two, Part One – was a bit of a revelation, as creators Wyatt Kennedy and Luigi Formisano completely reset the setting, tone and focus of the book, and once again achieve comics excellence. Swinging a relatively successful Image book back to an arc completely set in the past is a huge risk, but Kennedy and Formisano prove it’s exactly what Nights needed. We’re pulled out of the modern day YA supernatural angst to the ancient days of the 1970s, with a focus on CHIMERA, the superspy network deadset on wiping out or controlling the supernatural – which of course puts them on a crash course with a younger vampire Gray.
The prequel-gambit suggests a longevity and depths to Nights that I wasn’t sure we’d see, and I’m so excited about that! Nights has made the leap, and it’s one of the best ongoing runs of 2026!
Armaveni
There are too many graphic novels about genocide. This is of course less the fault of the artists than the history, where one would be too many. But as awareness increases globally, and squashed histories become harder than ever to keep from rising like the phoenix, I’m finding a comics landscape suddenly full of familial legacies that make me question what I ever saw in humanity.
Armaveni is Nadine Takvorian’s personal history of the Armenian Genocide of the mid 1910s via Levine Querido books. Takvorian is a gifted cartoonist, with a natural ability to weave memoir, flashback and family histories into one informative, emotionally gripping work. At one notable point, Armaveni contains one of the most searingly memorable depictions of genocide in action that I’ve read. Educational with a heart, Armaveni is well worth a read.
Punk’N Heads
“Teenage angst has paid off well; Now I’m bored and old.” Dave Baker and Nicole Goux have made a habit of capturing the messy transition into adulthood (F*** Off Squad, Forest Hills Bootleg Society), and for my money, Punk’N Heads is their most effective collaboration yet. I thought this would be because I’m a sucker for bad/emerging rockers. Spinal Tap, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, and of course, last year’s Beat It, Rufus from Noah Van Sciver. While Punk N’ Heads is very much about a subslice of the punk rock scene in LA, I did have to recalibrate my expectations for Baker and Goux’s aims. In short, it’s not a rock comedy, it’s a character drama, where yes, sometimes there’s great comedy in a queer punk rock band wearing pumpkin heads gets booked for a children’s birthday party.
Once I made this shift in my reading, the inner riches of Punk’N Heads hit my system with the right force. Baker and Goux are modern masters at illustrating the mess, confusion, and potential of finding direction and community in your 20s. As the work progresses, that focus hones in on some soul-stirringly profound reflections on creativity and the lifelong artistic goal of truly capturing *your* voice. Goux is perfectly suited to render these emotive considerations visually – as you know, if you’ve read This Place Kills Me with Mariko Tamaki – putting a truly remarkable amount of detail into everything from a painter’s trailer to the more obviously spectacle-laced full-page rock-out spreads.
It’s a longer work with relatively concentrated heavy character beats, so Baker and Goux wisely separate chapters both with Silver Age romance comics scene-setting, and manga-outtake esque mini asides between chapters. It might seem like a small thing too, but Goux’s book design features one of my favorite additions of the year – pumpkin head fold outs on the front and back covers! These can be used as bookmarks, they look fun, AND that’s what the band wears. YES. Book design!
Uri Tupka and the Gods: Another Story from Lands Unknown
Mike Mignola loves comics storytelling so much that he’s rebuilding a whole new mythology from scratch – post Hellboy (one of the great comics landscapes of the modern era)! It’s among the most positive late-stage career arcs in the history of comics, an industry which obviously has more than its fair share of heartbroken creators. Mignola’s Lands Unknown are certainly in line with the author’s established fixations – dark magic, secret mythologies, quirky talking animals making lil’ jokes while you read some of the darkest folk you’ve seen in your life – and I for one just can’t get over how *fun* it is to see the legend so obviously enthralled.
I prefer Uri Tupka and the Gods to the previous entry (the quite good Bowling with Corpses), largely because it centers the anthology of short folk-horror stories around the titular Tupka (say that twenty times fast!). It’s a more focused guide through the Lands Unknown, where the depth of history and cosmology can overwhelm at this (seemingly) early stage. Tupka will return later this year with Uri Tupka and the Devils, and I absolutely can’t wait. A new Mignola graphic novel every year? Say less!
The War
Dammit, Garth. I was having a nice evening pretending we aren’t all a madman’s itchy trigger finger away from utter annihilation! The War is a completely uncompromising modern horror story that disintegrates the daily comfort of thinking nuclear war couldn’t happen because no one would be crazy enough to kick off mutually assured destruction. Garth Ennis and Becky Cloonan (alongside colors from Tamra Bonvillain and letters from Pat Brosseau) take us inside one group of NYC friends as the situation progresses from faux-intellectual party-fodder (can it really be a party unless a guy is mansplaining global war?) to European bombing to New York fallout. The scary part of course is not just that Ennis and Cloonan could bring something so bleak to life – and don’t let the bleakness make you think the work isn’t a page-turner – but that even the act of reading and writing about the graphic novel feels like an active coping mechanism for the threat’s terrifying reality.
Despite the reputation as a masterful shock-jock (Preacher, Punisher and especially The Boys on your resume will do that), Ennis’ last 15 years are full of nuanced, expertly designed war stories (Sara‘s my personal favorite), and some fascinating spectral horror (A Walk Through Hell remains an underrated work). Alongside the absurdly versatile Cloonan (fresh off the excellent horror of Somna), the duo is deliberately unrelenting in The War, largely avoiding sensationalized story beats (admittedly, the earned last page is a massive exception!) or really any feeling of a way out. Likewise, through a focus on fracturing or doomed relationships, the inevitably nihilistic conclusion maintains a troubling emotional core.
I hated how I felt after reading The War. And now you can too!
The Bugle Call: Song of War
I’m trying to improve my manga credentials this year (some folks get advanced degrees as they approach mid-life. Not me! I make up credentials!), which led me down a fun rabbit hole exploring all the most interesting “new gen” 2020s manga (I smell a future CBH guide!). So far (and I’ve got a lot more reading to do!), the only book that knocked my hair off and my socks straight back is The Bugle Call: Song of War by Mozuka Sora (story) and Higoro Toumori (art). Fortuitously, the sixth Viz volume translated into English just hit stores, making it a perfect recommendation for the best manga of 2026.
As Sora and Toumori make fun in some back matter, The Bugle Call is *kind of* X-Force/Suicide Squad set in a medieval fantasy, but listen, if every comic with young people developing superpowers had to pay X-Men royalties, we’d never get anywhere (and X-Men would still owe Doom Patrol!). I am not prone to liking manga playing at the battle of Helm’s Deep (it often winds up feeling like… I could just go read more Berserk?), but somehow this book about the damn BUGLER alerting armies is the most compelling piece of superpowered action I’ve picked up this year.
For starters, the powered individuals – the Branched – are extremely compelling characters with uniquely portrayed abilities. Even in cases where I’ve seen this ability before – what’s up Mirror Master! – Sora and Toumori find fresh innovative ways to bring them to life. One character in particular – Zoe – has a powerset that gave me those Isca the Unbeaten feelings (my Krakoa heads know what I’m talking about!). Plus, the creative team are extremely smart about powerset synergies, combining seemingly minor gifts into unstoppable army destroying tide-turners. Of course, all of that isn’t worth much if Toumori doesn’t bring it all to life in captivating ways, and HOLY GUACAMOLE the Looking Glass v. Zoe fight in Volume Four! If you like meta panel explosions have I got a manga for you!
The Bugle Call: Song of War is my favorite ongoing manga right now, honestly even surpassing my long-running favorite Chainsaw Man as Fujimoto approaches the endgame there. This book rules. Check it out!
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