For those who were wondering, it turns out I read so many comics last year primarily because I wasn’t spending every free hour playing Marvel Rivals or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (or even reading a *gulp* prose novel, Cloud Atlas!). Video games are simply winning the “Would you rather?” battle right now, which means my “to-read” pile is growing concerningly large, and hauntingly ornery. Should to-read piles be yelling like this? I’m going to call an exorcist, but in the meantime, these are the great comics I *did* make time for this month!
Don’t hesitate to let me know any of your favorites I may have missed via dave@comicbookherald.com!
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Together – Haus of Decline
Let’s start this puppy off by breaking every ‘rule’ of the list! Haus of Decline’s Together is not especially new (the webcomic completed in July 2023), and as far as I can tell, it’s never been collected in print! Ah, you think, so it must be finally getting a print collection later in 2025, and that’s why Dave is including it. Nope! At least, not that I know of! I just finally finished reading it, and felt it worth a highlight.
If you’re like me, you might know Haus of Decline from their oft-hilarious 4-panel digital strips, flitting between social satire and pop culture commentary with unrivaled ease. A My Marvelous Year Slacker recommended I check out her long-form work, and I’m glad I did. Together is available for everyone in full right now. It’s a webcomic in the sense that “This comic is definitely available on the web!” but really it’s 240 pages of a fully formed sci-fi graphic novel. If you know Haus’s strips, you’ll expect humor and gross out body horror, and while there’s some of that, Together is moreso a remarkably sweet, heartfelt exploration of a romance in decline as a mysterious disease begins to merge the couple’s bodies together. This relationship is written with such care and specificity, even as pink laser beams begin spiraling from their wounds. Days after reading, I’m still thinking about the work’s eternal mantra that we all want to be safe, warm and loved. Words for a world to live by.
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Dr. Worm
“Doctor Worm” was one of my first favorite songs (what’s up, “They Might Be Giants!”) and now it’s a favorite Shortbox Comic Fair entry of 2024. Serena Cirillo’s short, hallucinatory treatise on creative burnout is messy, surprising, and gorgeously honest, bouncing between wtf-is-happening rides with a bunny on a ‘piggy tank’ to some of the more enduring “This is why we make comics” moments I’ve read. It’s an explosive fever dream bursting with “make art!” energy with possibly my favorite 2-page sequence of the Shortbox Fair.
“Yet all I worry about… is making comics!” Keep making them, Serena. I can’t wait to read what’s next.
William of Newbury
If you like heavy shadowed black inks, medieval spirits run amok, and anthropomorphic gothic raccoon monks, you’ll love Michael Avon Oeming’s William of Newbury! Dark Horse describes the new collection as Redwall meets Hellboy, and when they’re right, they’re right. Adorable forest creatures clashing with supernatural threats is well worn (Oeming’s own Mice Templar is no stranger), but what gives William of Newbury an extra spark is twofold. First off, we’ve got a Monk scared of just about everything except the demonic entities that he quashes with the power of the spirit (whether or not it’s intentional, there’s a comedy by way of Adrian Monk I wasn’t expecting in these comics). And most importantly, Oeming’s style and visual pacing are behind few others, with a fascinating bibliography spanning Powers, Thor, Mice Templar and recently Blue Book with James Tynion IV. Personally, I quite enjoy Oeming’s work in the mold of Mignola by way of Wes Craig, and although William of Newbury falters a bit in its overarching narrative, it’s a delightful episodic read.
Lindsey Cheng Dates a White Boy!!!
It would be easy to describe Asia Miller’s Shortbox Comics Fair graphic novella as “What if we all reconciled with what an absolute TOOL Scott Pilgrim is throughout that whole damn series,” but that reconciliation has largely happened! Instead, let’s take the work on its own terms, and just appreciate a slice of life journey through college band hopefuls, and Lindsey Cheng’s great taste in anthropomorphic friends, but terrible taste in boys. Miller’s earnest black-white-and-blue cartooning reminds me of Katie Skelly’s Operation Margarine, with anti-anatomical choices like full eyes showing through hair to sell character expression over everything.
It’s a humorous, heartfelt charge through finding your way through college and relationships, and a declaration that if I ever see that one high school girlfriend again, I should probably apologize for how much I talked about Built to Spill.
Bowling With Corpses
The post-Hellboy comics career of Mike Mignola has been hard to define, probably because even after the “conclusion” of Hellboy in Hell, Mignola’s still been attached to the Hellboy Universe through various spin-offs, one-shots, or Mignola-verse standalones that simply feel like they belong in the Hellboy Universe through sheer force of Mignola’s idiosyncrasies. As a casual fan, I was largely under the impression that Mignola was in the outsourcing phase of his career, drawing the cover and writing Falconspeare with the wonderful Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, but not doing it all, the way Mignola did on Hellboy for 20-some years. Last year’s Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea seemed to cement the limitations of this phase, as Mignola’s collaboration with Jesse Lonergan managed to stifle the boundless visual acuity of Lonergan, resulting in a completely passable work.
I was pleased to see this year that Mignola’s thick shadowy inks weren’t yet content with their corner of a well-earned tomb, and Mignola’s back in full with Dave Stewart colors and Clem Robbins letters on Bowling With Corpses and Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown. As promised, Bowling With Corpses is 90-some pages of Mignola’s patented horror, adventure, mythology and riffs on obscure folklore. Initially, I’ll admit I carried a lot of skepticism towards Bowling With Corpses, at least towards the stated mission of Mignola building new worlds. It’s impossible for a Mignola written-and-drawn comic to escape the shadow of Hellboy, and as the artist admits in the graphic novel’s epilogue essay, exploring these unknown lands comes from a line and idea in Hellboy.
Ultimately, most of these short stories of immortal wizards using the dark arts and hapless adventurers destroying skeletons and vampire brides with an ancient corpse’s arm would fit right into any Hellboy story, sans titular pancake-loving demon. So I won’t sit here and pretend Mignola has entered into some new and surprising phase. But when one of the greatest living comics creators fully gives himself to doing what he does best, who cares how much it reminds you of past glories?! It’s still a blast! Mike Mignola arguably has the highest approval rating of any creator in comics, straddling that ever-challenging line between critically-acclaimed and commercially successful. Bowling With Corpses is a reminder of exactly why that is, and the idea of Mignola, at 64, saying “Hey, let’s build something new,” is something to be celebrated. Especially considering he’s barely lost a step drawing those haunting, muppety, pupil-less witches, crocodiles and all things gothic and great.
At the end of the day, Bowling with Corpses is Mignola through and through, right down to an irreverent sense of humor and love of the strange that compels him to end chapters with talking narrator ducks (no ducks were otherwise found in the making of these comics!). It’s the kind of work that can dazzle you with spectacle, tease you with world-building potential, and make you laugh out loud at a panel of a strangely plot-significant miniature cow. Do I think Mignola’s on his way to his next Hellboy? Hell, no! But I don’t need that, and neither do you. Let the legend cook!
Clay Footed Giants
A comic about aging fathers clinging to Hoop Dreams and struggling with the responsibilities of raising young kids? Good grief, at least get me drunk and bamboozle me before you steal my life rights! Clay Footed Giants is one of those graphic novels with a premise so immediately gripping – a stay-at-home Dad who used to play college ball with Steph Curry! – that frankly, even remotely passable cartooning probably would have gotten me to the finish line. Fortunately, this is far beyond that initial scope, as Alain Chevalier’s rough but evocative black-and-white sketches dive into fatherhood, generational rage, and how we’re all influenced by the secrets of our parents. Written alongside Mark McGuire, Chevalier’s character study about an overwhelmed 6 foot 10 inch man is heavy, particularly as the lead sinks further into his alcoholic father’s past in the Vietnam quagmire. It’s an increasingly dark, unsettling journey through a period of a man’s life when he’s making all the wrong decisions. Steph Curry would never!
The Fables of Erlking Woods
Juni Ba is one of my favorite comics creators of the 2020s, so it didn’t take much convincing when I saw he was Kickstarting a new comic with Aditya Bidikar (who lettered all your favorite comics that Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou didn’t). I am of two minds with comics Kickstarters. On one hand, I don’t want to do any work to keep up with them (release your books to the masses you tyrants!), and I’ve mostly resisted the cycles of Kickstarter PR that demand you interview subjects about a work that… doesn’t exist yet! On the other hand, this inevitably means the moment I find out I missed a Kickstarter Comic, I get overwhelming FOMO (fear of maternal ostriches… I’ve been bitten before. Never again.) So naturally, I wasn’t going to let The Fables of Erlking Woods slip through my fingers. Between Djeliya, Mobilis, Monkey Meat, and The Boy Wonder, Juni’s pretty much a lock for best-of-the-year consideration.
Fables is no exception, and perhaps a needed reminder that the world is full of comic book storytellers fascinated by exploring the nature and power of stories. The book is broken into “branches” of separate yet converging fables, allowing Ba’s Mignola by way of cartoonist growing up on Samurai Jack style to effervescently float out of anthropomorphic and human tales from medieval times to World War Two. Bidikar proves endlessly versatile, shifting lettering to match tone and temporal jumps, most notably to me during a surprising black-and-white 80s diary turn in the book’s back half. The emotional core of Fables is reminiscent of threads in Ba’s other works (particularly Mobilis, or The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber), exploring how past traumas drive isolation and festering jealousy-laced anger. It’s the confidence and immediately recognizable style that pulls in new readers, but Ba’s writing is increasingly therapeutic, navigating a rare willingness to look inward and bare fears of self-loathing most would prefer to keep bottled up. The Fables of Erlking Woods doesn’t pass Mobilis as my favorite of Ba’s work, but it doesn’t need to enter into a rapidly expanding bibliography of essential reads.
Sunday
Holy hell, this comic. Olivier Schrauwen’s window into a single day in the life of his cousin is ambitious, hilarious, and downright Joycean. Sunday is a massive document of a single day, and every single thought of Oliver’s cousin Thibeault, as the 36 year old spends a day alone in his apartment achieving precisely nothing! I’m not saying this goddamn spectacle of a masterpiece is better than Ulysses, but corner me at a con sometime and buy me a beer, and I’ll happily tell you this is so much more fun than reading James Joyce.
I missed Sunday on my best of ’24 list (every January is spent begrudgingly catching up on any books critics loved that I somehow missed – shouts to Heidi MacDonald at The Beat for this rec!) – it would have been a top 10 selection for sure, and probably in my top 5 favorites. It’s the ambition of the thing that got my attention, but it’s the humor and character that kept me through 500+ pages. Schrauwen captures this fictionalized cousin T in all his uncomfortable honest truths, and he’s both obviously awful and one of the most relatable characters I’ve read in comics! If left to our own devices, how many of us wouldn’t get loaded, fantasize about lost loves, and overthink texts with loved ones? (Cousin T’s bathtime text leads to one of the most sublime belly laughs I think I’ve ever had reading comics.)
Schrauwen’s flurry of slice-of-life, hazy memory, and cross-country escapes keep the insular thought-stream from collapsing in on itself, and wisely gives us a chance to better understand the circle of friends or acquaintances occupying T’s thoughts. Likewise, the approach allows Schrauwen to finetune an almost endless array of character acting, whether it’s depicting the actual moment or Cousin T’s half-drunk inner monologue rendition of his faux career as a (terrible) stand-up comedian.
I love this comic. I’m just saying, I’d read Sunday twice before I read Ulysses again.
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