I should hope that if you’ve followed me in any measure of the years that 1) You’ve stopped doing that, following scared men is rude and 2) that you know how I feel about libraries. But I gotta stand up and say it again, scream it from my admittedly “maybe I could jump this?” rooftop: LIBRARIES ARE THE STINKIN’ BEST. I’d venture to guess that at least 50% of my new comics and graphic novel intake this year is via my local library, and their quite good curation and ordering programs. Combined with my kids’ increasingly bottomless reading appetite, and at any given time, my home is likely to be more parts library book than man.
Am I breaking ground here sharing that the place with free books is good at having free books? Maybe not! But somewhere, somebody needs a reminder to get that library card so they can read more comics. And let me tell you, you will not be disappointed!
Comic Book Herald’s official Mid-Year top 30 comics came out this month, as did a My Marvelous Year/Comic Book Herald live crossover conversation with comics writer and editor Zack Quaintance.
You can find the (near) full 2025 list of all my favorite comics this year. I’m up over 70 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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Where Monsters Lie Vol. 2: Cull-De-Sac
Kyle Starks and Piotr Kowalski’s Where Monsters Lie was right on the fence of one of my favorite comics of 2024, and volume two deserves a shoutout for maintaining the concept, humor, and gore of a gated community full of slasher-killer archetypes. This being volume two, I promise you it will not make a whole lotta sense if you haven’t read the first volume, but these are light, breezy, and mildly queasy 100 page reads out from Dark Horse.
This decade has shown off that Starks is more than just a genre send-up cartoonist with a penchant for replacing names with F bombs, although humorously, literally all those skills are on full display in Where Monsters Lie. Starks will be fighting against the “comedy comics” tag for the rest of his career (a good place to be honestly, as there are few cartoonists who do it better!), but Where Monsters Lie is another good example of action, heart and plot preceding jokes. Which of course belies the ongoing saga of the holiday-themed serial killer in the book, and his ongoing struggle to write the perfect Mother’s Day murder plot.
Where Monsters Lie won’t change your life, but it will make you smile, and for brief moments, if you let it, it just might make you feel something.
The Wrestler
Sometimes you can just draw the otherworldly pants off a big ol’ wrassler who sold his soul for a chance at invincibility. Don’t overthink it; just pit The Sledgehammer vs. The Angels of Death in the bowels of hell. John Kenn Mortensen is a damn TALENT, selling the hellscape wrestling with highly-detailed black-and-whites, and enough dry humor to make wrestling ropes out of hellspawn intestines. There’s some casually attempted heart here – Sledgehammer’s Faustian pact is at odds with the love he has for his daughter – but when a winged beast is powerbombing a wrestler named Sledgehammer from miles above the ring? Like I said, let’s not overthink it.
Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor
Mark Waid is foremost among the school of classisist comics writers who’ve found a home in modern superhero comics. Waid grew up in the trenches of the Bronze Age – don’t even get this man started on Englehart era Avengers – and has lived and breathed the medium for decades. What’s most remarkable about Waid is that he keeps navigating into (well-regarded!) positions of architectural power. Just when you think the clock’s about to strike midnight with his post Secret Wars Avengers, there Mark goes hopping to DC and captivating readers with a keen understanding of Batman/Superman, and most importantly, how to let Dan Mora shine.
Straddling the line between living legend and relevant is much harder than it looks – just ask Chris Claremont.
Part of Waid’s evergreen appeal is the arrogance (complimentary!) required to declare you understand the most beloved characters in the American cultural canon better than, well, anyone else! This is foundational to Waid’s approach to Superman, and quite evident in The Last Days of Lex Luthor with Brian Hitch, Kevin Nowlan, and David Baron, via DC’s Black Label. The three-book, tidy graphic novel is Waid and Hitch’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” meets All-Star Superman, a clear and concise reflection on every viewer who lost their marbles when Zack Snyder let Kal-El laser beam that lovely Michael Shannon to death.
The premise – Lex Luthor is dying and trusts that Superman will do everything in his power to save even his life – sets the stage for the team to explore a wide swath of Superman history, seeking answers in the Fortress of Solitude, Kandor, Legion of Superheroes future, and in Tritonis with Lori Lemaris, Kal’s would-be mermaid girlfriend. Waid roots Superman’s efforts to save Lex – despite a world that actively wishes he’d just let him die! – in a slight reimagining of the duo’s Smallville origins in which Supes belives he could’ve saved Lex from his lab accident, and in a clear mission statement: no matter how impossible, Superman finds a way to save life.
It’s all a refreshingly earnest spin on “Whatever Happened to the Lex of Tomorrow,” with Hitch stepping up for some wonderful splash pages where he gets to pull in anything and everything DC (apparently Supes even consults Metron to save Lexy!). I particularly appreciated the art team’s ability to convey an increasingly sick Lex, as he transforms from the confident archvillain to a paling, wincing husk. While the work lacks a second gear, it slots neatly into the library of Superman starter kits well worth your time.
Poison Ivy Vol. 5: Human Botany
Longtime Big 2 comics fans spend a fair amount of time decrying the death of the longform ongoing superhero comic. I should know. It’s no secret that exponentially compounding races to new #1 issues has killed, or nearly killed one of the genre’s greatest advantages: letting creators cook. It’s well worth a moment to celebrate Poison Ivy, then, not only one of the longest running ongoing runs of the last three years, but given the character’s supplemental Batvillain origins, one of the most unlikely.
In the fifth collected volume, G. Willow Wilson, Marcio Takara and team have fought through a successful longform narrative focused around Ivy’s final defeat of Jason Woodrue (that damn creep), coming out the other side of Slaughter Swamp to find a vast open body of water in front of them. Ivy’s inclined to murder *all* of humanity, opting instead for her version of climate justice in the face of our modern hopelessness. Naturally, her name and face are co-opted by an “ecoterrorist” cell, just as she so happens to unearth a haunted ghost town and some unexpected Swamp Thing adjacent Avatars of ancient primordial meaning.
It’s the precision of the work’s focus – in Wilson and Takara’s hands Ivy is better at capturing anxiety around climate catastrophe than any superhero work has in years – as well as the supporting cast (Killer Croc, Janet from HR, and of course, sporadic doses of her girlfriend, Harley Quinn) that really underscore why Poison Ivy deserves the longform treatment. Length alone does not make a work sing, but there’s a unique way you can see a character and world grow in 30 issues of superhero comics that is unique to the form. Wilson and Takara understand this, and Ivy remains a mildly hidden golden seed.
Fault Lines
Robert Cullen’s Fault Lines is comprised of three short stories of magical realism, all thematically occupying the same realm of haunted pasts. I suppose the narratives are ultimately predictable (the Shyamalans didn’t exactly blow my top), but there’s a real craft to each that earns the Ablaze published graphic novel a spot among the year’s best. Whether it’s a deaf father accounting for the criminal sins of his youth, or a magician’s assistant trying to make a little extra cash, Cullen finds visual flourishes that elevate the bite-sized novellas into captivating reads. There’s also incredibly strong lead character design and a richness of life in all three of the stories – again, the shorter the story, the harder this is to realize.
The Seasons Vol. 1
As a dude falling for comics between 2010 and 2015, it was very easy to fall for the comics of Rick Remender. Whether it was at Marvel (My MMY cohorts and I have Marveled (heh) during our coverage of the Rick Remender penned Uncanny X-Force at how goddamn GOOD the book is), or as part of the Image renaissance, Remender quickly became one of my favorite writers. You know what they say about familiarity, though (it breeds family hilarity). Since Deadly Class I’ve given everything Remender does a swing, but I’ve found it’s the works *least* like the oeuvre I originally fell for that really strike a chord. This is a creator who has successfully carved out a creator-owned pocket of comics, and is still finding ways to grow, to challenge themselves. Thank god.
A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance stood out as a favorite for Remender’s confidence to take 10 steps back, and let Andre Lima Araujo’s talent carry that weight. The first volume of The Seasons is spiritually tethered, albeit moreso in the sense that it feels entirely unlike a genre I’d have ever picked for the creator behind Frankencastle and Fear Agent. The Seasons follows the 4 Season sisters (yes, you guessed their names) as Remender and Paul Azaceta take them through a Series of Unfortunate Events (meets the Umbrella Academy) involving a cursed mirror, supernatural carnival, and the mystery of the sister’s missing parents. Azaceta’s work on Outcast with Robert Kirkman and B.P.R.D. implies a certain kind of darkness – the solicits even tease boundary-breaking horror! – and while that tension exists, there’s also a captivating lightness as Spring Seasons tries to keep her sisters from falling to this dark carnival. It’s a welcome surprise from a creator still more than capable of them, and I look forward to seeing where this can go.
The Deviant Vol. 2
The first volume (The Deviant #1 to #4) of James Tynion IV and Joshua Hixon’s The Deviant easily made last year’s 50 favorite comics, and volume two (The Deviant #5 to #9) doesn’t stumble nearly enough to drastically shift the positive appraisal. The Deviant is up there with Tynion’s The Nice House on the Sea as my favorites among the prolific one-man publisher’s recent output. Tynion and Hixon meld beautifully to craft a taught serial killer thriller, with the second volume focusing in on the partner left behind as his boyfriend is (clearly) framed for the copycat Deviant killings. At its core, The Deviant is gripping, borderline impossible to put down, and grotesquely gorgeous. Hixon should get a LOT of opportunities out of the work put on display here.
As much as a work like this does in fact need to reveal its killer’s identity and backstory at some point (the reveal is far from the best of Agatha Christie, but not a complete misfire), it’s hard for me to feel like The Deviant quite said all it had to say. This is a work running headfirst into taboo (A gay comics author interviewing a gay child serial killer), although I felt in the work’s backhalf, the two competing urges to A) deliver the thrills of a mystery killer and B) speak to the prejudices and hostility that tendril around the arrest and jailing of the “original” Deviant killer really butted heads. Now, in most cases, making a truly excellent crime comic is enough. But this creative team raised the bar, and that sets higher expectations. Did it meet them? It’s up for debate. I’ll admit reading the entire work as one satisfying chunk may deliver that feeling more fully than a volume two a year apart.
Attis: A Trans Folk Horror
One of my simplest joys in 2025 was going to CAKE (Chicago Alternative Comics Expo) for the first time, and spending literally all the cash a Walgreens ATM would let me withdraw on genuinely indie comics and zines. The coolest thing about buying comics from total or near-total strangers is also the greatest risk: Aside from a handful of minutes agonizingly flipping through pages of their work in front of their con table (The sheer number of comics I’ve bought at cons because walking away was too excruciatingly awkward is north of “far too many”), I have no idea what I’m *really* in for. So while there’s the hope that my stack of passionately created art is full of secret gems no one else in the wide world of comics press knows about, there’s also the more realistic probability that many of them will go into a pile of odd curiosities that I’m glad I tried but don’t want to tell the world about.
Attis: A Trans Folk Horror by Devin Gallucci is why I take the risk.
A trio of queer characters are stuck wandering through a haunted forest, full of mysterious portents and wolf-dog-mans (no, not that Dog Man) in gloriously haunting black-and-white inks. I could certainly be wrong, but I interpreted the forest as a metaphor for living through the trans experience in a hostile world, with various characters debating “ways out” while another settles into finding a home and community among what they have. Regardless of your takeaway – and the work is strong enough to warrant multiple reads – Gallucci’s pencils are sharp yet flexible, clearly defining character yet slackening towards ambient supernatural fear when the situation demands it. The heart at the center of everything reminds me of a young Tillie Walden or Jillian Tamaki. And this is her *debut*! Can’t wait to see what’s next.
Spent
There are three comics that shaped the kind of comics fan I’d become, all read between the age of 19 and 21 while I was at university (I’ve been reading Babel, excuse me for a moment if I affect the linguistics of a 19th century Oxford student). The first two are superhero standards – The Essential volume of Amazing Spider-Man by Ditko and Lee, and Watchmen – but it’s the third that stands out as most important. In a course on Autobiography, I was assigned Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. A graphic novel. In *college*.
With the exception of an optional Maus summer reading in high school (I opted for Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead; I was 16! I didn’t know!), this simply didn’t happen.
It wasn’t so much the idea that a comic could present serious literature as it was the perceived institutional acceptance of this idea. If this was true, then I could embrace them entirely. Comics could be anything! I quite loved Fun Home, and all that it represented to me – reading Fun Home alongside a course on Joyce is like Colossus throwing Wolverine to the Moon – but I haven’t found that same enthusiasm returning to Bechdel’s works in the last couple years. I’ve come away from Are You My Mother and The Secret to Superhuman Strength with admiration, but never awe, never enthusiasm.
I feel entirely the opposite about Bechdel’s new work of autofiction (a fictionalized account of an autobiography), Spent. While the work initially suggests this is Bechdel’s treatise on capitalism – chapter titles include “The process of production of capital” and “The transformation of the Value (And Respectively the Price) of Labour-Power into Wages” – we come to learn this is done with a knowing wink, as Bechdel’s fictional self-insert struggles to write her next graphic novel (and maybe TV Show), $um. Through autofiction, Bechdel captures a delightfully charming remove from her long-articulated intellect, moving half a step to the left to look at a world where Fun Home is replaced with Death and Taximdermy, now a hit “prestige” TV series on Schmamazon.
Spent effectively captures the overwhelming feeling of everything bad happening everywhere all the time through the lens of Bechdel and an array of charming progressive activists.
The Sickness
On a number of cool people’s favorite 2024 comics lists, The Sickness is Lonnie Nadler, Jennie Cha and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s black-and-white horror comic from Uncivilized Books, straddling two time periods, 1944 and 1954. The work follows the developing psychosis of a teen boy who believes he’s being followed by a shadowy figure, and begins seeing increasingly horrifying visages of twisted, monstrous faces everywhere he goes. A decade later, a psychiatrist finds a similar pattern of haunting mental illness following a woman’s murder of her own family. Both converging narratives feel heavily researched and immersively reflective of that period’s Americana, from the obvious (the announcement of America’s use of nuclear force on Hiroshima) to the minute (Hank Greenberg baseball card taped to a bicycle wheel).
Cha’s detailed lines, evocative expressions, and terrifying melting puddles of flesh all scream “don’t read after dark,” with an attention-to-detail and craft that at least enters the conversation with Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monster. Truly, this is top tier artistry, carefully orchestrated “every page a painting” energy, with Nadler channeling the structural ambitions of a young Alan Moore to ensure Cha’s bottom right panels neatly seque into the page turn’s top left. As the world’s most famously frightened comics critic, one of the few things that get me to risk getting spooked is a creative team with vision for miles. And boy howdy, talk about vision!
The Sickness beautifully blends unsettling tension and freakout explosions, paced patiently and steadily through the works first six issues. It’s also impresively captivating for a work this dense – this isn’t a comic to casually flip through in the back of the stacks before the clerk notices you’ve been sitting cross-legged for over an hour (just me?). It’s one thing to *want* to set out to make an instant classic; it’s another thing entirely to have the damn juice. I’m very excited that the work promises to continue, with the option to subscribe to issues #6 to #10 already available on Uncivilized’s website.
Cornelius: The Merry Life of a Wretched Dog
Somebody find my “Best comic of the year contender” button, and light the damn signal because Marc Torices’ Cornelius, translated from Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg, is full of best-of-the-year ambition from top to bottom. Describing Torices’ vision here is a bit like writing a song that smells like a rainbow, but here goes: Cornelius The Dog is a cultural comic strip icon, and this book (the first of 40 volumes lol) compiles the comic strip history of the world famous character. None of this is true – of course – but these are the rules of Torices’ work, where Cornelius is deeply tied to the fictional Maiame’s cultural and political nationhood, and has been for a full 300 years. Through a chameleonic blend of cartoon styles, this volume eventually settles into a narrative in which Cornelius witnesses the abduction of Alspacka (too good for this world!) and then proceeds to botch and obfuscate all attempts to rescue her. Honestly, chameleonic is too soft a word-choice – Torices draws like his nib is caught in a time-warp flitting in and out of comic strip styles like if he misses one the Maimese government will sue him for another lifetime of unpaid comics-making.
It’s fair to say I have a type, and much like Mary Tyler Moorehawk (my favorite comic of 2024), Torices’ continues the David Foster Wallacization of graphic novels with the work’s most compelling addition: FOOTNOTES. That’s right, Cornelius is the greatest of literary Marvels, a multi-bookmark book (one for the narrative, and one for the corresponding footnotes in the back!). The footnotes are what elevate Cornelius from a curious experiment in endlessly shifting style to a satirical, darkly funny critique of the history of comics-making. The footnotes are where the fictionalized world of Cornelius’ creation and import is fleshed out, detailing the politics of Maiame, the central industrial influence of SLAKR Group’s publication of the title, and the various figures, misfortunes and lawsuits that have accompanied Cornelius. The SLAKR Group is revealed as the prototypical greedy, corrupt publisher, exploiting workers, avoiding crediting individuals, and covering up collapsing offices. These hyper-detailed histories frequently give way to deadpan farce, though, as Torices weaves in a legal system based on the theory that comedy=tragedy+time, or the entire history of Cornelius’ Tijuana Bible market, which the SLAKER group adopts as 30% of its annual profits.
In fact, the footnotes are such effective satire, much of my read was simply anticipation between sneaky footnotes (they are quite easy to miss), and one of my largest critiques is that Torices clearly ran out of steam of the frenetic pace in the book’s back third. The actual story of Cornelius – wretched might be mildly strong, but certainly cowardly and ineffectual – is far more hit or miss, tonally closer to the likes of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan than the classic American strips I’m more familiar with (what’s up, Peanuts). Even so, Torices’ ambition and constant change of pace makes for a hefty read I rarely wanted to put down.
Catch up on all CBH’s favorite graphic novels of 2025 right here!