This month Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees returns, Tillie Walden and James Stokoe have new graphic novels, and Dogs on Dates makes a run at becoming my new favorite graphic novel of the year.
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To see the full year’s list, check out the best comics of 2026 (updated monthly!).
Investigators: Weather or Not / A Mighty Marvel Team-Up: Spider-Man Vol. 4 – Mighty Mayhem! / Aurora and the Orc
In the last month, my kids have *raced* to grab our newly arrived copies of each of these graphic novels, and honestly that’s the coolest feeling in the world for me. Both John Patrick Green’s Investigators and Mike Maihick’s Spider-Man graphic novels are already among my picks for the best comics for kids, and the latest, already dogeared copies just reinforces that.
As much as the kids love to read, getting them to try *new* graphic novels is always a trick. I dropped a copy of Lewis Trondheim’s Aurora and the Orc on my son’s pillow (this is my go-to trick, with an approximate 82.4% success rate), and within hours he was quoting mischievous battle-ready orc quotes back to me. Out now from First Second, and translated from the original French by Montana Kane, Aurora and the Orc is a Calvin and Hobbes/Big Nate esque series of cartoon vignettes where young schoolchild Aurora is the only one who recognizes an Orc has suddenly been dropped into their class! It’s cute, charming and full of exactly the kind of goofball antics the middle-grade reader crowd finds hilarious.
Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper is so damn sweet. Given its gravity and Netflix-infused popularity, it’s hard to reconcile that this gorgeously crafted young romance is actually ending, but good on Oseman for observing that all good stories end. I’ve been impressed too not only by Oseman’s cartooning and respect for rendering young queer love, but by her willingness to blend the challenging with the saccharine. Because at the end of the day, Nick and Charlie’s is a storybook romance, and that could feel too easy without the realism Oseman applies. Is she out to break hearts too as the boys prepare for college? You’ll have to finish Heartstopper to find out.
Ryoichiro Kezuka’s Record Journey defies expectations in all the right ways. The first chapter of this “I Love Albums!” anthology feels like a rather route, predictable passage on the power of music (I know, I know, my cynicism is showing!). The remainder turns in deeply interesting directions to reflect on this power, though, from an imagined alt-Beatles secret concert recording to literal pirate radio aired on the open seas to avoid censorship (the most dangerous ship on all the seas!). Kezuka works in that Jamie McKelvie on Phonogram or Dave Chisolm on, well, anything mode of bringing the transformative magic of audio to a soundless medium. It’s an extremely cool manga, and I’m greatly looking forward to volume two from Titan.
Orphan and the Five Beasts: Bath of Blood
Sometimes you just need to step away from a comic and take the pressure off. I loved James Stokoe’s first entry in his gory kung-fu throwback, but the first issue of the sequel, “Bath of Blood,” just did not hit any of the buttons I thought I was looking for. Stokoe is a the modern Geoff Darrow, one of my absolute favorite hyperdetailed ultra-action cartoonists, and his work on Sobek or Alien: Dead Earth remain some of my favorite comics. So, correctly, I put the issues down, walked away (to read different comics), and a few weeks later remembered that I should give “Bath of Blood” another shot.
Turns out, Stokoe still rules! If anything, “Bath of Blood” only exaggerates the cartoonist’s affinity for ubergore body horror disrupting the classic kung-fu tradition. We’ve got corrupted iron pregnant bellies (there’s a metal band name in there somewhere), floating krang-brain viscera (same), and a wifeguy so deluded he starts experimenting on patients and misses all the red flags (shouts to the wifeguys).
Anyway, I’m glad I walked away. Orphan and the Five Beasts is the best ongoing Kung-Fu saga in comics and I’ll read anything Stokoe does.
This summer’s award for graphic novel that made me cry while my kids enjoyed the backyard slip n’slide in front of me goes to Tillie Walden’s Charity and Sylvia (jokes on you, Tillie, I was sweating so much the tears blended right in!). Walden became one of the youngest Eisner winners ever with the back-to-back-to-back graphic novel knockouts of Spinning, On a Sunbeam and Are You Listening?, then took an unexpected but welcome detour into the Walking Dead universe with the Clementine trilogy. Walden continues to defy expectations, channeling all that goodwill into her latest passion, a meticulous historical biography of 1800s Vermont lesbian couple Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake.
The first thing that jumps out from Walden’s approach is the care put into this telling, with nearly every page a 4×3 12 panel vignette. In a 250 page graphic novel that is an absurd number of panels! As a historical story, Charity and Sylvia’s relationship is a juxtaposition of a completely average couple in love and a time-and-place where that was, in theory, entirely unheard of and made unacceptable. Walden eschews any fictionalized drama for the perhaps mundane but ever present fight these women must undertake to make their love last in plain sight of scandalized, heavily religious community.
Get enough emails from people trying to get you to read a new comic, and you start to see some embarrassing hyperbole. “Watchmen meets Game of Thrones by way of Kendrick Lamar in this debut graphic novel!” “One must imagine a young Philip K. Dick writing a love letter to a time-displaced Kurt Vonnegut in this queer YA sci-fi thriller!” Leave the overreaching comparative references to hack reviewers like yours truly, please!
Of course, my teasing belies the fact that this type of sales-pitch almost always works on me, which makes it doubly exciting when the hyperbole proves true. For Queens of the Crypt by Dom&Ink, Penguin opted for E.M. Carroll (huge fan) meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer (eat a rock, Joss!) by way of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (LET’SSSS GOOOOO!). And dammit, they’re *right*. Dom&Ink’s fearlessly evocative, non-conforming cartooning evokes Carroll’s When I Arrived at the Castle, the narrative itself is full of the not-quite-scary-if-we-joke-our-way-through-it ethos of Buffy’s supernatural world, and dammit, Janet, it’s one fine young debut graphic novel!
What if Mark Zuckerberg bought the Minority Report tech and used it to acquire ZipRecruiter? Wait no, what if comics creators imagined a near-future quasi-dystopia that forecasted the emergent trends of late-stage capitalism and AI in the workplace? Wait, no, no, no….
What if a new sci-fi graphic novel was smart, heartfelt, and really, really good? That’s the one!
Gigs is a new graphic novel from Mark Mosedale and Si Smith, via Top Shelf, where a series of interconnected short stories paint an altogether believable future look at the way technology and corporate mergers are consolidating the way we work, and the very nature of humans as cogs in algorithmic job-machine. Fortunately, the comics are a lot less like the semi-interesting LinkedIn post I seem to be describing (jeez, this guy’s even criticizing himself!), and find a deeply felt human heart at the center of this just-out-of-reach future.
For the majority of the graphic novel, Mosedale and Smith offer a bleak yet resisted future, whether it’s a gig-working woman developing an unlikely relationship with an old tech-punk, or an anti-gig graffiti artist sisyphean fight against the tech oligarchy. The ending is the most controversial decision for me, as it falls into the sci-fi trap of feeling like it needs to answer the dilemma lest we all fall into a pit of despair. Regardless, Gigs is an of-the-moment win, even if it means we’re all losing.
Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rites of Spring
The single biggest surprise in putting together my guide to the most popular comics of the 2020s came from seeing just how big Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees actually got. I knew I loved Patrick Horvath’s vision of Dexter by way of the Berenstain Bears but it’s extremely cool that this IDW miniseries exploded in collection edition sales and via a Webtoon expansion. In the aftermath of “Holy cow, it’s a hit!,” the most pressing question facing Horvath (and Eisner-award winning letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou) is whether Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees demands *more story* or if sequels are simply the byproduct of such overwhelming success that everyone involved had no choice!
“Rites of Spring” easily answers in the affirmative, with a sequel that jumps serial-killing Samantha Strong from 1980s Woodbrook to 1990s Woodbrook and the advent of the internet. It’s a compulsively readable cold-case where we know all the answers, told in dark noir captions and Horvath’s gorgeously inventive of storybook grotesqueries. It would have been easy to simply sit in Woodbrook and reap the rewards of a hit, but Horvath seems unwilling to take the easiest road, allowing a significant passage of time and escalating surprises that ensure “Beneath The Trees” never lies stuck buried in a paint can of its own making. Given the announcement that the story will conclude with a 2027 release, we can rest assured we’re getting the best version of a well-deserved indie hit.
Luke Healy is my favorite comedy cartoonist working today. We talk all the time about how *hard* it is to sell comedy in comics, but Healy’s approach of believably absurd escalation, queer sass, and heartfelt characters makes it look easy every time. Self-Esteem and the End of the World was one of my favorite graphic novels of 2024, and Healy’s back at it again – this time with talking Dogs! – as Dogs on Dates is quickly one of my favorite works of 2026.
Honestly, the decision to make this a romantic-comedy with anthropomorphic dogs (I think just the Dogs talk, too… one of them has a Goat as a pet!) is its own piece of humor, as absolutely nothing that happens in these pages is specific to dogs. It’s purely a touching, hilarious and at times tense queer relationship, framed by counting our lead couples each and every date (with an emphasis, of course, on some of the more eventful ones). Healy’s a master at the demanding tradition of punchline-a-page newspaper strips, alternating here between single page vignettes and fully realized short stories where the humor can compound over time. The approach builds an astonishingly well-paced window into Brad and Bernie’s growing love.
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