Obviously, I occupy a highly coveted position, with hundreds – nay – thousands of up-and-come-Johnnys seeking to usurp my role as the world’s foremost comics ranker. Every month, these hungry wolves rank their favorite comics of the month, and come for my throne, and every month, I beat them off (I could edit that! I won’t!).
So, it is with a benevolence worthy of Doom, that I bestow upon all of you a tip – a secret to success if you will. If you are to rank all the best comics and graphic novels every month, and do so with studied wit, taste and grace, do not, under any circumstances, begin playing Elden Ring. I put off Elden Ring for fear of its difficulty, but now that I’ve begun, this game has taken over my life. Will I be able to maintain my comics ranking throne for the duration of 2025 while in the midst of such gaming? Stick with me dear reader, and let’s find out together!
As I proceed with a great list of great comics, I’ll also point out that 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 50 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 Harrowing Game
There are few articles I get more excited about than upcoming new releases in comics and graphic novels, and The Beat put out a great one recently for 85 anticipated graphic novels for the summer. I was most impressed by the recurring inclusion of books from 23rd St. Press, as I didn’t know a thing about the publisher. I chalked it up to The Beat’s classic insider connections, only to realize later that 23rd St. is the “Adult graphic novels” offshoot of the very well-known, and consistently excellent First Second. Get familiar because First Second’s editorial curation is second-to-none, and in August, 23rd St. will release Jesse Lonergan’s “Drome,” which I fully expect will be among many top 10 lists come year’s end.
Antoine Revoy’s The Harrowing Game is among 23rd St.’s first official releases (by my count, it’s their second). Revoy has the horror manga scene down pat, channeling Ito and Dimension 21 visuals into the story fo 3 ghosts entering a scary-story-off contest. The work is more thrilling and wonderfully stylized than it is scary, but Revoy does a nice job merging three seemingly unrelated ghost stories into an interlocking shared effort to resolve each ghosts’ beef with the same flesh-eating monster.
Model 5 Murder
Talk about Deja Vu! I read the first 13 pages of Tan Juan Gee’s Model 5 Murder absolutely certain I’d read a story EXACTLY like this before, and it turns out it’s because the work was originally released during 2023’s Shortbox Comics Fair as “A Three Body Problem” (an admittedly very bad name for a sci fi comic in a world where The Three-Body Problem exists!). The excellent space-robot-noir is reassembled this year by Silver Sprocket, and if you like murder mysteries, Blade Runner, and excellent cartooning, you’ll want to get this in your hands.
One Little Goat
I pulled Dara Horn and Theo Ellsworth’s One Little Goat off the shelves of the children’s section of my local library because it teased a dryly funny “Passover catastrophe,” but I brought it home and excitedly read it because I haven’t ever seen a hyperactive black-and-white sketch style like Ellsworth’s in a graphic novel ostensibly marketed for younger audiences! Ellsworth’s busy, expressive, carefully detailed chaos is usually more at home among the Fantagraphics cartoonists scene and names like Dame Darcy, Richard Sala and even Jim Woodring’s Frank. It’s an unexpected but welcome fit for One Little Goat, where Horn displays the unbeatable combination of sharing culture and customs alongside eminently relatable family dynamics.
Apparently, during the Passover Seder, a hidden afikoman must be found and eaten by midnight. When the chaotic-youngest child of the family loses the afikoman, the Seder lasts an eternity, opening the absurdist ideas up to include a time-travelling goat and travel across hundreds of years of Jewish history. It’s a deeply clever, exceedingly well-crafted exploration of Jewish culture.
This might win the award for “graphic novel I most consciously avoided” in 2025. Erik Kriek’s The Pit sat on my to-read pile like a curse, jeering at me and haunting me with a synopsis about a couple trying to find healing after the loss of a young child, only to enter a mystically spirit-laden woods. Nooooooope!
Unfortunately, Kriek’s a great cartoonist – there’s a lot of Charles Burns in those shadow-shifting fallen oaks and descents into unreality – so I had to give The Pit its due. The grief is hard-hitting, and ultimately this is a deeply sad work of fiction, but Kriek never gets lost in trauma porn. The Pit is at its best with Kriek carefully characterizing a husband almost over-eager to move on and ignore the trauma, and a wife so completely consumed by the loss that she’s put her entire art career on hold. I have gripes – listen, if y’all ever catch me telling my wife the spooky ancient writings in our new haunted forest home are just the ravings of an infirm old man, slap me – chief among them that a work of ambient horror is so… predictable. I don’t even like horror and every step felt predetermined. Nonetheless, Kriek draws the hell out of a nebulous tormented bog, and I look forward to seeing what they cook up next.
Mutt Mag
Fresh off The Gulf, one of Comic Book Herald’s favorite comics of 2024, and a hopeful Eisner winner, Adam de Souza released two new collections this summer: A third volume of his continuing comic strip Blind Alley (think a more esoteric, modern Peanuts) and Mutt Magazine, a one-person anthology of short-stories and strips. Mutt Mag is uneven – de Souza compares the spirit of the magazine to a leisurely walk without a known destination – but take a cartoonist this talented and beauty isn’t far away. More than anything, I’m excited for a world where an anthology like Mutt Mag exists, bringing to mind Daniel Clowes’ Eightball or Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve, if only in structure and ambition.
The majority of Mutt Mag (over 100 pages) returns to Brambles, a Blind Alley-esque six panel gag strip about a cute fairy creature. Personally, I was most invested in the various short stories, Truffle Pig (45 pages), Zoonosis (31 pages), and an untitled short about an older couple preparing for a stork to deliver their baby (19 pages). Stylistically, de Souza gets to play with post-apocalypse (and oddly, a Blind Alley crossover in a mishmash of genre), caves of horror, and the whimsy of a world where storks do unpredictably drop babies from the sky. I love a world where Mutt Mag exists. I hope we see more.
When I’m right, I’m right. I was highly skeptical of a post-Krakoa “From the Ashes” era of X-Men comics, and by and large the aimless retro reversion killed any interest I had in the mutant line as a whole. Nonetheless, with the right creators there are always diamonds in the rough, and that’s what we have with Storm by Murewa Ayodele and Lucas Werneck. Somehow Ayodele and Werneck manage to navigate a shared universe minefield (not only is this a new X-Men status quo, but Storm’s become an Avenger AND is tying into the One World Under Doom event) to give appropriate space to Ororo to look, act, and become what any true X-Head knows her to be: The coolest mutant.
There are big choices here, from Storm living in an Atlanta Sanctuary full of Hippos to Storm “knocking boots” with Wolverine back to Storm agreeing to a pact with a demon made by Brother Voodoo. But the real kicker is just how cosmic Ayodele threatens to take a Storm comic, not content with the mere likes of Thanos or Phoenix, but instead going straight for the ultimate abstracts, Eternity, Oblivion (fresh off a G.O.D.S. introduction!) and the Living Tribunal. Ayodele’s creator-owned resume (My Grandfather Was a God, Akogun) tells me he’s well-prepared for this moment, but still, Eternal Storm? That’s a swing for the damn fences! Couple that with Werneck dusting off his Krakoan stylists pens, and I’m here for it. +5 bonus points for this exchange:
Storm: How do you know my father’s gumbo recipe?
Doom: I am Doom.
The Dissident Club: Chronicle of a Pakistani Journalist in Exile
Out now from Arsenal Pulp Press, The Dissident Club is the autobiography of award-winning Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui. The work begins with the attempted kidnapping and assassination of Siddiqui by the Pakistani military in response to his critiques and investigative journalism. This forces Siddiqui to flee Pakistan for France, where he’s lived with his family in exile since 2018. Alongside Hubert Maury’s expressive character work (he reminds me of a less abstract Filipe Andrade), Siddiqui spends a good chunk of the work exploring his childhood in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to highlight his life arc from a strict Islamic household to a skeptical exiled journalist.
Autobiography is always shrouded in layers of perspective, but through Elise Follin and Ariane Borra’s swirling warm colors and David Homel’s translation, it feels like an honest representation of Siddiqui’s experience through modern Pakistani history. I appreciate Siddiqui’s unflinching portrayal of his increasingly fundamentalist father, taken and transformed wholly by a fiercely dogmatic interpretation of Islam, and a childhood understanding of Osama Bin Laden as a hero of his people. Siddiqui also turns the knife on himself with some venom, clearly showing how his own perceived bravery could also be interpreted as an arrogance that puts his family in danger repeatedly (I’d argue this is not his fault, nor even a reason to stop his critiques, but he is willing to show how his headstrong stubbornness refuses his wife’s advice to be more careful and strategic in his approach).
First published in France in 2023, the English translation of The Dissident Club is a great graphic representation of Siddiqui’s unique challenges, but also the near-universal challenges of modern journalism and speaking truth-to-power. Admittedly, I was hoping for more focus on Siddiqui’s work as a journalist, but the first-half focus on a childhood under the shround of Islamic jihad and Pakistani political history was a needed eye-opening for a western devil like myself.
Trial+Error
At this point, I’m not sure what a Choose-Your-Own-Path comic would have to do to be kept off my favorite comics lists. It’s absolutely a cheat code key to my heart, right up there with peanut butter and my 3-year-old telling me out of the blue, “Hey Dad, you’re pretty good at basketball” (unprompted!). Nonetheless, when you combine my affinity for flipping pages with the post-eco-apocalypse anthropomorphic animal cartooning of Matt Emmons, you have the recipe for one of the best comics of 2025.
Trial+Error (via Emmons Second at Best press, with title and layout credits to Kyle Murdough) is one of 2 new 2025 graphic novellas released via Emmons latest Kickstarter success. Its companion, Daystar, follows the nature (heh) of my other favorite Emmons’ comics (Council of Frogs, y’all!), following a sentient rat navigating a supernaturally horror-infused post-human ecological ruin. Trial+Error isn’t entirely dissimilar (you’re a robot-monkey born into a laboratory full of deceased human remains and mysterious creatures – I’m starting to get the sense Emmons doesn’t have great hope for the climate crisis), with the great exception that you get to choose your own path. Like a GOD.
Emmons is one of my favorite do-it-all cartoonists, marching completely to the beat of his own drum (the drum is, of course, being stomped on by wolves). Where many anthropomorphic forest animal narratives lean to whimsy or comedy, Emmons leans towards the strange, foreboding and at times grotesque, an eagle with its innards exposed, or a racoon-priest wearing its own pelt as a cloak (wtf?!). Yet there’s always a heart at the center of these works, and in Trial+Error it’s our own wide-eyed naivety channeled through the freshly-created E.L.M. On a purely structural level, Trial+Error never approaches the snaking-turns of Jason Shiga’s choose-your-own comics mastery, but I’m deeply smitten with the inclusion of optional mini-pamphlets scattered throughout the journey, like the material addendums of JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst novel S. Ultimately, the test of a work like this is do you want to start at the beginning and try as many paths as you can? For Trial+Error, I choose “Hell yes!”
They talk a lot about Oscar-bait, but if you want to see Dave-bait, show me a graphic novel about an obsessive-personality cartoonist making comics and loving libraries. Katie Fricas’ debut full-length graphic novel explores the author’s journey to make the ultimate graphic novel about World War I pigeons (the Coop Troop!), while simultaneously exploring the NYC queer dating scene and taking on a new job at the hallowed grounds of a dope library. It’s a slice-of-life autobiography exploring the way creative obsessions both fuel and disrupt life, with an incredibly inviting tone and narration.
Fricas’ art is a minor miracle, walking this impossible line between juvenile sketches (unerased pencil lines, water colors splashing well outside the inks!) and transporting scene-setting, hyperwarping the reader straight into a New York City library and fully understanding the emotional state of all the characters involved. It’s funny, I’ve talked enough about superhero comics online to know that for certain readers, anything short of a Jim Lee imitation feels like “bad” art (even if it’s – true story – Frank Quitely on New X-Men). Those readers will be BAFFLED by Fricas’ approach. And listen, even my snobby-old-self took several pages to finally feel comfortable letting go. But there’s such warmth in Fricas’ approach, such heart and charm in everything she’s doing. There are a lot of ways to evaluate “good art,” but increasingly for me, I find it’s any style that uniquely conveys the author’s sensibility. And in Checked Out, every element brings us closer to an intimate, vulnerable, pigeon-eye view of Fricas’ New York.
Simplicity
Imagine an unapologetically trans/genderqueer Futurama and you’re about a third of the way to the dystopian future satire of Mattie Lubchansky. Hot off 2023’s Boys Weekend, Lubchansky’s next Pantheon Graphic Library addition is an even bigger swing, a concerningly believable depiction of what’s left of America in 2081, following a New York scholar, Lucius, attempting to understand the off-the-grid city of Simplicity. In Simplicity, Lucius finds a society well outside the norms of the city-territories, with seemingly cultlike rituals of nightly violence and orgy, and a collectivist approach to their unlikely survival. As Lucius begins to fall for Simplicity’s lifestyle (as well as the charismatic Amity), his fact-finding research is revealed to be a ruse for developers to destroy Simplicity. And that’s when the monsters arrive.
Lubchansky’s an excellent cartoonist, crafting instantly compelling world design with an economy of line, and able to sell a character’s look of desire with tremendous ease (whereas when I try to sell this look irl, I just look like I’m about to sneeze). As the work develops, Lubchansky also gets to show off their monster designs, with translucent nightmares made entirely of eyes, mouths, zippers and Mysterio fish-bowls. It’s an eye-opening balancing act as Lubchansky alternates between erotica, supernatural thriller, and laugh-or-you’ll-cry satire.
Without spoiling anything, the third act very effectively seals Simplicity’s “point,” in intensely recognizable ways. It’s an emotional and powerful conclusion to another stellar work from Lubchansky.
I am in awe of Ryan North’s work on Fantastic Four. It’s not like I didn’t think highly of North before, but I wasn’t aware he had “possible 2nd best Fantastic Four run of all time” in his bag. And dear readers, through 28 collected issues, and an ongoing One World Under Doom event in the making, we are in “possible 2nd best Fantastic Four run of all time” territory. (Which means, yes, passing Hickman and friends.)
It’s easy to identify the one-and-done contained single issue approach as FF’s unique calling card, but it’s not as simple to identify why one-and-dones went out of style with flowers in your hair. While some of it boils down to the episodic possibilities of shared continuity and the realization that “Hey, I think they’re gonna keep publishing these fellas in tights long after I’m gone,” there’s also a simple modern truth: It’s hard as hell to write a fully contained superhero comic in 20 pages. That means every month there’s a brand new adventure, a brand new twist on sci-fi, and a brand new reason to fall in love with Reed, Sue, Johnny, Ben and the whole extended family. Sometimes it’s the Fantastic Four transported to an alien world where Johnny finds true love with a Squid-like alien, sometimes it’s Reed and Johnny egging each other on until they’ve unleashed supernatural ghost forces only a magic skull vomiting blood can stop, and sometimes it’s Ben, Sue and She-Hulk trying to spend a day about town ignoring that Doctor Doom has taken over the world. These are each full, individually satisfying meals in a way that frankly no other superhero comic today achieves.
In all iterations, it’s everything Fantastic Four was ever meant to be.
The Ardent
Fieldmouse Press got my attention early in 2025 as one of the first publishers to publicly discuss the impending, disastrous impact of the Trump Tariffs on their comics publishing plans. Through some combination of Trump’s chaos and paper prices remaining consistent, the emergency was temporarily subdued, but fortunately all the hubbub made me aware of the publisher fundraising their 2025 Winter catalog (they also publish SOLRAD, the very good online literary journal for comics). Thus began my descent into crowdfunding 98% of cool comics projects announced in 2025.
Carl Antonowicz’s The Ardent is among the 5 Fieldmouse offerings, and the hardcover latidunal story of a mute monk’s journey towing the bones of a Saint from one monastery to another is worth the price of admission alone. The monk’s journey is effectively broken into three encounters with a warrior reduced in station, a rambunctious child abandoned by his mother and father, and an older woman who purports to know the true history of this monk’s “saint.” The underlying theme of each chapter is a total rejection of fairytale endings in favor of the cold pragmatism of this earth. Each meeting threads the fine line of endless failures with a dark humor, that escalates with each human connection until the work’s final explosive conclusion.
In short, Antonowicz has crafted a riveting fable, confidently sketched and toned through sky-blue water colors and nostalgic reds for the various flashbacks. It should come as no surprise in a work with a mute lead that much of the narrative rests on a clearly communicated variety of facial expressions, and Antonowicz proves up to the task. I loved reading this work, but I’m most impressed by the way Antonowicz flirts with some really dark moments – I’ll never forgive that sweet boy’s parents, and the saint’s true backstory is brutally violent – but then balances a comedic whimsy in a way that doesn’t feel like tonal whiplash. Like many journeys in life, the monk’s final confrontation is both funny, sad, and fruitless! So it goes.
Catch up on all CBH’s favorite graphic novels of 2025 right here!