My Favorite Graphic Novels of March 2024

One of my favorite things about comics is how they’re always the best. Below you’ll find my favorite graphic novels or collected editions released in March 2024. I’ve ordered the selections in relative preference, in ascending order.

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The Marble Queen

I talk about this all the time, but one of the most important things I try to keep in mind is how to respect the craft, aims and effect of a work when it’s very clearly not targeting “aging Dad with a sick step-back three” as its primary audience. The Marble Queen by Anna Kopp and Gabrielle Kari is a great example, a Sapphic YA graphic novel from Dark Horse following a Princess brought to a faraway Kingdom to marry the realm’s Queen for the sake of both their kingdoms. The work is undeniably written for a younger audience, and more deliberately speaks to queer audiences navigating early feelings of romance and the cultural hostility or “othering” that follows. Nonetheless, I read half the graphic novel in a single sitting, fully pulled in by Kopp and Kari’s pacing, Manga-esque comedic expression, and beautiful storytelling. The Marble Queen is especially good at capturing the creeping dread of anxiety, and the ways its tendrils sneak into your world at the most unsuspecting otherwise blissful times.

Admittedly, the plot-based palace intrigue didn’t pull me through the book’s back half. Nonetheless, I can tell this is some fine work worthy of its audience.

Immortal Thor Vol. 1: All Weather Turns To Storm

At the core of Al Ewing and Martin Coccolo’s Immortal Thor, there is a lingering question: What does the Immortal legacy mean to Ewing?

Through the critical and commercial success of Immortal Hulk, Ewing established “Immortal” as his sacred ground for mature, nuanced superhero storytelling, a cut well above the typical standards of the monthly corporate rat race. Immortal Thor is Ewing’s second attempt at chasing those lofty ideals, but the methods feel distinctly changed to meet what Thor needs. An easy answer would have been to chase the “horror” genre thrills of Hulk, or the cosmic doors to hell, but that was the Hulk story that needed telling. And Thor has so many more stories at his beck and call.

“Too long have you chosen illusion over change!”

There’s a really fascinating undercurrent of tension in Ewing’s narration, much talk of the magic of story, and the associated costs that lie in wait for Thor. It’s a fairly challenging blend of superhero highs and Asgardian tales, and meta-commentary on the stagnation of the medium and what must happen to shake Thor out of it. In this first volume, Ewing is more nebulous in his motives, more mysterious in his aims, than he ever was on Immortal Hulk. The vision is not quite solidified, but the promise is there. In the meantime, here are Storm, Thor, Loki, Jane Foster and Beta Ray Bill playing pass the hammer to defeat an ancient god.

So be it.

A Firehose of Falsehood: The Story of Disinformation

Explanations of chronologies of disinformation – in the immortal words of Billie Joe Armstrong, “Now everybody do the propaganda!” – are increasingly and sadly needed more than ever. It’s a huge reason why I fell so hard for James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds The Department of Truth; to me, it seemed a miracle to be able to translate the era of “Fake News” and accelerating lies and conspiracies into fast-paced fiction. How do you articulate what is happening when shameless lies are told to the rapturous applause of an ahistorical rabid fanbase feeding purely off emotion?

A Firehose of Falsehood feels like the other side of the coin, where Teri Kanefield and Pat Dorian expertly navigate the full historical breadth of disinformation. It’s an engaging, simply told history of a complex subject, and one that made me realize truths I hadn’t quite seen. For example, I knew Donald Trump was Exhibit A in the contemporary American political scene of “Fake News,” but I did not realize how directly many of his tactics were taken from Italy’s Benito Mussolini. It is a difficult read, frankly, knowing where our world is at. But seeing that disinformation has been weaponized for millennia, and that inevitably its evils have been overcome is oddly comforting.

Descender

I used the release of a Descender compendium to catch-up on Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s Descender, an Image Comics sci-fi series that launched in 2015 and ran until its 32nd issue in 2018. Since that time, Lemire has release approximately 684,000 new creator-owned comic books and has become the Robert Pollard of comics creators. Nonetheless, it was quite thrilling to revisit an underrated time when Lemire had a clearer sense of quality control, and when Nguyen’s watercolor landscapes captured some of the purest cosmic energy of anything in comics.

Descender is effectively the answer to the question “What if Jeff Lemire read Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels” and I’m mostly here for it, although it’s hard not to feel diminishing returns over the run’s back half. Plot-wise the sci-fi doesn’t break any new ground, but Lemire is creative enough to mix up the delivery utilizing Nguyen’s strengths, most notably in a standout triptych with three separate narratives told one atop the other on each page for the whole issue. Likewise, it wouldn’t be a Lemire comic without a sincere effort to find the tear-jerking pathos of a robot built to drill mines. All in all, it’s a memorable if flawed run.

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy

I suspect I’m undervaluing Faith Erin Hicks. Despite the fact that she’s a pretty big name in all-ages cartoonists, I’ve never found my in with the creator. The Nameless City doesn’t quite measure up to my all-ages faves (Bone, Amulet, Nimona, Mister Invincible, etc), and Hick’s popular licensed work on Avatar and The Last of Us is simply the kind of spinoff comic I tend to ignore (aka comics from media I’ve already enjoyed better!).

As such, it was an enjoyable awakening to see Hicks at her full powers on Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy, a queer teen romance from the absurdly reliable First Second Books. It’s clear with the first 30 pages that Hicks sense of pacing, space, character, and emotion is all masterwork, art from the hands of a cartoonist fully in control of the themes they wish to convey. Even the premise is a clever subtle subversion of sports-romance tropes, where our star athlete is the high school girl being bullied, and the queer drama boy becomes her mentor (and maybe more). I took minor issue with the high school sports bullying taking place seemingly right in front of the coach (come on, coach! Speak up!), but this is coming from a guy who regularly reads comics about a 200 hundred year old man with knife hands. Believe what you will.

Sex Criminals: The Cumplete Story (…Do you get it?)

One of the weird things about coming of age and falling in love with comics during the Image renaissance of the early 2010s is there are a lot of comics that I think of as some of my favorites ever that I actually never finished. Due to various combinations of delays and personal life there are multiple series that I fell in love with from 2012-2014, and kept collecting, but never actually went back and read. Over the last 5 years, I came to this realization with Deadly Class, East of West, Black Science, Chew, Invincible, and now, the permanent #69 on my favorite comics of all time list, Sex Criminals.

Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s cum comic (their words) is particularly egregious because it turns out I only ever made it to issue #7 of a run that spanned #1-#30 and ends with an issue #69. So yes, let me reiterate that dirty, naughty secret: I’ve been recommending a comic as the 69th best of all time based on 22.5% of the run. I’m a nasty, freaky lil fraud! Punish me!

This re-release of the whole dang story in one sizable package prompted me to hit my longboxes and pull out the run. Hitting my own stacks for a run I haven’t finished (or read in a while) is in my top 2% of favorite things to do, and it was especially thrilling to – for the first time – cut open the NSFW variant pink polybags for a few of my comics (including a Bryan Lee O’Malley NSFW variant that can only be described as “I’ll never play Mario the same way again”). But the other rewarding part of this sexperience was confirmation that Fraction and Zdarsky kept Sex Criminals great all the way throughout! This could have easily been a short-term adrenaline rush of taboo humor and dick jokes, but instead it’s decidedly character driven, and thoughtful in its depictions of the messiness and complications of sexuality and gender. Even in moments when I stop finding Sex Criminals especially funny, I’m still eager to continue with the creator’s imaginative fantasies, explosions of formal expectations, or deeply self-conscious meta commentary.

It would be no surprise if a book featuring Cumworld didn’t hold up a decade later. The miracle of Fraction and Zdarsky’s collaboration is that it reads as fresh now as it did then – it’s like they came together and stopped time.

Zodiac

Like most deep philosophical art critics, I picked up Ai Weiwei’s graphic memoir Zodiac because the cover is very pretty and shiny. I’d love to say here that this is another one of my many classic jests, but I’m 100% sincere. I had no idea Ai Weiwei was a legendary Chinese performance artist (not to mention political prisoner & exile) – I just really loved the gloss on Ten Speed Press’s hardcover design, and the feel of Gianluca Costantini’s pencils from a quick scan.

I’m glad I’m so easily impressed because Zodiac is a fascinating read, oscillating between meditative and almost surreal discussions of art, politics, and human purpose. The memoir is structured via 12 chapters, each corresponding to the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac. At times this framing is very intentional, with Weiwei and Costantini sharing the folklore inspirations of the zodiac, but more often than not it’s a metaphorical framing tied to discussions of everything from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Chairman Mao to Weiwei’s most famous works. Unlike most memoirs that trade in linear autobio, Zodiac walks a fine line between history and theory, between concrete and ethereal, and somehow Costantini’s lines are so precise yet tactical the pacing never feels stodgy. A highly compelling work that I’d recommend.

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir

For vast stretches of its 300+ pages I was convinced Feeding Ghosts is the graphic novel of the year. Tessa Hulls’ multigenerational memoir, tracking the lives and relationships of her grandmother, mother, and herself, is an almost impossibly ambitious document of Chinese history, immigrant experience, mental health, generational strands of trauma, and therapeutic self-examination. Hulls treats the entire work with a laboriously designed swirl of creeping ink, a descending black-and-white instability ready to spin the entire work of its axis but never giving way to outright madness. Put another way, Feeding Ghosts can be out of this world gorgeous, and designed unlike anything else I’ve read this year.

At the same time, Feeding Ghosts is dense. You feel the weight of the labor, the toll of the personal introspection, the weight of every family tree branch crashing from the ether into a fully formed published document. It’s not just that the book isn’t light reading; it’s that information often feels repetitive, or tediously drawn out. Feeding Ghosts is so much from start to finish that it seems inevitable the work will oscillate between the most fascinating examinations in comics and stories a close friend has told you several times before.

For a work this personal, though, I’m more than willing to look past the rocky stretches, and celebrate the magnificence of Hulls’ accomplishments. Much of Feeding Ghosts is among the best memoirs I’ve read, whether we’re talking Fun Home, Blankets, The Best We Could Do, or anything else in comics (and beyond). I learned so much about Mao’s China, and the psychological toll that took on generations of Chinese, and Hulls benefits from the unique existence of her grandmother’s memoir about escaping Mao’s China to Hong Kong! It’s a must-read, and will be for years to come.

The Gulf

Comics are full of teenage coming-of-age journeys where an otherwise mundane experience is amplified by the angst and promise of youth. For obvious reasons, cartoonists love tapping into this emotionally resonant adult ground zero, from Craig Thompson’s Blankets, to Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer or Roaming, to Tillie Walden’s catalog, and on and on. Adam de Souza’s The Gulf is the latest standout in the genre, a masterfully put together graphic novel about high school friends seeking the idyllic promise of a Canadian commune over the stale possibility of a life spent collecting paychecks for insignificant contributions to the capitalistic machine.

de Souza’s work excels due to an excellent lead character, the wise-cracking, fiery, complex Oli, who steps right up to the legacy of Enid Coleslaw as memorable comics creations. With one brilliant exception, de Souza avoids the spectacle of the supernatural, and plays the journey straight: these are just three high school graduates navigating the woods and trails of Canada over the course of two days. There’s the messy backdrop of high school sexuality, bullying, and parents with no idea how to parent teens, but at the end of the day, it’s just a few awesome, confused kids finding their way and asking the question we’re all asking regardless of age: What is all this for?

Swan Songs

If you’ve followed my picks for favorite comics at any point over the last 6 years, you’ve probably gathered that I am decidedly in the bag for W. Maxwell Prince. Ice Cream Man has been my favorite ongoing comic book for about 5 years, and the spiritual (and final-issue crossover!) sibling Swan Songs was among my favorite works of 2023. I don’t think anyone in comics is more thoroughly and effectively dedicated to the art of the single issue than Prince, giving every 20+ page floppy work its own flavor, approach and experience. Alongside some of the best creative collaborators in the business, Prince justifies monthly comic shop sojourns better than anyone in the business.

Swan Songs is a series of 6 one-shots with a new artist on each issue (Martin Simmonds! Caspar Wjingaard! Filipe Andrade! Caitlin Yarsky! Alex Eckma-Lawn! And Ice Cream Man‘s own Martin Morazzo), and each issue is about the end of… something. We get the end of a life, the end of the world, the end of a marriage, the end of a sentence, the end of depression, and in a parody of Shel Silverstein, the end of the sidewalk. In Prince’s manner, each issue offers something entirely new, while trading in black humor, existential dread, and sneaking, buried, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hope. Issue two reimagines the end of a marriage as a series of genre-laced battles between the splitting couple, issue 5 reimagines therapy as a hypnotic sojourn into a collaged dreamscape, and issue 6 reimagines the aforementioned Silverstein.

It is dark, it is funny, it is imaginative, and always, always, always: it is what comics were meant to be.

Mobilis: My Life With Captain Nemo

This is unquestionably a 2023 release, but I finally read my hardcover this month, and it’s one of my favorite reads in recent years, so on with the show! I first got wind of Mobilis, Juni Ba’s follow-up to his similarly excellent TKO graphic novel debut, Djeliya, a few days before I interviewed Juni and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou about their collaborative Dark Horse graphic novel The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber. The cutoff for review copies had already passed, making it one of the first interviews I’ve ever done where I knowingly walked into a conversation without having read an author’s most recent work. In my arrogance, I assumed I kind of knew what the book was! After all, I’m a big fan of Juni’s Djeliya, Monkey Meat, and the aforementioned Unlikely Story. I’ve even read his Ninja Turtles work! Surely, no surprises lie in wait.

And, on the surface, Mobilis is not a book that trades in surprise. Both narratively and visually, Mobilis is very much Juni Ba’s modern re-imagining of a Captain Nemo on a never-ending underseas mission, with a young girl rescued and in tow. A tale as old as time! The surprise, then, is the totality of Ba’s vision, the consistency of his handle on tone, spectacle, pacing and emotion. Juni should not be this in control this quickly. Where Djeliya and Monkey Meat both felt like like works created with the energy of someone bursting with ideas and who had to get them down on the page before the next idea wormed its way in, Mobilis feels like the carefully considered craft of a years-in-the-making study. Yet somehow, the work doesn’t lose that thrilling energy – I sat down to read a few pages, and lo and behold I finished the work in a single night.

Juni Ba was already a must-buy cartoonist for me, but honesty I can’t say enough good things about Mobilis – this is a must-buy, and I would strongly encourage the hardcover print package over digital to fully enjoy the vision at its fullest.

 

An Unordered list of other New Comics I Read and Mostly Enjoyed!:

• Masters of the Nefarious – by Pierre La Police
• Transitions: A Mother’s Journey – Elodie Durand
• Ultimate Invasion – Jonathan Hickman / Bryan Hitch
• Firebugs – Nino Bulling
• Viscera Objectica – Yugo Limbo