The Best Comics of 2024 (So Far)

Listen, I appreciate that you’re taking the time to read this intro, but every second you waste here is a second you could have spent reading one of the many great new comic books in 2024. So, again, thank you for considering that I might be able to write something here worth reading, but in the name of Jack Kirby, let’s get moving to the best comics so far this year!

For the mid-year, I’m keeping the picks to my favorite 30 completed graphic novels and trades released in 2024. This means favorites I’ve been reading entirely in single issue (Ultimate Spider-Man, The Deviant, I Heart Skullcrusher) are largely absent (but will probably be on the year-end list!). Likewise, I ruled out including any compendiums (what’s up Sex Criminals: The Cumplete Collection) or favorite reads that came out late in 2023 (sorry Mobilis and Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey!).

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Otherwise, without further ado, check out the best comics of 2024, listed from my 30th favorite to my absolute favorite below!

Influenca

It’s a danger to give a comic too much credit just for its premise, but Influenca‘s is so damn good. In Jade LFT Peter’s graphic novella from Silver Sprocket, a zombie apocalypse marks the 7th apocalypse the world has been through (and can remember!), and the story follows the online influencers (named here for a combination of Influenza and Influencer) who hunt zombies. It’s an erotic, queer, funny and at times tense look at the ways we both fight and post our way through what feels like the end of the world, and the relationships that help us do it.

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.

How to Baby

As a father of three boys, I’ve obviously mastered every facet of parenting, but I’ve never seen an author (and a cartoonist to boot!) so effectively capture what it’s like to go through every phase of BABY, from consideration to birth to walking reality! Liana Finck combines wry observations and loose, humorous figures and diagrams in a truly masterful, engaging depiction of motherhood. I recognized many similar elements my wife and I went through, and was freshly reminded of the many, many experiences I don’t understand especially well.

Finck is careful to avoid crafting an advice book, instead focusing on the lived experience, and the variety of topics and issues you’re likely to experience. I’d expect the work resonates far more with fairly recent or soon-to-be parents, but again, purely on a craft level, I’m awed by the mileage Finck can get out of a jumbled anatomy-free penned sketch of a frazzled mother. It’s a Scott McCloud-esque testament to the power of forms and icons, and Finck wields that ability with understated power.

The Enfield Gang Massacre

Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips’s That Texas Blood is one of my favorite ongoing comics since its launch in mid-2020. The creative team is smart about taking breaks between installments to allow for quality (and presumably their own scheduling sanity), meaning each arc feels like a carefully calibrated document of small-town Texas crime. The latest “hiatus” took the form of a spinoff arc set entirely in the town’s past, documenting a somewhat mysterious massacre of outlaws hundreds of years ago. It’s a bold risk, and only loosely connected (at least on the surface) to the immediate action of That Texas Blood, but Condon and Phillips fully commit to the vision.

Under Phillips’s brush every setting sun makes me think, “Well maybe I would like to spend more time in Texas” (I wouldn’t!), and Condon’s dedication to backmatter ephemera highlights a unique hyper-obsessive loyalty to the worlds being created. It’s one thing to allude to a town’s past, it’s another to tell a story from hundreds of years ago, and then it’s an unprecedented third level to write the investigative journalism chronicling the discovery of truth about that story from inside the fictional universe. It’s the kind of “Alan Moore just straight up wrote an article on ornithology” level of craft that tells me I’m in the hands of storytellers who care so much. And that just innately makes me care too!

Hobtown Mystery Stories: The Case of the Missing Men

If you told me Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes were adapting a popular series of middle-grade novels from the 1970s, the Hobtown Mystery Stories, I’d fully believe you. The serialized title and small-town America environment feel pulled out of time from used book store shelves, dusting off their thrills, horrors, and downright strangeness for a new comics audience in the 2020s. Yet in reality, the Hobtown Mystery Stories (which as far as I can tell ran for two volumes) are being reprinted by Oni Press after their release via Conundrum in 2017.

At times, The Case of the Missing Men feels like reading an adaptation of Boxcar Children directed by Twin Peaks-era David Lynch. Or like if Ed Brubaker was writing Friday with Dan Clowes instead of Marcos Martin. The premise is a high school group of teens form a detective club and are pulled deeper and deeper into a deeply strange town-wide conspiracy. While this is ripe for simple pleasures, Bertin and Forbes imbue the work with such tension, nightmare, and surreal imagery that The Case of the Missing Men is hard to put down.

Transformers Vol. 1: Robots in Disguise

Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer are a walking advertisement to pursue your creative vision without compromise. This is perhaps surprising given their latest entry – an instantly Eisner-nominated Transformers run – is part of the hottest corporate IP synergy in 2024 comics, with the Robert Kirkman driven Energon Universe. Yet even within those boundaries, Johnson and Spicer produce a work akin to their masterful catalog of gems like Murder Falcon, Do a Powerbomb, and Extremity. It’s the platonic ideal of how big-name comics should work – all the audience of a nostalgia-franchise with all the creative freedom of a creator-owned book.

I’ll tell you right now: they’re gonna win a damn Eisner for best ongoing comic with this formula. Marvel and DC, where’s your head at?

Personally, I don’t get the same charm and literally out-of-this-world characterization as Transformers: More than Meets the Eye by James Roberts and Nick Roche, and if I’m being well and truly honest, Johnson’s very much in danger of repeating himself to the point of cliché (he’s Jeff Lemire’ing all over these sad Dad stories!). Nonetheless, there is an unquestionable thrill in the tactile, pen-to-paper sheer style, and the way Johnson and Spicer make you believe Cybertronian wrestling makes metal look like it’s made of Gumby. The approach injects Optimus Prime with pathos, isn’t shy about sidelining or destroying your childhood faves, and is the kind of comic you can hold up and wave about at a protest of AI taking over the creative arts. It’s good. And I’ll tell you again: It’s gonna win a damn Eisner!

Bad Dreams in the Night

I start at least one comic review every month with a reflection on my own ignorance about the world of comics, and this month it’s webcomics superstar Adam Ellis’ Bad Dreams in the Night. Despite tremendous popularity (dude has over 1 million followers on every social platform), I of course had never heard of Adam Ellis. It’s yet another fantastic reminder that staring too hard at the bullpens of Marvel and DC can make you intensely ignorant of where people are actually reading their comics.

Bad Dreams in the Night is a collection of short horror stories, oscillating between humorous depictions of millennial fears and genuinely unsettling body horror. The tenor, pacing and characterizations of all these initially innocuous settings building to their ultimate dread reminds me of Junji Ito filtered through the artwork of Chip Zdarsky. You can feel Ellis trying on different styles and approaches here as well, in a refreshingly honest display of an artist not afraid to experiment in a published graphic novel. Frankly, this is my kind of horror – too grim and unsettling to be considered exclusively YA, but often with just enough nod and wink under the surface that I don’t lose sleep (with the exception of Ellis’ brief recounting of a harassment campaign levied against him in 2017 – as always, real life monsters are the scariest of them all). It’s great work from Ellis, and I’m eager to explore more.

Chainsaw Man Vol. 14

You can tell Tatsuki Fujimoto is playing a jazz solo only he can hear right now because in Chainsaw Man Vol. 14 one of the biggest mangas in the WORLD goes an entire volume without a SINGLE chainsaw. While the early thrill of Chainsaw Man was Fujimoto’s explosive, hyper-dynamic horror-action, recent volumes have amplified the idiosyncrasies of a creator trying to make sense of landing on top of the world. I’m consistently in awe of just how strange Chainsaw Man can be in part because it’s so difficult to imagine any of the top superhero comics with the courage to sideline their own main players for such extended periods of time (at least without the tired death and rebirth cycles). It’s also tremendously rewarding to see audiences willing to ride out Fujimoto’s quirks, and to evolve with the work through an on-the-fly creative rebirth. Don’t worry, there’s still a fair share of demon-monsters and the dry-as-desert-sand humor that the book has excelled at since jump, but again: A whole volume. No chains!

How is he getting away with this?!

The Ribbon Queen

With Hellblazer, Preacher, and The Boys to his name, Garth Ennis is widely regarded as one of the best and most successful comic book writers of the past 35 years. Post-Boys, though, I was under the impression Ennis had fully retreated to his love of War Comics, a genre I simply didn’t care to follow. So just like that, a modern master completely fell off my radar: I haven’t read a Garth Ennis book since the spiteful cynicism of a Boys binge turned me off to the comics well over 6 or 7 years ago.

After reading The Ribbon Queen, I suspect I have a lot of catching up to do. Ennis partners with Jacen Burrows (speaking of underrated recent resumes) on The Ribbon Queen, via the “oh yeah, remember them!” AWA publisher, and it’s a gripping smooth ride through terror, revenge, and more flayed skin than New 52 Joker could even stomach. It’d be one thing if Ennis and Burrows were just flexing on all the ways to set up evil men getting their skin peeled off layer by layer by an ancient spirit, but the ambitions of The Ribbon Queen are astonishingly multifaceted. Ennis and Burrow’s lead, Detective Sun, is an Asian woman on the NYPD, and the book bounces back and forth between issues of policing through Black Lives Matter, institutional racism, patriarchal society, and a host more. They’re the kind of issues that Boys era Ennis would have treated with all the wrong amounts of Juvenile shocks, and the kind Preacher era Ennis and Steve Dillon could have lent a needed outside viewpoint towards. The Ribbon Queen leans more towards the ladder, rarely overstaying the length of the sermon, and organically weaving it into what is ultimate a horror-comic asking the question: could a human jaw go down a bath drain? Deeply impressive work from masters I’ll be reading more of as soon as I’m able.

Lunar New Year Love Story

A new First Second graphic novel from Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese, Dragon Hoops, Shang-Chi) is one of those “pencil it onto everyone’s best of the year list” books, so it’s no surprise that this near-perfect teen rom-com with LeUyen Pham is a preposterously well-constructed read. Yang’s ability to capture teenage emotion and dialog only continues to grow, but for me, it’s Pham who stole the show with a deeply versatile style. Pham’s supernatural St. Valentine is the wonderfully gothic old horror spirit, while her Lion Dancing (a Vietnamese and Korean cultural element this book taught me about for the first time) is pure Kirby monster energy. Pham utilizes a unique tactile approach where images are frayed at the edges, where uncolored slots of white seem to reveal the page beneath – it’s the kind of AI-assassinating artistic effect that subtly iterates, yes, a real person made this with their own two hands.

You’re going to hear about Lunar New Year Love Story this year. The only question is do you read it now, or wait for the best-of accolades at year end?

Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis

Purely based on graphic novel title and publication by Dark Horse, you’d be forgiven for assuming Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis is a well-worn genre thriller looking to expand upon the sandy shores of Aquaman and Namor. Cursory inspection reveals it’s anything but, though, as Dave Maass and Patrick Lay are actually adapting a suppressed 1943 opera by Jewish artists created inside a Nazi Germany concentration camp. The history alone, and the miracle of any retained art surviving the Holocaust is worth the price of admission. The comic looks to adapt Der Kaiser von Atlantis, created by Peter Kien and Viktor Ullman from within the Terezin concentration camp, and seeks to share how “beauty and humor can be found even in the face of doom.”

A work like this is in danger of flatlining at curious historical project, but Maass and Lay modernize and elevate the opera for comics with tremendous, care, relevance and precision. Death Strikes is funny, at times like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (a personal favorite), and the ink-washed grays are gorgeous. You’ll want to read the historical analysis that bookends the comic, but readers could pick this up without any of that context and simply enjoy a parodic dig into the rise of fascism and the endless ills of war. This is genuinely special work from Maass and Lay, living up to the weight of adapting something created in such historically harrowing circumstances.

Victory Parade

When Leela Corman sets out to make a graphic novel, she makes a graphic novel built to win awards. The early 2010’s Unterzakhn is a tremendous work, following twin sisters navigating New York’s Lower East side as Jewish immigrants circa 1910. Corman wields an innate ability to transform history into an emotionally resonant present, with casts of fierce women encompassing the full spectrums of humor, heart, and heart of fully realized lives. Victory Parade walks a similar emotional path, following the lives of Brooklyn women navigating World War II in America as German-Jewish refugees.

In Victory Parade, Corman eschews the black-and-white thick inks for a lush and times surreal palette of softly melting watercolors. The oversized Pantheon Graphic Library hardcover allows for a wider canvas, which Corman uses to full effect, particularly during hallucinogenic dream sequences full of dissected anatomy depicting subconscious trauma in the lives of these characters. Even so, the ‘realism’ of the history is only augmented through fever dreams and flashbacks, whether it’s memories of pre-Nazi Germany or Sam’s nightmares of seeing the post-liberation Buchenwald concentration camp. Corman’s quite carefully considered in depicting the rampant blend of misogyny and xenophobia of the era as well, even down to lettering that snakes around a lead character’s neck like a noose of jeers.

Corman’s ambitions – in tone, pacing, character focus – all seem larger than the inevitable Unterzakhn comparisons, and not always to her benefit. Ruth’s journey into women’s professional wrestling of the era could likely have been a whole graphic novel of its own, but within Victory Parade, it’s a bit clouded in all the moving parts. Nonetheless, this is fascinating work from an incredible talent, and well worth seeing in print.

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.

DOOM (2024)

Sanford Greene and Jonathan Hickman’s DOOM one-shot is my favorite Marvel comic book of the past 4 years, and in a perfect world, would serve as the launching template for a Marvel Black Label series of creator-driven out-of-continuity prestige comics. Tying Hickman to a project will get the lion’s share of attention – especially on a character he’s so well known for across Fantastic Four and Secret Wars – and he plays to his love of Valeria Richards and Doom’s relationship, calling back to many of his Doom’s greatest hits moments.

The real star, though, is Greene, the artist of the excellent Bitter Root, making a star turn as co-plotter and artist across 48 pages of Marvel cosmic glory. The premise is hardly unprecedented – Doom vs Galactus at the end of the Marvel Universe as we’ve known it – but Greene’s virtuosic visualizations give the rarest of joys across modern Marvel Comics: an artist fully empowered to explore their own style with the full use of these toys we’ve built such adoration for over decades. It calls to mind the potential of Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men, or better, Tradd Moore’s artistic showcase on Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise.

It is joyful, it is so rich and living with detail you could pour over these pages for a full childhood, and by DOOM, it’s why I can’t quit Marvel Comics.

In Utero

I was on the fence about trying In Utero, but the pull quote from Jeff Lemire on the back cover calling Chris Gooch “his new favorite cartoonist” convinced me. I’m glad because Gooch’s In Utero is “best of the year” stuff, a masterfully in control, tense, creeping sci-fi, with enough youthful lightness to keep from sinking into the monstrous muck. The graphic novel takes place a decade after a mysterious massive explosion shook Australia, in a dilapidated old shopping mall now overrun with… well, something mysterious! It’s a heartfelt and earnest story with expert creative design and tonal control. Gooch is an artist I’ll be following into the future.

Singularity

Singularity is a concept comic from composer Bear McCreary (who scored everything from God of War to Outlander to The Rings of Power) with scripting from Mat Groom and more art teams than you could fit inside a black hole (including personal fave Rod Reis). The 144 page comic released via Image is a companion piece to the concept album of the same name, and while this would normally make the comic an afterthought, it’s actually quite good. I read the whole thing in a single sitting and love the sci-fi premise, the use of new art teams for every reincarnated life, and the message on the ultimate question: what’s all this for?

So here’s the challenge: For a Jonathan Hickman scholar (see also: nerd) like myself, Singularity reads like a greatest hits of Hickman’s works across Powers of X, Decorum, Secret Wars, and beyond(er). There are two ways of interpreting this. One is some nebulous accusation of plagiarism, which I don’t buy (Bear McCreary might not even known who Jonathan Hickman is!). The other is that some Hickman comics are a source of inspiration, in much the same way Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August inspired Hickman’s own narratives for Moira in House and Powers of X. All art is influenced one way or another, this one simply wears it on its sleeve very openly, or shares DNA with a very popular source. But within those inspirations, everyone involved does great work!

At the end of the day, here’s what matters: At its best, Singularity improves on some of Hickman’s concepts, and on average, lovingly recreates visual spectacles of a reincarnated life across the multiverse. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of other sci-fi reference points outside of Hickman anyway: It’s Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow but across alien planets throughout the entire multiverse, with a heaping dose of Jim Starlin’s cosmic entities mixed in for good measure. It’s a really satisfying graphic novel executed through an anthology approach that makes narrative sense. And yeah, RIYL Hickman comics!

The Werewolf at Dusk: And Other Stories

I talk about this a lot, but I’m endlessly tantalized by how much I don’t know about comics. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the major celebrated works of the 2010’s, but then here’s David Small, an artist I’ve never encountered before, with a graphic memoir, Stitches, so beloved it’s blurbed by R. Crumb and Stan Lee! Small’s so good he has Gene Luen Yang saying, “David Small is among the most masterful storytellers alive today.” I don’t know anything about anything. It’s great!

Small’s latest is a series of three short stories: The Werewolf at Dusk, A Walk in the Old City (the only of the three also written by Small), and The Tiger in Vogue. The works are compulsively readable, and compulsively inspiring, with Small working in an almost child-like partially sketched pen that makes me want to stop what I’m doing and draw my own aging werewolves. The difference of course is that Small knows what he’s doing with the absence of a line, or a detail-less grocery aisle, allowing character expression and a laconic narrative do the heavy lifting. For my money, The Tiger in Vogue is the standout, a surreal adaptation of Jean Ferry’s story about the rise of fascism in early 1920’s Germany, as told by a man attending a musical with a woman and a literal tiger as the star attractions. It taps into the same themes as the previous works – aging as the world changes and shifts the ground beneath your feet – but while also capturing the madness inducing fear that comes from watching a small mustached man controlling a crowd in ways only you seem to fully understand.

In Perpetuity

Maria and Peter Hoey’s In Perpetuity, out now from Top Shelf Productions, is a brilliant exercise in comic-making restraint. Stylistically like Chris Ware’s slice-of-life decompression meets the staccato movements of Robot Chicken figures, In Perpetuity is told primarily through stilted, matter-of-fact third-person narration. “Jim walked over to his car.” “He took the bus to make it more believable.” “Kimberly continued on and did not look back.” The repetition and simplicity captures the mundanity of In Perpetuity‘s Afterlife, a vision not of heaven nor hell, but instead one of tedium and limited pleasures. The lead character works as a gas station attendant, with days largely broken apart by crossword puzzles and cigarettes, until an old acquaintance from life pulls him into a criminal enterprise contacting the living from the A.L.

As In Perpetuity develops, its reimagining of the Greek afterlife mixes in noirish mystery, conspiracy, and ultimately a confrontation with the ruler of the A.L, Hades. It’s a masterful mixture of genre, both compelling as narrative and contemplative of the joys we take for granted of in this life.

Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees

While my intent is to keep these monthly favorites to full graphic novels or trades released in a given month, I had such a good time reading the first three issues of Patrick Horvath and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees that I have to put it on the list. Horvath combines the warmth of small-town anthropomorphic forest creatures with the cold, calculating serial killing of Dexter. Except unlike Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Horvath is in complete command of the tone and pacing of the work, allowing it to traverse a read that is at once as charming as it is deadly mysterious. This one has The Juice. Expect to see it on most best of the year lists in 2024!

Punk Rock Karaoke

If Bianca Xunise’s Punk Rock Karaoke was just a playlist of punk rock deep cuts interspersed with canon classics by X-Ray Spex and Fugazi, it’d still be one of my favorite comics of the year. Fortunately, the “now playing” soundtrack recs are mere icing on a beautifully designed world of punk rockers and Chicago friends navigating the steps from high school to adulthood. Xunise’s Southside is full of a lived-in amateur music scene, wondrously full queer characters, and a fluid style of Chibi by way of Bryan Lee O’Malley. Punk Rock Karaoke is bursting with charm, radiant colors, and the importance of the bonds of community.

No joke, queuing up the referenced punk cuts while I read this graphic novel was one of my favorite comics experiences of the entire year. The only good reason to stop reading at any point is if you’re not in a good place to blast Ministry. Punk Rock Karaoke is one of my favorite comic books of the year.

Gleem

Originally published in 2019, Freddy Carrasco’s “selection of spectacular short stories” is so good Drawn & Quarterly picked up the out-of-print work for a new edition this year. I’m very glad they did, as Carrasco’s fully-realized sci-fi worlds walk an incredible blend between Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkon Kinkreet and the cosmos-shattering spiritualism of Jim Starlin reincarnated in the pen of Ronin-era Frank Miller. Gleem is composed of three distinct stories, one a bored kid’s accidental spiritual journey at a future megachurch, another what happens when bored kids add a defective robot AI to their crew, and a final that I can best describe as what it’s like for bored kids to do future-drugs at the coolest rave I’ll never get invited to.

Carrasco’s cartooning is confident and inspiring, the kind that often invites you to make your own comics even as its displaying a control of the page that can only come from immense creative experience. In his book blurb, Michael DeForge writes, “Nobody’s doing space and time the way Freddy Carrasco does space and time,” and it’s hard to argue otherwise. Sequences where a teen at church loses himself in a swirling fever dream made up of lust and a fish asking him if he’s paid his taxes are, uh, hard to pull off! Within Gleem‘s walls it all makes a delirious amount of sense.

From here on out, I’ll be reading anything Carrasco releases, no questions asked.

Tokyo These Days – Taiyu Matsumoto

Honestly, all I needed to know was Viz Signature was releasing a new series from Taiyo Matsumoto (thanks to Ritesh Babu for that nudge!). I’m a manga noob sure, but Matsumoto is one of the artists I’m most caught up on, having read both Tekkon Kinkreet and Ping Pong within the last year.

This is “Inside Manga” from a celebrated master, a slice of life manga about a lifer who retires from his job editing manga, and the writers, artists, editors and “jobbers” that surround him. The work begins as a character study taking us behind the curtain of who comics are made but evolves into both an inspirational reflection on artistry, aging, and how we choose to spend our days. This could easily go down as another all-time classic, but with only volume 1 released in English, I’ll have to eagerly wait and see.

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.

Self-Esteem and the End of the World

Luke Healy’s second graphic novel is a hilarious, heartfelt, contemplative look at aging into catastrophe, both expected and otherwise. It’s a reflection on family, on finding yourself, and (“he loves that meta sh**”) trying to make it as a cartoonist. More than any of that, Self-Esteem and The End of the World, out now from Drawn & Quarterly, is one of the best comics of the year, as well as one of the best comics of recent years.

Healy’s rigid 6-panel structures at times play like newspaper gag strips, and at times like long-form memoir, blending the best recurring comedy of the former with the pathos of the latter. Once you get in Healy’s rhythms, and adapt to the unique blend of self-lacerating wry humor, it’s a laugh out loud funny work that doubles as some of the best mother-son relationship work I’ve read in the medium. Plus, as a fellow sucker for the meta, Healy includes an honest-to-god reproduction of the fictional work he references as the comic of his that gets adapted into a movie. That’s commitment to the bit, and a damn fine read in and of itself. I love this comic, and I’ll be recommending it for a good long while.

Hexagon Bridge

Like any sane comics fan, I passed on Richard Blake’s Hexagon Bridge because the clean, striking covers looked like Jesse Lonergan’s work on Planet Paradise or Hedra, and I thought maybe they were an egregious form of imitation. Ya know, instead of getting excited about a new artist sharing Lonergan’s sense of space and design. As usual, I’m an idiot, and Blake’s Hexagon Bridge is one of my favorite comics in recent years.

Hexagon Bridge is glorious cartoonist sci-fi, and the single closest approximation of a Christopher Nolan film via comics that I think I’ve ever read (complimentary!). The fact that this is Blake’s graphic novel debut is concerning. No one should be this good this fast unless they’ve already been replaced by the advanced AI navigating the mysterious maps of Blake’s work! Yes, Hexagon Bridge has huge RIYL Hickman/Nolan/Asimov energy, but it captures a wholly unique atmosphere, not to mention a rare innate ability to trust the reader to take care of the damn exposition themselves. It’s AI sci-fi but without any of the ripped-from-the-headlines ham-fisted approaches the genre is currently overwhelmed with. Much like Adley’s parents, Hexagon Bridge is a whole world to get lost in, and if you’re like me, the only time you’ll feel dissatisfaction is when the work suddenly ends against all your wishes.

The Jellyfish

One of my favorite surprise graphic novels of the year, simply due to my lack of familiarity with the artist Boum and Pow Pow Press. The Jellyfish is a gorgeous, touching, queer work, and one of the better explorations of what it feels like when doctors can’t tell you what the hell is wrong! The premise is that Odette, a young Canadian woman, develops a unique condition where she has a… Jellyfish… in her eye. This condition is stated as both unique and completely matter-of-fact, as Boum depicts literal floating black spots of jellyfish circling around Odette, growing in number as Odette’s condition worsens. Doctor visits confirm Odette does in fact have Jellyfish in her eyes, but aren’t able to offer much by of solution, apart from more doctor visits and prescriptions that maybe might help but who really knows (I’ve been there so hard!). In the midst of all this, Odette falls for another young woman experiencing the traumatizing abuses of her father/boss. It’s a sweet, touching romance in the face of impending health failure and resonates deeply.

It’s a hyper-specific thing, too, but I love how The Jellyfish seamlessly incorporates a sick mid-aughts indie dance rock playlist of songs by groups like Gorillaz and The Rapture. Obviously comics can’t capture sound, but I do find that reference points are an effective way to present scene, tone and time period. This is especially true when all the songs are tracks I know – I danced to Gorillaz in 2006 too! – but plenty of times it’s led to discovery (I’m thinking here of when I interviewed Stephen Franck and discovered “Honky Tonk Hardwood Floor” in his L.A. country bar noir). Again, the end result is a work of art that feels intensely lived-in, and intensely relatable, only adding to the ways it completely pulled me into this world of all-consuming Jelly.

Tender

Beth Hetland’s graphic novel debut from Fantagraphics looked me directly in the eyes, crawled under the lids, and rooted around in the slimiest corners of my brain all night. If that’s a little too gross, Tender might not be for you! This astounding work combines modern social pressures, body horror, fever dreams, expectations, grief, eating cats, and trauma like nothing I’ve ever read. Ok, fine, that’s a pretty specific combination, but hot damn if it doesn’t work under Hetland’s carefully constructed nightmare.

Tender effortlessly oscillates between the familiar patterns of adulthood (first comes love, then comes marriage, then a baby in a baby carriage!) and a creeping, sinister darkness under the current that grows to a nauseating critical mass where there’s no hiding it. Hetland isn’t the first artist to try and turn suburbia into horror, but the blend of yearning for a perfect family you can brag about onto Instagram alongside exaggerated truly grotesque scenes of self-mutilation is a rare kind of resonant. Hetland shows a confident grasp of restraint, setting scenes of suburbia in ink-washed grays and blues, but unleashing the destructive forces of angry reds and yellows during 12+panel pages of psycho-kinetic terror. I couldn’t put Tender down, even knowing it would wreak havoc on my dreams, and I’ll be reading anything from Hetland in the future.

Mary Tyler Moorehawk

Right up front, I’ll admit that the mere suggestion of a comic pulling from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is exactly the kind of English Major snobbery lab-tested to impress me. At the same time, those are outlandish claims to make about your graphic novel, especially for an up-and-coming creator like Dave Baker. Heading into Baker’s Mary Tyler Moorehawk I was both prepared to be floored and pretty skeptical that the work could live up to its own literary ambition.

Mary Tyler Moorehawk is the front-runner for my favorite comic book of 2024, and on the shortlist for my WIP Mt. Rushmore of vital reads this decade. Baker’s combination of DIY adventure comics, like a fanzine riffing on Alan Moore and co.’s Tom Strong, and magazine columns from a not-so-far-flung American future where physical media has been purged, wears all its ambitions so earnestly that I couldn’t help but fall in love. It captures one of the underlying similarities of all my “Mt. Rushmore” contenders this decade: Naked, raw ambition and the bravery to say, ‘This is what comics can be in MY hands.’ It’s the kind of comic that makes me want to make comics, read comics, live comics, breath comics.