While we understand and sympathize with the fact that things might not have always been going the way you would have preferred in 2024, many new comic books formed a torrential downpour of stories upon us all. We had some amazing anthologies, wonderful reprints and translations, many of which you openly loved. Here's proof that not only is there something to do aside from awaiting the return of The Weathermen, but something good did happen, the evidence is below, Happy New Year.
-The Editors
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Contributors
(Click on a name to jump to their selection)
Jean Marc Ah-Sen
My favorite comic releases and reissues of the year, in no particular order:
Forces of Nature by Edward Steed
Maria Llovet's Violent Flowers by Maria Llovet
Precious Metal by Darcy Von Poelgeest and Ian Bertram
The Toxic Avenger by Matt Bors and Fred Harper
Zatanna: Bring Down the House by Mariko Tomaki and Javier Rodriguez
Alley by Junji Ito
The Blood Brother’s Mother by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
Spectregraph by James Tynion IV and Michael Ward
Helen of Wyndhorn by Tom King and Bilquis Evely
Vera Bushwack by Sig Burwash
Final Cut by Charles Burns
Acme Novelty Datebook Vol. 3 by Chris Ware
Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thomson and Hayden Sherman
Dawnrunner by Ram V and Evan Cagle
Batman Dark Age by Mark Russell and Mike Allred
War on Gaza by Joe Sacco
The Bat-Man First Knight by Dan Jurgens and Mike Perkins
7174 AD by T.P. Louise and Ashley Wood
Torpedo 1972 by Enrique Sanchez Abuli and Eduardo Risso
Zorro: Man of the Dead by Sean Gordon Murphy
When The Lake Burns by Geneviève Biqué
Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta
Dumbass #1 by Jenn Woodall
Flash Gordon by Jeremy Adams and Will Conrad
Paranoid Gardens by Gerard Way, Shaun Simon, and Chris Weston
Brian Blomerth’s Lilly Wave by Brian Blomerth
Grand Electric Thought Power Mother by Lale Westwind
Damned by Eric Haven
Blurry by Dash Shaw
Caravaggio: The Palette and the Sword by Milo Manara
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Robert Aman
Inevitably, any ”best of the year” list is subjective. Adding to this is the linguistic limitation of my list — like many such lists in TCJ, it only includes comics published in English. If this were a list of the best comics I’ve read in 2024 in any language, it would look quite different. For example, Jérôme Dubois’s Immatériel(Cornelius) and Dongery member Sindre Goksøyr’s Pfft! (No Comprendo Press) would undoubtedly make the cut.
Here are my selections:
Although Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday was serialized in English by the German publisher Colorama, the newly compiled edition from Fantagraphics tops my 2024 list. This 500-page epic, chronicling a single day in the protagonist’s life, is a masterpiece that demands to be read and reread. Schrauwen serves as a beacon of hope for those who believe the best comics are yet to come.
Following closely is the latest installment of Drawn & Quarterly’s mission to publish Yoshiharu Tsuge’s collected works. Volume four, Oba Electroplating Factory, is the strongest yet. The joy of discovering Tsuge’s lesser-known works feels akin to discovering Robert Crumb for the first time today.
Aidan Koch continues to astound with her poetic, dreamlike comics, which employ minimalist drawings to tell innovative stories. Similarly, Dash Shaw has never experienced a creative slump, and Blurry is yet another testament to his storytelling brilliance.
Another revelation this year is the translation of Dominique Grange’s autobiographical comic, which chronicles her life as a protest singer, political activist, and comics editor, portraying a France marred by police brutality and racism. Likewise, Sole Otero’s harrowing family chronicle, weaving together themes of sexual violence and Argentina’s modern political history, is a stunning achievement.
I did not expect to see Pierre La Police translated to into English, but I am delighted that he finally gets the recognition he deserves from a new audience. Few cartoonists rival his mastery of humor.
Although Final Cut didn’t quite meet the high expectations surrounding a new Charles Burns book, Unwholesome Love solidifies his place as a master of the craft. The artwork is immaculate, perfectly complementing the dark, romance-comic-inspired narrative.
Sammy Harkham deserves praise for compiling some of CF’s best works for the first time. This collection of CF’s groundbreaking pieces serves as a vivid reminder of how his comics epitomized the spirit of Kramers Ergot. Caroline Cash, too, excels in crafting contemporary comics that remain rooted in the tradition of 1990s autobiographical one-(wo)man anthologies.
Other notable mentions include Anna Haifish’s Ready America (Fantagraphics), Tommi Musturi’s Future (Fantagraphics), Matti Hagelberg’s On the Honeyland of Mars (kuš!), Tara Booth’s Processing (D&Q), and, of course, Chris Ware’s third volume of his Acme Novelty Datebook (D&Q).
Undoubtedly, there are other brilliant works that slip my mind as I compile this list. If I’d written it yesterday or tomorrow, it might have turned out differently.
- Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics)
- Oba Electroplating Factory by Yoshiharu Tsuge (D&Q)
- Spiral and Other Stories by Aidan Koch (New York Review Comics)
- Blurry by Dash Shaw (New York Review Comics)
- Elise by Dominique Grange & Jacques Tardi (Fantagraphics)
- Mothballs by Sole Otero (Fantagraphics)
- Unwholesome Love by Charles Burns (self-published)
- Masters of the Nefarious by Pierre La Police (New York Review Comics)
- Distant Ruptures by CF (New York Review Comics)
- Peepee poopoo #1 by Caroline Cash (Silver Sprocket)
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Jason Bergman
My favorite graphic novel this year is Charles Burns' Final Cut. I feel very confident saying it's his best work since Black Hole. It has all the same themes you'd expect from Burns, but there's a feeling of personal pain in this one. I loved every gorgeous, exquisitely rendered page of the book.
Rick Veitch is still chugging along on his King Hell Heroica saga, and this year we got the first installment of True-Man The Maximortal. King Hell is Veitch's sprawling storyline about the comics industry, government conspiracies, superheroes, and the cosmic nature of life itself. It's some crazy shit, made even crazier by the fact that the final chapter was first to be published (over 30 years ago, in the form of Brat Pack). This chapter adds Veitch analogs of Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, and Hugh Hefner among others. It's weird, it's wild, and I can't wait for more.
This was a good year for memoirs. I really liked Amy Kurzweil's Artificial: A Love Story, about her own life, and her father's attempt to recreate his father's voice via artificial intelligence. Also great was Jordan Mechner's Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family, with its multi-generational story and an art style heavily influenced by European cartoonists. Both touch on similar themes of life and legacy, both are very personal works.
I'm big on horror, but outside of Burns' book, most of what I enjoyed in 2024 wasn't actually published this year. I was lucky enough to get an early PDF of Julia Gfrörer's World Within the World: Collected Minicomix & Short Works (now scheduled for release in January) and damn if that isn't great, although it collects older works. The collected Dwellings also came out this year (again, collecting issues from prior years), putting the series to date in a single, slim volume. Dwellings is some of the best horror being published in any medium at the moment. It might look cute, but it's dark as all hell. Tender by Beth Hetland was also a standout. Sad and gross at the same time.
And finally, I really enjoyed Light It, Shoot It by Graham Chaffee. Just a good ol' crime story set in 1970s Hollywood. Great setting, great characters, plays out just the way you think it will, with a bunch of bodies on the floor. Highly recommended.
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Colin Blanchette
I’ve spent a good portion of this past year reading older comics, and as a result I’ve read fewer new comics in one year than I can ever remember. That doesn’t mean I haven’t read anything good that was published in 2024, though. I picked ten interesting comics which were standouts for me in one way or another and I decided to rank them because, hey, who doesn’t like a ranked list? It also allowed me to put Sunday at #1, something that I feel pretty strongly about.
1) Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics). When I read Sunday last year in its quasi-periodical form, I devoured it in one sitting and I couldn’t believe how good it was. After I heard that Fantagraphics was going to publish a collected edition in 2024, I told everyone who’d listen that it was going to be the book of the year. I still think that’s true, more than a year later and after a satisfying reread. I had a vague notion that Schrauwen might just be the best cartoonist working today, but Sunday removed any doubt in my mind: Schrauwen isn’t just the best cartoonist working today but he’s quietly building a case for being one of the best ever.
2) Absolute Simultaneity by Lily Thu Fierro and Generoso Fierro (self-published). I can’t remember another reading experience quite like the one I had reading Absolute Simultaneity. The narrative was opaque, at least it was to me, though I do believe that there is a narrative to be found in its pages. I found myself falling into a meditative state while I read it and that sense of calm stayed with me until the end. Something about the way the Fierros structured this book guides the reader in way I hadn’t encountered before. It’s a remarkable book.
3) Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch by Guy Colwell (Fantagraphics). Guy Colwell is one of my favorite cartoonists, even though he would identify himself as a painter and has only done comics intermittently. he shared pages from Delights every once in a while on Instagram for the past few years, but often with the caveat that he probably wouldn’t finish the book. Painting was a more reliable source of income for him, and he was getting older. So, when the book was announced, I was ecstatic. I’m happy to say that Delights isn’t just a good book but that it is also his most cohesive work (that’s not to say that it’s his best). If it’s the last comic he ever makes, it’s a fitting capstone to an eclectic career, however much of a sideline that career may have been.
4) Tender by Beth Hetland (Fantagraphics). Beth Hetland has been making comics for years, yet for some reason Tender was marketed as her debut graphic novel. While that isn’t factually true, Tender is very different in both its tone and the level of execution from her previous work. Her earlier work is ambitious in a formal sense, but with this book she combines deft skill with literary ambition and somehow manages to make solid genre entertainment at the same time. Tender is a wonderful, well-executed book, but what’s even more exciting to me is the announcement of a new (or new-ish) major talent.
5) Iris: A Novel for Viewers by Thé Tjong-Khing, Lo Hartog van Banda. Translated by Laura Watkinson (Fantagraphics). I was somewhat skeptical about Iris when I first heard about it. I was more excited to see it than I was to read it, if that makes sense. From a historical perspective, its designation as the first Dutch graphic novel made it a book I wanted to check out, and I knew that it would a be gorgeous book. Surprisingly, I thought it was a really fun read. The art was fantastic, and the story flowed smoothly. I won’t make an argument that it’s a lost masterpiece, but Iris is worth reading for more than its pioneer status.
6) Peepshow #15 by Joe Matt (Fantagraphics). This comic was easily the most pleasant surprise of the year. When Joe Matt passed away unexpectedly, his longtime readers had no reason to believe that there would be any more comics from him. What a gift for all of us, then, that we got one more issue of Peepshow; and an extra large one at that. Matt’s thick, assured lines are here, as well as his seemingly effortless pacing (which I’m sure took a great deal of effort to achieve). It’s a great sendoff to an underappreciated cartoonist.
7) True-Man the Maximortal Number One by Rick Veitch. Veitch’s five-book series, The King Hell Heroica, began more than thirty years ago in the pages of Brat Pack. After the direct market collapsed in the '90s Veitch put the series on hold, but for the past few years, he has been working on his epic again. His art is crisp and clear and the writing shows that a two-decade layoff may have been beneficial. It’s obvious that an older, wiser Veitch is swinging for the fences, and I believe that when the Heroica is finished, it will be regarded as a full-blown masterpiece.
8) The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume 3 by Chris Ware (Drawn & Quarterly). In general, I admire Chris Ware’s work more than I enjoy it. The biggest exception to that stance has been The Acme Novelty Datebooks, two volumes of which were published in 2007 and 2013. This year, out of the blue, came Volume 3. Billed as “the third and final installment of the artist’s facsimile sketchbook series” on D&Q’s site, it was one of the bigger surprises for me this year. I don’t mean that the content was surprising; it isn’t. It just never occurred to me that there would ever be a third volume. These books show off Ware’s ability as a drawer, and while I won’t say that there isn’t any of his trademark fussiness to be found, it’s refreshing to see his art without the formalist straitjacket he applies to his finished work.
9) Hate Revisited #1-4 by Peter Bagge (Fantagraphics). Who says you can’t go home again? Bagge’s Buddy Bradley remains an enduring character even though in most readers’ minds he is tied so closely to a specific place at a specific time: Seattle, Wash., in the early '90s. The narrative trick of this series, where Bagge shows Buddy’s current “exploits” in color and his glory days in black-and-white, and then alternates between the two, is a stroke of genius. Somehow, he manages to strike a balance between the nostalgia he believes his readers crave and the natural progression that his characters deserve.
10) Savage Dragon Vault Edition by Erik Larsen (Image Comics). I’m including this one more for its packaging and presentation than its content. I was fourteen-going-on-fifteen when Erik Larsen debuted Savage Dragon in 1992, and I scooped it up eagerly. I didn’t stick with the series for very long, or any of the other Image founders’ series, either. Many years later, Larsen is the only founder that has made a substantial contribution to comics. Whatever you might think of his work, he’s continued to work on his creation as a true cartoonist. The “artist edition” format serves Larsen’s pages well and his dynamic art leaps off the page. His art still provides a visceral thrill, even all these years later.
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James Bradshaw
I am one of those unfortunate fools that needs to preface their annual list by making clear that they didn’t read nearly enough this year. It’s embarrassing. This list could be very different in a world without landlords, or day jobs, or getting old. But this has been my first year writing for TCJ and I’m not about to squander the chance to throw my 2 cents into the online void. So, here’s the few old manga that I loved the most:
1. Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke by Sugiura Shigeru (New York Review Comics)
The book that prompted me to write for this site. Surreal, dumb, funny, masterful, and totally unique. I wake up at night in a cold sweat, worrying how long I might have to wait for another Sugiura translation.
2. Oba Electroplating Factory by Tsuge Yoshiharu (Drawn & Quarterly)
One of the books that I can’t believe I haven’t gotten my mitts on yet is Peepshow #15, but in my defence it sold out rather quickly. I did, however, still get to enjoy these artful exploits of a self-aware, sexual degenerate whose autobiographical comics knowingly sabotaged his personal life. Every volume in this series is fascinating.
3. Tomorrow The Birds by Tezuka Osamu (Ablaze)
You’d be forgiven if you haven’t noticed the series of low profile Tezuka releases from Ablaze publishing. After an initial few odd translation choices (including a loose mish-mash of Shakespeare allusions), Ablaze has finally hit upon a classic. This bizarre critique of humanity, with its apparent message that all life is doomed to avarice and self-destruction, is exactly the kind of work that shows how wildly varied Tezuka’s prolific catalogue can be. The next few Tezuka titles from Ablaze are promising, too.
Honourable mentions: My Name Is Shingo Volume 2 by Umezz Kazuo (Viz) and Second Hand Love by Murasaki Yamada (Drawn & Quarterly).
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Kevin Brown
I’m guessing many people are going to mention/talk about Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two and Charles Burns’s Final Cut, two works that are definitely worth mentioning and talking about. That said, I’d like to highlight a few books (in no particular order) that haven’t gotten as much press.
Manon Debaye, The Cliff.
The story Debaye tells here is dark, as it follows two girls in middle school who make a pact to commit suicide by the end of the week. Charlie’s unhappiness seems to have obvious causes — she doesn’t fit in at school because she refuses to act feminine, possibly because she doesn’t want to be female, though that’s less clear. Astrid seems to fit into traditional feminine roles, yet she, too, is ostracized at school, almost making her situation more painful because she doesn’t know why she’s an outcast. She also might be romantically interested in Charlie, though that also isn’t clear. The end of their innocence is dark, and so they seem willing to throw themselves off a cliff before life can do it to them.
Denise Dorrance, Polar Vortex.
The premise of Dorrance’s graphic memoir — her mother suffers from dementia, so she has to travel from the UK to the American Midwest to care for her, as a polar vortex strikes — is clear and easy enough to describe (I’m resisting making a “tip of the iceberg” reference here, but it seems I just did). Instead, Dorrance uses her situation to explore a role that so many in America, in particular, find themselves in, with an aging parent who needs care, which normally falls to the female in the family. Along the way, she critiques the health care industry and consumerism as America’s new religion, while exploring family relationships, all while using gallows humor to lighten the mood as best she can.
Mark Doox. The N-Word of God.
There’s so much to say about Doox’s work that, when I wrote a review of it, I had to go back to a literary theory I haven’t looked at in a decade or so. Doox uses traditional Christian iconography to elevate his Saint Sambo from a type of anti-Christ to a Satan who has been preaching the truth all along, both elevating his revelations about race to the level of the sacred, while also mocking the very religion he’s questioning. And that description doesn’t do this work justice. If you’re interested in race and art and religion or just the future of America, you should read this book.
Oscar Zárate, Thomas Girtin: The Forgotten Painter.
Most writers/artists would have written a graphic biography about Girtin, drawing him some necessary attention before people moved on to some other artist or idea. The biography isn’t the important part here, given that parts of it aren’t even true. Instead, Zárate, uses the frame structure of three people who meet at a community art center to raise much larger questions about the importance of art, the brevity of our lives, and choices that come about from each of those.
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Clark Burscough
It is the end of a hectic year, and so, appropriately, this list is assembled with haste, but not without care – passing these comics to you, pages thumbed, spines and bindings worn, as they have been read on sofas, on public transport, in beds, in parks, propped up on tables while hastily eating a meal during a truncated work break, etc – you get the picture, it’s your classic modern life is rubbish (in 2024), except for the escapism afforded by media, baby, play the theme tune!
None more escapist than the finely-crafted silliness of Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusc Rampage by Pierre La Police and Nancy & Sluggo’s Guide to Life by Ernie Bushmiller, both of which passed the multiple-laugh-out-louds test, and both of which are very handsome editions in their own rights. Every page-turn of Masters of the Nefarious held the promise of a(nother) perfectly crafted absurdist joke, rattling them off in quick succession, like a Zucker/Abrahams joint, until you’re basically just letting them wash over you in a tidal wave of nonsense. I don’t think I need to add much to the reading of the reading of Nancy discourse, at this point, but I will say that the shocked faces that Bushmiller drew as punchlines are up there with the grimacing faces that Schulz drew.
You hit a certain point, when you’re writing weekly about the travails of the contemporary comics market, where you float up out of your body and look at the collection of books you’re amassing, and then look back over at the myriad articles about creativity being stifled/appropriated/complicated by the various billionaires and tech-platforms they are so enamoured of, that it all starts to get a bit exhausting, and Tokyo These Days by Taiyō Matsumoto intimately understands the situation we're in now, but also gets that there will be people who work to let other people just tell the stories that they need to tell, and I think that is as good and sweet and sometimes as sad a thing as the trilogy of books manages to convey. Solid interstitial drawings of birds too – always count on Matsumoto to draw good animals, it’s an important skill.
Another important skill? Realising that sometimes a book just needs to be horny on main, and embrace the vibes that come with that – enter Dandadan by Yukinobu Tatsu, which understands that teenagers will always, for the most part, be fucked up and horny and weird, and that is okay. Good fights and supernatural weirdness abound, which, again, is a plus, and the theme song for the anime adaptation is a club banger.
Supernatural weirdness also abound in Rare Flavours by Ram V and Filipe Andrade, but of a darker, more dangerous nature – I read this while severely congested and ill, and then the first thing I did after my sense of smell and taste returned was to furnish myself with some masala chai and dal makhani, because if ever there was a comic to make you hungry, but in an uneasy way (given the thrust of its narrative), then this is indeed that book.
I return to Gotham City sparingly these days, at least insofar as new publications go, but Batman/Dylan Dog by Roberto Recchioni, Gigi Cavenago, Werther Dell'Edera, et. al. had that same insouciant coolness that was also threaded through Catwoman: Lonely City by Cliff Chiang – I have an enduring soft spot for solid crossovers with the caped crusader (Aliens, Predator, Spawn, Judge Dredd, etc) that hold up a mirror in which to admire the best sides of the Dark Knight, so pouring the European Lothario cum paranormal investigator into the mix, in a nicely self-contained and efficient tale, worked out perfectly.
I’m sure other people on this page have written about Blurry by Dash Shaw, and for good reason, so I’ll just say – it’s a temporal pincer movement.
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RJ Casey
A fine, fine year for comics. If I've written about any of these, I've included a link. Otherwise they are in no particular order.
K is in Trouble by Gary Clement
Cutting Season by Bhanu Pratap
Tales from Qyleoth by M. Yaxam
Longboxes by Nate McDonough
Jaywalk #4 edited by Austin English and Floyd Tangeman
"Valley Valley" instagram comics by Audra Stang
The Scrapbook of Life and Death by J Webster Sharp
Lily Wave by Brain Blomerth
Forces of Nature by Edward Steed
The instagram comics and paintings of Cyril Vilx
Peephole #1 edited by Juliette Collet
No, Thanks! by Susan Hoppner
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Henry Chamberlain
A prestigious publication focused on the comics medium once asked a legendary cartoonist about how he creates distance between the reader and his characters. He provided a matter-of-fact answer that he is most interested in creating types in the service of his story. Maybe his skills might stretch, and maybe he’ll become more relatable but that wasn’t his main concern. That was from a Comics Journal interview with Charles Burns. True, in a nutshell, Burns is pursuing his special brand of horror. The characters that inhabit the genre tend to be ciphers, a word that Burns used himself in the same interview. A cipher is a blank slate. Paradoxically, a reader can project anything they want onto this “nothing” character and, therefore, make that character relatable. And that brings me to Final Cut by Charles Burns, published by Abrams, featuring a misfit we can all relate to in one way or another, and the best work in comics for 2024.
Charles Burns, along with a few other exemplary cartoonists, is a superstar, recognized outside of the comics community, notably for his graphic novel, Black Hole, released in collected form by Pantheon. Many people, without a stitch of expert knowledge, will recognize his distinctive style with its crisp jagged shadows. You immediately know it when you see it. And then to have that style go hand in hand with such a spot on storytelling sense in just mind-blowing. Burns is a known entity by the general public at a level reached by only a few. People may think they don’t know but, with a little prodding, they remember seeing some iconic image somewhere on the internet that originated with Heavy Metal or Raw. Burns, like Dan Clowes, is a cartoonist who is everywhere. If cartoonists have just a smidge of that kind of recognition, they can consider themselves lucky.
I can understand why up-and-coming cartoonist Caroline Cash would want to do her version of a Charles Burns cover for her latest comic book series. She has been riffing on other comics legends (Crumb, Robbins, Clowes) for her covers. For her take on Burns, she copied most of it and added a few of her own flourishes. But she missed doing an “apologies to Charles Burns” type of credit or nod that would have been nice to say the least. The average person will not know that this is a Burns work. I can appreciate the enthusiasm but it’s time that Cash let loose with her own amazing and distinctive original work gracing her covers and/or let her readers know about such an extensive homage. Anyway, the cover in question is fun and goes to show how Burns, one way or another, is everywhere. We folk in comics are doing the best we can, or should be, and Burns is one of your very best guides.
Of course, no year is dominated by just one cartoonist. There are so many books and comics that come out in any given year and so many rabbit holes that one book may fall prey to; or by whatever twist of fate, any number of springboards provided by allies, gatekeepers and the mercurial waves of word-of-mouth. All that said, some books manage to rise to the top. Three of the most esteemed titles for 2024 are Blurry by Dash Shaw, published by New York Review Comics; Victory Parade by Leela Corman, published by Schocken Books; and Naked City by Eric Drooker, published by Dark Horse Comics. In each case, these creators are putting it on the line and giving it their all. And, in each case, these are works that are a culmination of a lifetime exploring and learning within the creative process.
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Chris Anthony Diaz
In no particular order, ten works from 2024 that I liked, which are narratives written and drawn by one creator:
Blessed Be by Rick Altergott (Fantagraphics)
The Collected Audra Show by Audra Stang (Self-Published)
Final Cut by Charles Burns (Pantheon Books)
Forces of Nature by Edward Steed (Drawn and Quarterly)
Froggie World vol.1 Love, Angel, Music, Bike by Allee Errico (Cram Books)
Grand Electric Thought Power Mother by Lale Westvind (Perfectly Acceptable Press)
I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together: A Memoir by Maurice Vellekoop (Pantheon Books)
PeePee PooPoo #1 by Caroline Cash (Silver Sprocket)
Soft by Jane Mai (Peow2)
Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics)
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Michael Dooley
Once you’ve judged Will’s Comic Industry Awards, you can never again do so. And that’s exactly how it should be. I disagree with some of its standards and practices – for details, see my Print interview with Steven Heller and my chat with Bryant Dillon at Fanbase Press – but i’m totally on board with its one-and-done policy.
However, that doesn’t mean that I – or anyone else, for that matter – can’t compose a list of nominees, or winners, for that matter. and that’s what i’ve done for myself every year since I served as one of six judges for comics’s Oscars back in 2020.
And since The Comics Journal asked me to contribute to it’s Best Of list i I figured, Why not go public?
So, in bypassing the actual process of voting for the nominees – because i can – here’s my (unofficial, of course) totally fanciful list of W*ll E*sn*er Award Winners for this year.
Best Single Issue/One-Shot: Les Mort 13, Giant Syze Special One-Shot by T.P. Louise and Ashley Wood (Image)
This is a winner of a horror story set in a fishing village inhabited by spectral beings and other shadowy souls. Be prepared ti immerse yourself in Louise’s mysterious, abstract narrative, infused with philosophy, spirituality, and existential dread, and spend quality time exploring Wood’s lively yet frightening chiaroscuro renderings, minimal color palette and complex, intricate layouts. The creators demand that you spend quality time, for which you’ll be richly rewarded.
Best Continuing Series: The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds (Image)
The Department of Truth continues to deliver, and in excellent form. Tynion’s nightmarish JFK story arc and Simmonds’ stunning, haunting visuals evoke Moore/Sienkiewicz’s classic Shadowplay in its political relevance. So if you’re looking for a brilliantly-told foreshadowing of the next four years under our country’s duly-elected Administration of Lies, you’d do no better than to seek out the Truth.
Best Publication for Kids: Hearing Things by Ben Sears (TOON Books)
In this compact, colorful children’s book, writer-artist Ben Sears takes his charming tyke and his cat on a trip through the neighborhood in search of spooky sound effects to help his sister’s musical creativity, and the ghostly onomatopoeia throughout makes it delightfully entertaining read-out-loud fun. Charmingly rendered in Sears’s clean, clear signature style, Hearing Things is possibly the best TOON Books release in recent years.
Best Publication for Teens, Best Limited Series, Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia: Tokyo These Days by Taiyō Matsumoto (VIZ)
I thoroughly enjoyed this three-volume set. It begins with a man who’s edited manga for the past three decades and finds himself at a crossroads, and expands to include a wider array of manga artists and editors as they deal with their dreams, relationships, and creative struggles. Rendered with sparse linework, the characters’ emotional lives are skillfully conveyed through their body language. In contrast, Tokyo These Days is also as much about the city as its inhabitants, with Masumoto rendering the urban surroundings with loving detail and depth. It’s targeted at teens, but it has much to offer anyone who appreciates stories told with a great deal of humanity.
Best Humor Publication: Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre by Tom Scioli (IDW)
It’s the Great Gatsby vs. Godzilla, guest-starring Sherlock Holmes and a couple of sci-fi pulp writers. What starts out as a straightforward parody of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic soon becomes completely derailed and careens into a joyful madness. I can easily imagine madcap artist-writer Scoli having at least as much fun drawing this deliriously insane romp as I did reading it. For sheer playfulness, it’s easily the most farcically comical comic of the year.
Best Anthology: Advertisements Disguised as Comics by Sam Grinberg (self-published)
Ads in comics – for muscle developers, sugary sweets, bubble gum, etc – have practically faded into oblivion, which is just as well. But a great deal of them are well worth preserving, and so Grinberg has assembled 300 pages of the most noteworthy examples, some dating back over a century, and gorgeously restored them to crisp, sharp mint condition quality, and in full color. We know the ones by Al Capp and Charles Schultz, but there’s alsoThurber’s for roach repellant, Charles Burns’s for Altoids, and Sienkiewicz’s MTV promo. Advertisements Disguised as Comics is a fascinating visual anthology of a near-extinct aspect of comics history.
Best Graphic Memoir: Woman & Man+ by Craig Yoe (Clover Press)
Biographies don’t need words, as Yoe skillfully demonstrates in this abstract narrative about his recent world travel and marriage dissolution. He also shows that life could be a dream, more fanciful than factual, loony rather than literal, yet no less genuine, even when Mickey Mouse and Bob’s Big Boy pop up. Tune in and trip out to Yoe’s turned-on tragi-comedy, each page bursting with organic, rebellious, unrestrained energy.
Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Attaboy by Tony McMillen (Mad Cave)
As the boss of my own E*sn*r Awards, I can declare a comic book version of a non-existent video game an “adaptation”. And personally, I hate video games, having given up with Pong in the early 1970s. But I’m most impressed with this exploration of the gamer mentality, and its disengagement from humanity, as well as its wildly manic graphic style. And hey, if this comic was ever made into a video game, I’d be strongly tempted to play it.
Best Lettering: The Russian Detective by Carol Adlam (Jonathan Cape)
Nominations for this award typically go to the best Todd Klein variants, but here is a graphic novel that’s truly deserving in its smart, skillful use of lettering and typography at the service of this complex, compelling, contemporary Dostoevsky crime story of a magician-journalist-detective-thief investigating a murder in nineteenth-century Russia, exquisitely illustrated with lush, elegant textures.
Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism: Mike Peterson at The Daily Cartoonist
Without fail, I devotedly start every day with this’ survey of cartoons commenting on the previous day’s news. Updated every morning, it becomes a quick, convenient way to catch up on local and world events … with cartoons! And sure, my political PoV syncs with Peterson’s. Bonus: other Daily Cartoonist columnists also cover newsworthy comics items.
Best Comics-Related Book: Kate Carew, America's First Great Woman Cartoonist by Eddie Campbell (Fantagraphics)
Carew’s meager, largely derivative comic strip output was hardly the most impressive aspect of her career, yet this well-researched, entertaining biography is most deserving of this year’s best comics-related book, as it chronicles not only her adventuresome life but also her full range of exceptional artistic achievements, in widely-varying styles that range from rough, energetic sketches to Beardsley-like elegance. Comics reportage hardly began with Spiegelman, Satrapi, and Sacco: Carew was also one of America’s first great women caricaturist-journalists, and Campbell thoroughly documents her groundbreaking, casual, breezy, witty interviews with, and caricatures of, Sarah Bernhardt and Ethel Barrymore, Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt, Picasso and Twain, as well as her documentation of the women’s suffrage movement. She was also ahead of her time in branding herself with “Aunt Kate”, her charming cartoon persona that she’d adroitly incorporate into her illustrations. Kate Carew is an excellent comic-strip history follow-up to Campbell’s superb Goat-Getters, so go get it now.
The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey, Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories by Carol Verburg (Chronicle)
In an ideal world, this work also deserves best-of-year bio honors. What it lacks in traditional graphic narrative it more than makes up for in Gorey’s marvelous visual mysteries, personal history, and fascinating explorations of his creative process.
Best Reality-Based Work: How War Begins, Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion by Igort (Fantagraphics)
Evocative renderings of a nation under siege yet capturing the political history of Russian oppression. Vitally relevant. Essential reading.
Best Graphic Album — New: Return to Eden by Paco Roca (Fantagraphics)
Family photos – brief moments in time – become the basis and pivot points of Roca’s quietly stunning portrait of, and postulations on, his mother’s dreams and sadness in postwar Spain, told in his classical, muted style.
Best Writer/Artist: Man and Superwoman by Catherine Meurisse (Europe)
A series of philosophical strips. Brilliant concept, superbly executed.
Best Painter/Multimedia Artist: Jonathan Marks Barravecchia for Bear Pirate Viking Queen (Image)
Stunningly gorgeous watercolors in a variety of styles that amplify the narrative’s intense, bloody, brutal tone.
Best Cover Artist (for multiple covers): Laurence Campbell for The One Hand (Image)
Brilliantly designed. Credit also to Lee Loughridge, who created the cover layouts.
Best Coloring: Love Me, A Romance Story by Francesca Perillo and Stefano Cardoselli (Mad Cave)
The colors are equally as loud and energetic as the illustrations and as joyful as this unique, charming sci-fi romance comedy.
***
Alex Dueben
If I had to list one single book that would be the "best" that came out this year, it would have to be Victory Parade by Leela Corman, which like all her books has stayed with me since I first read it. But of the new comics I read this year which I haven't been able to get out of my head:
- Blessed Be by Rick Altergott
- Houses of the Unholy by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
- Final Cut by Charles Burns
- 1177 BC A Graphic History by Eric H Cline and Glynnis Fawkes
- Victory Parade by Leela Corman
- My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book 2 by Emil Ferris
- Deprog by Tina Horn and Lisa Sterle
- Spiral and Other Stories by Aidan Koch
- All the Things We Didn't Do Last Night by Maria Llovet
- Degrees of Separation by Alison McCreesh
- Fall Through by Nate Powell
- Blurry by Dash Shaw
- Chrysanthemum Under the Waves by Maggie Umber
- Maple Terrace by Noah van Sciver
- Big Jim and the White Boy by David F Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson
- WW3 Illustrated #54
***
Malcy Duff
This year has been spent mostly with my nose hovering above my drawing board like a droning church, and not as often as I would have liked placed like an attentive tennis net, between pages batting back and forth. When my reading feels lacking in a year, I tend to try and catch up with what I have missed over the Christmas break, so I’m hopeful the small list below will expand before 2024 is out. There are so many wonderful and amazing new things always happening in this incredible art form, and so I admit I may be a little dehydrated from not sipping from the freshest fountain this year. Even my dusty plan of reading the entire first run of Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew over 20 Saturday mornings failed when "life" intercepted.
Now I look back on my comic reading in 2024, I realize this year has been dominated by looking back – visiting older works that I haven’t read before and reading cartoonists returning into my orbit from here and beyond. I think a lot about the time and place that I read a comic, and how those times and places will forever be connected to how I remember them. So, this year, I will remember:
- The Hernandez Brothers at a wooden bus shelter in the Pentland Hills, 6.45 a.m.
- The final Peepshow in Cellardyke, accompanied by the sounds of waves from the window
- Charles Burns’ Hard Boiled Defective Stories in a dimly lit Aberdeen hotel room
- Jack Kirby’s OMAC, baking on a bright porch in Puçol beach
- And my 2024 comic book highlight: Meeting Stinky’s Mum in Tollcross
***
Austin English
Probably more beautiful and brilliant work out this year than most I can remember. As material conditions on the ground get worse and worse for artists (or people in general) in practically any artistic (and, of course, non-artistic) field(s), comics continues to expand as a place for unencumbered expression, even if the best work made today reads as increasingly foreign to even (especially?) the more "progressive" comic publishers. Here is a small list of work I liked a lot, by no means complete.
Comics by Mary Moore, mostly seen on Instagram @lifehole_ : Real feeling, real thought. If the goal of art is to make the viewer feel something, Moore is a cartoonist who makes the careful restraint and craft obsession of our comics pantheon look potentially irrelevant and possibly wrong-headed.
Froggie World V. 1 Love, Angel, Music, Bike by Allee Errico (Cram Books): Anti-narcissistic autobio comics, a focus on the central narrator alongside other human beings, other voices.
Hot House by John Hankiewicz (Fieldmouse Press): Over the last decade, the term ‘poetry comics’ gets thrown around more and more, though we often see it phrased as grid comics with dialogue sprinkled around in an unimaginative imitation of a ‘poem.’ Real poetry does not exist in these comics, they are the inverse of poetry’s promise. True poetry is when every line, every choice has its own power and that power isn’t sacrificed when all congeals into the works totality. This is what we have with Hot House.
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore (Knockabout Comics): I thought there’d be more talk about this book, as it’s a gigantic statement from one of comics most revered thinkers. Lots of "not comics" sections, but plenty of the book is full of incredible cartooning. I loved it and I’m glad it exists.
Captain George Morose by Clarie Inaba (self-published): Anyone clinging to comics as a delivery system of pure information and prizing clarity above all else should sense the end of days ahead, as young cartoonists are tapping into the Feininger tradition even if Feininger himself is irrelevant or unknown to them. Comics as a system of total expression, conservatism finally thrown in the trash, is seen in these pages. This is exhilarating to me. I read this comic at the end of the year, but it speaks to the mood on the horizon.
Small Justices by Steve Smith (self-published): I received a bunch of comics by Steve Smith, a cartoonist living in Australia, probably much older than most cartoonists who will appear on the majority of "best of" lists. Smith is working completely outside of any comics community or "scene." He makes ‘crime’ and drug comics that are not made to shock but instead to communicate a specific life lived. A big thank you to comics evangelist Siobhan Combs of Australia’s Cockatoo Comics for connecting me with this work.
My Name is Shingo by Kazuo Umezz (Viz): If method acting is at a 5, and melodramatic acting is at a 10, the characters in this book perform at 1,000.
Grand Electric Thought Power Mother by Lale Westvind (Perfectly Acceptable): I’m glad, in a year with so much vital work published, that Westvind put this book out, a masterpiece in any year it would have been released, but more beautiful in a moment when the heady promise of Westvind’s work has been delivered upon by so many and so loudly.
***
Gina Gagliano
Two Kids Fantasy Graphic Novels That Are Generally Delightful:
Young Hag and the Witches' Quest by Isabel Greenberg
I love everything that Isabel Greenberg does. Globe-spanning historical romance? Bronte siblings? Scheherazade-esque frame stories? I am in. So when I heard that Greenberg was working on an Arthurian graphic novel, I was on board immediately. Surely, I thought, Isabel Greenberg will take this Arthurian canon that I have read so many books in and do something new and different and fascinating with it.
And she did.
Young Hag is one of the last witches in Britain. After her mom is murdered by a mob of villagers, she and her grandmother wander the world alone, subsisting on what they can hunt and gather. Until they find a changeling -- and are pulled into a quest to bring magic back to the world. Along the way, her grandmother's stories and her encounters with characters of legend upend the patriarchal Arthurian history that everyone knows where "unfortunately you have absolutely no agency in this story," says a storyteller they encounter early in the book, describing the experience of Arthur's mother Igraine (and women in general).
Also included in this book: a giant cat, Sir Britomart (she's not a lady knight, she's just a knight, as she tells Young Hag), and a trip to the goblin market. Isabel Greenberg's gorgeous, scribbly artwork is perennially charming, and I can't recommend this book enough.
Tiffany's Griffon by Magnolia Porter Siddell and Maddi Gonzalez
This book has the best plot: it features Marnie Plummer, a girl obsessed with kids fantasy novel series Griffon Riders. She's read the books hundreds of times; she writes fan fiction and draws fan art; her score on the griffon trivia quiz is 110%. So when a fairy appears to her and tells her that she's the chosen one who bond with a griffon and save the kingdom, she's on board and takes the griffon egg home -- even when she realizes that Tiffany, her community service partner (who likes sports and hasn't even read the books), is the real chosen one.
So all of that is great, and if your reading tastes are anything like mine, you'll be immediately on board with this book! But what crept up on me as I read it was the amazing friendship that develops between Marnie and Tiffany. Marnie's right at the beginning of the book when she thinks that the two of them are very different – she's a nerdy, awkward, sarcastic, creative person without any social skills, while Tiffany is popular, coordinated, fashionable, and always thinks the best of everyone. As the griffon hatches and they start to become friends, they have to navigate finding if they have anything in common, working together to raise a baby griffon, dealing with Marnie's dishonesty, along with fulfilling the prophecy and saving the griffon kingdom. That's a tough set of circumstances to build a friendship around, but I'm totally in on Marnie and Tiffany, best friends forever.
Plus: there's an angsty griffon with anime bangs. It's awesome. Artist Maddie Gonzalez does a fantastic job both capturing the real-world setting and all the fantasy elements.
***
Shaenon K. Garrity
Samurai vs. Ninja by Jason Shiga. The third and, to the best of my knowledge, final installment in Shiga’s Adventuregame series of choose-your-own-adventure graphic novels. Each has a number of endings as well as a “final” ending that can only be reached by accessing a Shiga-esque dimension of mad genius.
Tank Chair by Manabu Yashiro. As I wrote in my review for Otaku USA, there are times for intellectually sophisticated science fiction, and there are times for a manga about a paraplegic assassin whose sister fits him out with battle wheelchairs so he can fight mutants and weirdos. Strike that: every time is a time for Tank Chair.
UFO Mushroom Invasion by Shirakawa Marina. So far all the weird, old, pulp manga put out by new imprint Smudge have been jaw-dropping. This one is creepy and weird and surprisingly pensive and crawling with fungi of all descriptions.
Woe: A Housecat’s Story of Despair by Lucy Knisley. Top-shelf cat comic. Among the best. Traumatized my kid for a while. Lucy Knisley is a treasure.
World Within the World: Collected Short Comix 2010-2022 by Julia Gfrörer. A great collection by a great artist, plus it includes her pornographic Edgar Allen Poe parodies where the wall in “The Cask of Amontillado” has a glory hole.
***
Charles Hatfield
Best-of-year lists come too early! I don’t begin catching up on the year’s talked-about comics until the following January or February. That’s when I study other critics’ best-of lists. If I’m lucky, I’ve “read up” by the time the Eisner Award nominations drop in springtime (though Eisner season prompts me to scrounge up still more books from public libraries). So, what I have to say here will differ sharply from whatever I say months from now. Note the usual caveats: personal biases, scheduling pressure, neglect of manga, neglect of webcomics. Sigh. Regardless, here are a dozen personal highlights from 2024:
Ash’s Cabin by Jen Wang (First Second).
Wang’s latest graphic novel follows a quixotic teen into the wilderness. Ash enters the woods to escape the everyday compromises of a sclerosed, self-destructive society; this is the story of their deliberate retreat, but then again, their rediscovery of community. Remarkably, Wang does not judge, but follows Ash lovingly, with page after page of beautiful observational drawing and unhurried storytelling. Sure, Ash’s return from the wild comes as no surprise, but what’s awesome about this is that Ash is not naïve and not wrong. The toughest and loveliest of Wang’s excellent books, this should be remembered as a YA touchstone.
Wildful by Kengo Kurimoto (Groundwood Books/House of Anansi).
Pair with Ash’s Cabin: A gorgeously rendered, sparsely worded, and unhurried fable about loving immersion in the natural world as a salve for grief. A young woman and her dog stumble into the woods, make a new friend there, and learn to slow down, settle in, and observe. Eventually they draw the girl’s bereaved mother into the wild as well, for a kind of healing. A quiet affirmation of biophily, Wildful invites us to think about interconnectedness and adjust the rhythms of our noticing to the teeming world around us. Kurimoto’s lush, attentive, naturalistic illustration — not cartooning — carries me away.
Arctic Play by Mita Mahato (The 3rd Thing).
“Is this comics?” might be the least interesting question we could ask about this tour de force of visual poetry and collage. Of course it’s comics, but the insufficiency of that answer is just the start of coming to grips with the work. Sparked by a residency in Svalbard in 2017, Arctic Play views “nature” not as a fund of extractable resources, nor an idealized romantic remoteness, but instead a ground for thinking about (again) interconnection and longing in the face of ecosystemic decay and loss. Drawing from theatre, the book unfolds in three “acts” and casts physical media (paper, plastic, ink) as “characters” in its dramatis personae. The three acts, nonlinear evocations of an Arctic journey, keep shifting in form, from concrete poetry to diagrams and inventories, from collage comics to, finally, a visual sonnet. Human characters are disembodied and unseen (a decentering, implicitly political choice), yet human desires are key. Arctic Play is about being in the world, and then again about the impossibility of folding the repleteness of world experience into discrete forms. The effort is glorious. Mahato has said she aimed “to make a book that would make discomfort feel like a form of care,” and she has succeeded, radically.
Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies by Stan Mack (Fantagraphics).
Mack spent twenty years capturing real New Yorkers (and their overheard speech) in a strip for The Village Voice. This hefty collection, a time capsule of those years, has become my nightly devotional read – a study in cartoon reportage and change over time. Beautiful scraggly drawing, knowing depictions of characters at every rung of the social ladder, pungent irony, needling satire — in sum, a treasure. You can feel NYC changing as you go, from the louche but lively 1970s to the loathsome Reaganite 1980s and beyond. Mack is amused, but critical. He listens and sees. One hell of a testament.
Victory Parade by Leela Corman (Pantheon).
Corman is a ferocious artist, wise to self-deception and easy moralizing, and Victory Parade is, true to form, harrowing and unsentimental — which is not at all the same as unfeeling. This provocative counter-story of WWII-era New York focuses on two women, one a shipyard worker, the other a German Jewish refugee. The culture around them is hateful and dangerous (no Rosie the Riveter patriotism here). Painted, fiercely colorful, Victory Parade is Corman’s most beautiful book, but also scalding and nightmarish (the finale transports us to Buchenwald). A bracing refusal of WWII nostalgia and the packaging of genocide into tidy lessons.
Plain Jane and the Mermaid by Vera Brosgol; colors by Alec Longstreth (First Second).
Brosgol spins an Andersen-like fairy tale in unexpected directions, as Jane, labeled “plain” and frumpy, magically walks into the sea to recover a handsome man abducted by mermaids, a man she hopes will marry her. Turned out of house by her family’s nearest male heir, Jane believes she has no prospects other than marriage; her undersea quest, however, turns scary. Feminist fairy tales are common in comics, but this one’s special: tart, tough, and, despite an affirming ending, mindful of the world’s cruelty. Visually, it’s another departure for the protean Brosgol, but, as ever, it’s smart, droll, and casually daring.
Knapsack magazine, Volume 1: Cassette. Edited and designed by Sara Hagstrom and Steph Bulante (Lucky Pocket Press).
Shojo Beat nostalgia meets small-press aesthetics in this chunky 212-page anthology from the multi Ignatz-winning Lucky Pocket, a Riso-loving two-person micropress devoted to making beautiful objects. A printer’s orgy in vibrant pinks and blues (no grays or blacks), Knapsack is the press’s first offset-printed number: a wistful “weird-kid” valentine to serialized North Am manga from a couple of decades ago. Themed around music, this first issue hosts roughly a score of artists and intermixes seven stories with sundry zine-style text pieces and illos. Some stories don’t quite jell, or beg for longer exploration, but the total package is a dream.
Bald by Tereza Čechová and Štěpánka Jislová (Graphic Mundi).
This memoir of hair loss due to alopecia, newly translated from the Czech (Bez vlasů), mixes poignant autobio with didactic passages about the causes and effects of the condition, the impossibility of undoing it, and the cultural and gendered symbolism of women’s hair. The tone is hard to peg: seriocomic, often light, and yet sad; resigned, but then again wounded by fresh hopes and disappointments. It’s humanly awkward — more bemused than outraged. The story is Čechová’s, but Jislová’s inventive art, with its sharp, woodcut-like lines, varied pink and gray tones, and ingenious page designs, carries and enlivens the story, brilliantly.
Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Jordie Bellaire, et al. (DC, duh).
Right now, DC and Marvel are banking on alternate versions of their figureheads; this comic is the best part of that avalanche. I thought the hype for DC’s “Absolute” imprint was silly, and the pitch for this particular series (Diana is “dark” now! Diana is a princess of Hell!) put me off. Turns out it’s a Kelly Thompson comic — so, tightly written, sharp, and ingenious. It’s also beautifully designed and drawn (Sherman, whoa). Its Wonder Woman, though substantially tweaked, remains recognizably herself. As myth fantasy, this just skirts Hellboy territory; as a DC franchise book, it’s the best on offer.
Four Years by Karen Czap (Czap Books).
Old news, but not to me. This new edition of Four Years (a webcomic in 2018-2021, collected in 2019-2021) brought me back to Czap’s cartooning, which is beautiful, and their abiding sense of friendship and community, which is uplifting yet never simple. This story of Betty and her friends, her hopes for change, and her unacknowledged past trauma honors feeling over plot. Honestly, I kept having to reread to grasp the relationships and themes, but, you know, I am so happy to reread these pages. I can’t get over Czap’s fluid, organic drawing and open page designs. Lovely and transporting.
PeePee PooPoo #1 by Caroline Cash (Silver Sprocket).
Cash’s continuing “one person anthology series” is not so much an homage as a fresh repurposing of underground and alt-comix tradition – a claiming of territory. It seems casual, even ramshackle (issue 1 is the fourth in the series!), until you realize that it’s not. Cash moves designedly through alt-comix and autographics tropes, poking at them, reworking and queering them. The work is heartfelt, but also, clearly, she’s having fun. She’s piercing, observant, and hilarious, but can be poignant too, as in “First Date,” a romance under COVID’s shadow. Each new Cash comic is an experiment, a dare, and a gift.
Comic Arts Los Angeles, Dec. 14-15.
My comics year ended on a high note with the return of Comic Arts Los Angeles, one of my favorite festivals ever. I got to take part in a panel on graphic medicine there (with Barbra Dillon, Chris Fink, David Lo, and Naomi Volain), and I picked up a couple of the above comics there too. Not a huge event (thank goodness) in terms of numbers or space, but the wheat-to-chaff ratio was amazing. Kudos and thanks to Angie Wang, Jen Wang, Jake Mumm, and their community of volunteers and partners for bringing CALA back. May it keep on going!
***
Tim Hayes
Joe Pineapples: Tin Man by Pat Mills & Simon Bisley & Clint Langley (Rebellion).
Call in the receipts. Ask those corners of mainstream comics that would swear they were in the resistance liberalism business how business was in 2024. Count the mentions in 2000 AD of the Trump Memorial Crater or appearances of a parody Nigel Farage, and correlate with the real-world fortunes of both men. Count, or rather don't count, engagement with events in Gaza in the same comic. Recall that in 2020 Rebellion apologized for a 2000 AD cover that "was not meant to directly reflect scenes from the week of release." Wonder if cultural activism might not actually be much use as activism. Read Joe Pineapples: Tin Man, an accidental return to one of 2000 AD's original modes as container of chaos, in that the story appeared five years behind schedule from two extravagantly talented artists playing experimental solos and in no kind of dialogue with each other, illustrating a story in which writer Pat Mills wonders how long under-appreciated artisans should put up with their bosses before jetting off into the cosmos.
Immortal Thor #9 by Al Ewing & Ibraim Roberson and Roxxon Presents: Thor by Ewing and Greg Land (both Marvel).
Mockery of capitalism from those well known leftists The Walt Disney Company of Burbank. Dario Agger, president and chief bullshit officer (he's a minotaur) at the Roxxon Corporation, shows Thor a model of the future to come, a population dehumanized to fit the next generation of private enterprise. Agger drops hard truths about wealth buying power, art being just content, growth being all that matters, as if his desk diary had fallen open at any date since about 2010. He traps Thor in a comic-within-this-comic from the Roxxon Comics Group, in which Thor shills for AI and everything is even more drastically dumb (drawn by Greg Land!). Perhaps a reader is illuminated. Perhaps they have a fugue-state vision of alternative worlds like that guy in The Man in the High Castle. Or perhaps capitalism assimilates all attempts to subvert it and pats you on the head for recognizing the gesture.
Elise and the New Partisans by Dominique Grange & Jacques Tradi, translated by Jenna Allen (Fantagraphics)
Actual activism, in that it describes a better world and also how to get there. A lightly fictionalized version of the life of Dominique Grange before she married Jacques Tardi (a bachelor M. Tardi cameos at the end when they start dating). A street-level record of French civil unrest and youth on the loose in the decade following May 1968. No one draws characters you care about being agonizingly burned to a crisp like Tardi.
Time2 Omnibus by Howard Chaykin (Image)
A collection of all Howard Chaykin's previous Time2 material plus a new story, Hallowed Ground0. Changes in Chaykin's mood since the last one are detectable, but still a brash statement about architecture and the corrosive forces of urban renewal and massive Colosseum spectacles with blazing visual design. Appropriate that the book was so late it can be experienced in parallel with Francis Ford Coppola's film Megalopolis.
Early Gigs: Dave Gibbons Underground Comics 1970-1973 by Dave Gibbons (Dark & Golden Books)
Early pre-professional strips by Dave Gibbons from various places, the latest delve by Dark & Golden Books into the dusty cellars of UK comics. Allowing for a legitimate amount of clean-up and being presented on some decent paper, the assurance and vigor of the artist's cartooning when aged about 20 is almost hard to credit.
Frank Miller's Ronin Rising Collector's Edition by Frank Miller & Philip Tan & Daniel Henriques (Abrams Books) and Wonder Woman: Earth One by Grant Morrison & Yanick Paquette (DC Compact Comics)
Abrams presented Frank Miller's almost maniacally decompressed Ronin sequel, drawn mostly by Philip Tan with Miller chipping in, at coffee-table scale so you can peer at the drawings in wonder, perhaps for several reasons. DC included in its manga-scale reprint line Grant Morrison and Yannick Paquette's hugely entertaining interpretation of Wonder Woman, reconfiguring the character for the Aeon of Ma'at, per the writer. My copy of the Abrams book was missing all of Chapter V, and the DC book was so poorly glued the pages came unbound within 72 hours and spilled onto the floor.
The Abyss, A Tradd Moore Planet Ardbeg Creation (Ardbeg distillery)
"To re-tell the legend of Corryvreckan [whisky], we have collaborated with one of the most renowned comic book artists of his generation, Tradd Moore. Like the whisky itself, his fantastical artwork draws us into a parallel world where sea, space and spirit collide! The whisky and the comic book sit alongside each other within a unique casing. Complete with port holes, gauges and a masterfully-engineered locking mechanism, this extraordinary space-capsule-meets-diving-chamber is itself a journey of discovery and hidden depths. Limited availability £21,250/€25,000." Good for Tradd. Beyond satire.
***
John Kelly
This has been a very busy, and strange, year, with most of my comics activity dedicated to launching a new publication (DUMMY) and relaunching an old one (NEMO). As as result, while I read an awful lot of comics and comics related material for those projects, I read a lot less new material. But I sure liked some of the newer things I read. Here's some highlights:
- Final Cut by Charles Burns (Pantheon). I actually read a lot of new or newish things by Burns this year. In addition to Final Cut, which is stunning, he also produced a terrific traditional comic book, Unwholesome Love (Partners and Son), that is a creepy and very funny stab in the eye at the romance comics genre. He also created a series of limited riso printed zines – Sweet Dreams (Partners and Son) and The Cutting Floor (Desert Island)–as well as Kommix (Fantagraphics), a book of fake romance comic book covers. All are terrific and should please any fan of Burns. But Final Cut is a masterpiece and I think it’s his finest work to date. Obviously, the artwork is flawless, but Burns’ writing and storytelling reaches a new level for me and it’s a book that requires and multiple readings. I can’t recommend it any higher.
- Blessed Be by Rick Altergott (Fantagraphics). This was a long time in coming and the results more than pay off. Blessed Be is a very strange book and I mean that in the best of ways. Writing about it for The Comics Journal, I said, “Gorgeously rendered in a '70s MAD magazine style, Blessed Be is a visual treat. Its overlapping storylines involve sex, drugs and a satanist cult. And lots of other stuff." You can read my interview with Altergott about it here.
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Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund by Caitlin McGurk (Fantagraphics). A gorgeous and impressive book, Caitlin's thoroughly researched exploration of the life of Barbara Shermund is comics journalist at its finest. It's also a big book – 9"x12" with nearly 300 pages of fascinating text and art – and thoroughly captures the life of an important, and largely forgotten, comics pioneer.
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The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller by Peter Maresca and Brian Walker (Fantagraphics). For those of us fortunate enough to attend the transformative Nancy Show exhibit at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum– as well as the once-in-a-lifetime experience that was Nancy Fest – this book is a treasured artifact of historic events that will likely never happen again. It was like Woodstock for Nancy fans.
- Drafted by Rick Parker (Abrams). A powerful memoir about Parker's experience as a young man drafted into the Army during the turbulent time of the Vietnam War. It details the day to day insanity and mindlessness of the military and shows how a love for art can help someone survive the chaos of dire and frightening conditions.
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Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995 by Stan Mack (Fantagraphics). A wonderful collection of Stan Mack's quirky Village Voice strips that each week–for three decades–gave us New Yorkers a bizarre snapshot of the strangeness of the place we lived. Using his approach of catching perfect snippets of "overheard conversations," Stan created a magical new form of comics journalism.
2024 was a strange year and 2025 may well prove stranger still. I am trying my best to shut out the external noise and look forward to new work by Carol Tyler and Kayla E, both of whom have powerful books coming out next year that I have read drafts of. I wish everyone happy holidays and a peaceful new year.
***
Hank Kennedy
I begin with two reprints this year captured the spirit of these times that try men’s souls. First is A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali. The book collects a hundred drawings from al-Ali, creator of the omnipresent refugee child Handala. That al-Ali’s work continues to inspire such feeling decades after he played the ultimate price for his drawings reflects not just his strengths as a cartoonist, but also the global failure to protect the human rights of the Palestinian people.
The other reprint I fell for was Steve Darnell and Alex Ross’ Uncle Sam, re-released in time for the U.S. Presidential election. I was struck by how well it aged, having never read it before. If you want feel-good pablum, Uncle Sam is the wrong place to go. Darnell and Ross may not have gotten the election result they wanted, yet I got a comic I didn’t know I needed. “Ask not what your country's done for you. ... Ask what your country's done to you.”
Over at PM Press, Donald Nicholson-Smith translated Golo’s B. Traven: Portrait of a Famous Unknown so that we English speakers could enjoy it. Golo tackles the unenviable task of dramatizing the life of a man we still know very little about: the anarchist novelist of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (among many others), B. Traven. Golo’s biography is creative and readable.
The gild may be of the lily for some people regarding the long running Ed Brubaker-Sean Phillips partnership. I am not one of those people. The duo’s outing Houses of the Unholy is another success from one of comicdom’s most dependable teams. The book detours into the horror genre to explore the aftermath of the '80s Satanic Panic. Especially appropriate are the flashbacks in the guise of vintage Chick tracts draped in a foreboding blood red.
On the subject of horror, I’ve always had a soft spot for attempts at mixing the genre with comedy. So unsurprisingly, I was a fan of Steve Thueson’s The Night Never Ends. It also helps that the plot, about a group of friends reuniting to celebrate one of them turning 30 feels increasingly relevant as I approach the big three-oh myself. Thueson goes all out with blood and gore here. It’s a great book for Halloween or any time a reader wants to conjure up a spooky mood.
I end my list with Maurice Vellekoop’s poignant memoir I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together. Vellekoop’s work is emotional and displays sublime use of color. Vellekoop sketches the various influences on his life and upbringing in Ontario: his family, religion, and classic Disney. The book reminds us that despite all of life’s ups and downs “there can still be happy endings,” in the words of TCJ reviewer Kevin Brown.
***
Sally Madden
(top)
(The following is in no particular order, making a best-of list is distasteful enough as it is)
The Puerto Rican War by John Vasquez Mejias (Union Square & Co.): John lures me in with his funny-sad, painful-joy tone, and those jaw-dropping woodcuts are all too easy on the eyes, great-looking fingernails. The Puerto Rican War loses a few points for making me learn something, but I’ve never put this book away, I won’t do it.
Round World Thinking (zine + audiobook) by Ana Woulfe (Reptile House) Looks like Mark Beyer panels of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and reads like Cher Horowitz as a clairvoyant house witch. The 3rd section of the book, Noses, is just a targeted ad for yours truly so far as I’m concerned, but you know what? I bought it and loved it! Speaking of love, if your loved one is convalescing, get them the audiobook, it can be enjoyed with closed eyes. Both are good for slumber parties.
What About Humility? By Dash Shaw (self-published in ant dodger) What a delight! This comic made me scream. A prettily ink-washed story of an unhappy family layering on the absurd in a way that anyone with half a funny bone could appreciate. Has that dangerous ecstasy-like quality of making it seem as though all is right with the world and before you know it you’ve agreed to spend an evening with people you hate, coasting on the laffertunity fumes from this 4-page newspaper comic. Bring to slumber parties at your own risk.
Heavenly Days by Em Frank (Floating World Comics) Admittedly, I can be a bit of a Swimfan for Em’s work- I figured I knew her patterns and therefore what to expect from this one, you can smell the hubris all the way through your screen, do I need to finish typing this sentence? An experimental romance comic not for the hopeful so much as the curious. The dainty drawings surrounded by big white spaces make for very intimate pages, had to lie facedown on the carpet for a long while after this one, I didn’t want the feeling to leave. To be read in solitude.
Unwholesome Love by Charles Burns (Fictopicto and Partners and Son) A thoughtful gift for lovers of classic romance comics. Charles’ stunning panel designs could almost be a flash sheet, plenty of glamorous black silhouettes accompanied by a heaving full-moon. Playful farce with very dear affection shining through, required reading for even the most casual fan of the genre. Slumber party fodder for a mature crowd.
Pebbles #3 by Molly Colleen O’Connell (self-published) Everything in the entire world is drawn in these panels, the art is so friendly and welcoming (yet not even a little saccharine), it’s a bit of a surprise not to have newsprint-stained fingertips after reading. This comic IS a slumber party, you can bring it, but you can most definitely stay home and maintain a party of one, too fun!
Halo by Leomi Sadler (Famicon Express) A spirited interpretation of the angels among us and the ambulance crashes they adore. The drawings are so sweet and cute, but this is strictly for bad kids at the slumber party. If anyone tells mom, you are certainly not getting invited back.
Whistle by Louka Butzbach (Breakdown Press) Delicate drawings about attraction and revolting and a potato. The clouds are drawn like little doodled clown wigs in the sky, it’s not the most charming element of the story, but it does put some additional buoyancy on the page. Read alone but immediately lend to someone else so you can talk about it (thank you to Gina Dawson, from Partners and Son).
Zoo # 4 by Anand (self-published) I’m a sucker by choice for short stories and am energetically devoted to the opener for this collection, “This Loud World”. Filled with dramatic, surreal action and melodrama. These feel like images from someone who loves to draw, there’s lots of care to fingers and faces, clouds and movement blustering you through the pages. To be passed around at the slumber party, which story do you have a crush on?
The Scrapbook of Life and Death by J. Webster Sharp (Avery Hill) As a mother, these interpretations of largely upsetting newspaper clippings resonated with me deeply. So much is done and never said, this book shines a light on an entire world of troubled flesh shimmering just out of sight in the darkest unswept corner of your mind. J. Webster’s tremendous talent as a draftsman goes head to head with her ability to pull out the unsettling from the known. Suitable for vegetarians, and, as I’ve said before: not for everyone.
***
Mardou
How Are We To Live by Ellen O’Grady (Paper City Publishing)
This collection of stories mingles the author’s experiences of living in East Jerusalem in the late 1980s with the contemporary experience of bearing witness to the grief of Gaza’s people now. This is a deeply moving book in its simplicity and immediacy, calling the reader to compassion.
Victory Parade by Leela Corman (Pantheon).
This was a great graphic novel and the ending is seared into my synapses. Always the sign of a master at work.
Women Life Freedom, edited by Marjane Satrapi (Seven Stories Press)
The pages of this anthology transmitted hope and energy, it’s a wonderful, cohesive work of activism. The result is a graphic mosaic of life under repression and the spirit of liberty that keeps breaking through.
The Mythmakers by John Hendrix (Abrams)
This graphic biography was amazing; a serious and in-depth look at the life of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien that was playful, inventive and riotous too. An instant classic.
I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop (Pantheon)
This memoir was visually gorgeous and psychologically rich. One of those books that makes me privately despair and want to quit drawing my own scrappy comics. I ate it up and just loved it.
How it All Ends by Emma Hunsinger (Greenwillow Books)
One of those books that makes you want to DRAW COMICS NOW. It was so funny, fast paced, shows all the internal wrangling and goofiness of the early teen years. Emma Hunsinger is a fantastic cartoonist and this is hands down one of my favorite YA books of all time.
My book of the year is:
Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (MCD/Macmillan)
One of those remarkable memoirs that could only be told in comics form. Hulls unpicks her family trauma from the warped pages of history. Every inky page was surprising, thoughtfully constructed and enlightening. As a cartoonist and writer I so admire how she pushed the comics form in unexpected ways. And I loved it as a reader for being so engrossing and readable. One for the canon!
***
Chris Mautner
One thing I've learned in my short time as co-TCJ editor so far is that, gosh, but there are a lot of comics being made. Like it's hard to keep track of it all! That obvious (and somewhat whiny) observation aside, here's 10 comics I really adored this year (I didn't include Sunday on my list cause I had it on last year's):
My Name is Shingo by Kazuo Umezz (Viz). Sci-fi/horror madness with a lots of time for broad comedy and young romance, at least at first. This might end up surpassing Drifting Classroom in my estimation. Emphasis on might. But still.
Tokyo These Days by Taiyo Matsumoto. A "bringing the team back together" but with cartoonists instead of musicians or thieves. I'm a sucker for this genre anyway, but add in Matsumoto's gift for melancholy mood setting and thoughtful, well-rounded characters and you've got the makings of a classic.
Ninja Sarutubi Sasuke by Sugiura Shigeru (NYRC). Have you noticed it was a good year for stellar "classic" manga? Translator Ryan Holmberg had a particularly prolific year, but this title was my favorite of the books that bore his "imprint," as it were. Just utterly wild, psychedelic comics – Looney Tunes on acid. I loved every manic page.
Grand Electric Thought Mother by Lale Westvind. As much as I love Westvind's work, I wasn't sure if this book was going to make my list as I combed through the first few pages. The narration in much of this collection of experimental mini-comics have a unique rhythm that can be difficult to grasp. Soon, however, I found myself adapting to it and digging on Westvind's dreamlike tales of futuristic warrior women battling against technology – or just perusing through a bookstore. Go check out her first two issues of Void Packer as well.
Collected Doug Wright Vol. 2, edited by Seth and Brad Mackay. I sadly suspect this slipped by most folks' radar. I don't even know if it made it into stores after it hit its crowdfunding goals. That's a genuine shame as this impressive collection just further cements Wright as one of the truly great cartoonists. An utterly charming look at mid-20th century Canadian life, guided by an ink line that won't quit. Try to track down a copy if you can.
Blurry by Dash Shaw (NYRC). Matt Madden got to the nested story concept first (in, I believe, A Fine Mess) but Shaw took that core conceit and turned it into something far richer, more thoughtful and emotionally compelling than its initial description might suggest.
Froggie World #1 by Allee Errico (Cram Books). Diary comics can be a real hit-or-miss prospect, so it's all the more impressive how accomplished Errico is here in detailing her daily obsessions, loves and troubles, all while slyly alluding to other aspects of her life that don't perhaps get the full spotlight. She's definitely one to watch.
Unwholesome Love by Charles Burns. Yes, yes, Final Cut. But for me Burns' best book of the year was this amazing mish-mash of (somewhat) interlocking stories (maybe?) using hallowed romance comic tropes like car crashes, bandaged faces, and erotic encounters in the woods. A disturbingly surreal joy.
Peep, edited by Sammy Harkham and Steve Weissman. There were a lot of really good anthologies this year -- Bernadette, Cram #4, Now, etc. -- but I think I liked this one best of all. Just one great entry after another. All killer, no filler.
Dandadan by Yukinobu Tatsu. Space aliens vs. yokai vs. teens in a frenetic action manga that is consistently horny on main and yet at the same time somehow charmingly chaste. Relentlessly inventive and just all around fun. Comics can be fun! Who knew?
Honorable mentions: Hot House by John Hankiewicz, Oba Electroplating Factory by Yoshiharu Tsuge, Second-Hand Love by Yamada Murasaki, Bernadette, Anna by Mia Oberländer, Chrysanthemum Under the Waves by Maggie Umber, and Absolute Batman and Absolute Wonder Woman.
***
Brian Nicholson
Tokyo These Days, Taiyo Matsumoto (Viz)
It plays out like a heist movie, where a gang is gathered despite each member’s initial reticence, only here they’re putting together a manga anthology rather than committing a robbery. The conversations between characters are suffused with the glow of love, not just based on shared personal history, but for what the work each has made means to one another. These men and women are infatuated with the idea of making manga that speaks to people, and in addition to their self-doubts, they are repeatedly told that what they like and want to make is uncommercial and doomed to failure. And so Matsumoto braids the threads of aging, art-making, and the comics community into something that takes the melancholy of his series Sunny and applies it to middle-aged people rather than children. Any Comics Journal contributor that doesn’t name this as their book of the year is kidding themselves.
My Name Is Shingo, Kazuo Umezz (Viz)
The death of Kazuo Umezz this year shook me up, in part because the still-ongoing translation of My Name Is Shingo feels so vital. Not just because it presents a computer coming into consciousness while more and more of the computer programs we interact with daily forsake functionality in the name of A.I. integration, although there’s that; the sequence in volume two where children ask a computer how to make a baby and are told to jump off a tower 333 meters high feels predictive of chatbots telling you to put glue on a pizza if you don’t want the cheese to fall off, and damned if I didn’t marvel at every image where Umezz integrated pixel art into his style to depict the visions of an early eighties machine. I have no idea how those were accomplished. But we also have these guileless children protagonists, whose perspective seems so removed from the maniacally precise technical drawing of rooms full of wires, that make this book laugh out loud funny, and give it a tone that feels like it’s suffered a psychotic break. It all comes together into a comic that feels like pure life force. Is this better than The Drifting Classroom? I think yes.
Blurry, Dash Shaw (New York Review Comics)
I love that a hundred pages into this comic, nothing has happened yet, but two hundred pages in, it feels like everything is happening at once. A symphony of comics editing, intercutting stories nested inside other stories overlapping with each other, eventually culminating with a strong climax whose relationship to nonsense is to be determined by the reader. While it's built around small, insignificant decisions, it keeps diving deeper into the bigger ones – choosing between career paths, keeping or quitting jobs, whether to stay with romantic partners – that make us who we are and define our lives, but the structure of the book argues that we fixate on the small choices because those determine how we are perceived. Fearlessly presenting characters some might consider unlikable, and very funny for it, this feels like Shaw’s most mature book to date.
Sunday, Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics)
Another comic whose action is defined by being uneventful, ruminating on how one is perceived, that is nonetheless both a formalist masterpiece and an approachable comedy. And yeah, just like Blurry, this features a perfect ending. Some read this over the course of many years, as it was serialized, but I put it off until its single-volume collection, and for my patience I have been rewarded with a brick of a book dense enough I have so far only read it once. More locked in than the freewheeling and playful Parallel Lives and Portrait Of A Drunk, both of which were on my top five lists for the Journal the respective years they came out, this commits to the bit, following the course of one man’s stream of consciousness and the outside world he distantly occupies over the course of a single Sunday. Comparisons to Ulysses are inevitable, but it is much more likely you will be able to read Sunday to the end without a college course compelling you to do so.
Final Cut, Charles Burns (Pantheon)
This year presented a feast for Charles Burns fans, with Kommix (from Fantagraphics) providing a gallery of fake comic book covers, and Unwholesome Love (published with the Philadelphia shop Partners And Son) expanding on one title presented therein to work in a parodic romance comics register. As cool as those these works are, Final Cut, collecting three albums previously published in France in a single volume, is the big book that has to be acknowledged first. It is a simple story of young amateur filmmakers, but Burns’ reputation as a horror purveyor precedes him, and the sense that the bottom will fall out from under our characters, and a man’s mental illness will doom the woman who deigns to humor him, lends a great deal of tension to a work that otherwise feels deeply indebted to romance comics. The undercurrent of terror compels you through a through a world of surface beauty, making for a comics experience that reads like a dream.
Ballpark, James Collier (Wig Shop)
In a year heavy on strong small-press and self-published work, only James Collier balances his avant-garde impulses with the most appealing hallmarks of professionalism: Beautiful bright flat coloring, compositions with foreground and backgrounds playing off each other, charming cartoon characters, a sense of humor that feels unique to itself even when it’s doing broad strokes slapstick. None of these qualities by themselves are necessary to make great work, but the presence of all of them made for a comic I kept returning to, poring over how each panel flowed gracefully into the next. A two-pager featuring Kim Deitch telling a story about Wally Wood situates the author in a lineage of cartooning greats, but every strip featuring his cartoon cat Kitty suggests a casual at-home worldview free from the torments that plagued Wood’s generation, making work that somehow feels both of the moment and like a balm.
***
Hagai Palevsky
So last year on New Year's Day I went downstairs to check the mail, and, like a cosmic joke, in the mailbox was my copy of Hino Hideshi's Panorama of Hell, from Star Fruit Books, arriving one day too late to include it in my best-of-2023 list. But I read it that same day and it fucking rocked, so suck it, universe, it's going in this year's list instead. I win. Time is a fiction propagated by Big Calendar anyway.
As for this actual year… it's hard not to observe that two of 2024's best books are best described as anti-epics: Olivier Schrauwen's Sunday (Fantagraphics) gives us a view of one man's endless stream of nothing-thoughts and neuroses, whereas Dash Shaw's Blurry (New York Review Comics) takes a step back and tell us that, no, everyone is like that, fidgeting and restless and filled with emotional negative space; these are both books that create time within time through sheer bombardments of granularity, straightforward and blunt but nonetheless feeling new.
On the opaque end of the spectrum, Maggie Umber's Chrysanthemum Under the Waves (self-published) and Bhanu Pratap's Cutting Season (Fantagraphics) are both striking displays of previously-published work that is made even stronger by curatorial cohesion. Both of them are also, not coincidentally, works of emotional submission: Pratap's characters are destroyed, emotionally and physically, by their yearning, while Umber's protagonists — an explicit extension of the author — surrender themselves to the future as a way of making peace with the fundamental gone-ness of the past.
Another striking couple of shorts-collections-as-thesis-statements come from New York Review Comics, first with Aidan Koch's Spiral and Other Stories, which seeks its own transcendence in the way of melting the boundaries between self and surroundings (communal, physical, environmental), then with CF's Distant Ruptures, whose central driving force is a formal and narrative counter-intuition; these are not comics that start or end where you would expect them to, and they are all the stronger for it.
In Leo Fox's Boy Island and Yasmeen Abedifard's When to Pick a Pomegranate (both from Silver Sprocket), meanwhile, we receive two takes on the same approach, characters who are less narrative constructs than actors, exploring different themes from ever-varying angles. For Fox, it is gender as an aspect — though not as the entirety — of the broader self; for Abedifard, it is the violence of vulnerability. For another take on the same formal principle of character-as-actor, seek out Jon Chandler's Dogbo, which encourages you that this too shall pass – if by this, of course, you mean 'the hope that you might ever be happy.'
In anthologies, Sammy Harkham and Steven Weissman's Peep (Brain Dead Studios) substituted the enfant terrible formula of Harkham's erstwhile Kramers Ergot formula with a more laid-back, vulnerable take, to striking results. Of particular note here are Antoine Cossé's four-page "Aix-en-Provence, 20th Octobre, 1906," a tragedy of inevitability that uses the death of Paul Cezanne to ask if there's any point at all to pursue art at the sacrifice of all other things in life, and Sophia Foster Dimino's "Happy Birthday Henry!" whose three-page barrage of subtle social cues may well say everything about human emotion that the rest of us might take thousands of volumes to reach.
In the realm of archival manga, too, we have been blessed with two gems, albeit of distinctly different flavors: Yamada Murasaki's Second Hand Love, from Drawn and Quarterly, is a tender, sharply-drawn compound of two looks at the same motif: the understanding that your current relationship is simply not going to do you any good, and that a sense of the other is worthless without a sense of self. The late Umezz Kazuo's My Name is Shingo (Viz), for its part, is its own search for a sense of self, as through a young boy and a robot Umezz asks what it means to be fully human, and whether it is something inborn or an act of becoming.
Aaron Losty's Clearwater (self-published) and Adam de Souza's The Gulf (Tundra) both examine a coming of age. Though Losty's is a story about criminals, it is not a "crime story" so much as a story contextualized within crime; de Souza's story is an attempt to square nascent political ideals with a reality that rarely aligns with them. Together, the two comics explore the same the same round-peg-in-a-square-hole stuck feeling, though one is more hopeful than the other.
Autobio comics, I confess, are typically more miss than hit for me, but Allee Errico's Froggie World (Cram Books) introduced me to an entirely new voice that I found completely charming: Errico has a wonderful knack for the implicit rearrangements of the authorial position, which she uses remarkably.
The first installment of Erika Price's Worms (self-published) sees the cartoonist follow her previous endeavor, the astonishing horror-as-autobio Disorder, with a more straightforward narrative, but one which does not lose any of the innate sense of nightmare-urgency; Price's cartooning, with its jagged, forceful lines in pen and white-out, makes one feel like they are being chased and their leg has just gone numb.
That is all from me, though I would be remiss in not mentioning those books that I simply have not had the time to read but which will undoubtedly have made it in here: this year's slate of releases from Glacier Bay Books, including Imai Arata's Flash Point and ohuton's Seaside Beta, is surely yet another crucial look at the all-too-overlooked (in the Anglosphere) self-published manga market; the third volume of Floating World Comics' collections of Guido Buzzelli's work is, I am sure, splendid, as are Lale Westvind's long-awaited Grand Electric Thought Power Mother from Perfectly Acceptable Press and John Hankiewicz's Hot House from Fieldmouse Press. Nate McDonough's Longboxes (self-published) sits in my pile, waiting for me to delight in it. I'm sorry, folks, I'm sorry; a comics critic only has so many hours to read, so busy are we swimming in our vaults of cash.
In case more words are desired, I've taken the liberty in hyperlinking some of the titles above to my full-length reviews and essays. In the interest of full disclosure, some of the creators listed above are friends of mine; others are, to some extent, collaborators. But I do not recommend their work because they are friends; on the contrary, they are friends precisely because I think their work is admirable. Go read some comics, people. If you read the right ones, it just might do you good.
***
Yiannis Papadopoulos
A few words for some comics I loved this year. And some more that I got to read and enjoyed.
Aristotle by Tassos Apostolidis and Alecos Papadatos (Abrams)
The philosophical brilliance of the greatest thinker in history is transformed into an expansive comic book by Apostolides and Papadatos. Drawing from in-depth historical research, a range of visual techniques, and a mix of prose and dramatized storytelling, the creators follow the exciting life of Aristotle. Papadatos' illustrations display a blend of technical proficiency, a wide range of references (including nods to Robert Crumb), and impressive talent. Apostolides' writing steers clear of contemporary takes on Aristotle, offering the narrative a bold and captivating outlook. The comic's use of color is more than effective, with a carefully chosen palette that helps distinguish the shift from first-person to third-person narration.
A World Without End by Jean Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain (Particular Books)
This is the most comprehensive and creative examination of humanity’s impact on the environment. Beyond being just a comic, it skillfully combines the ninth art with stand-up comedy, TEDx-style talks, and science popularization, all while addressing the root cause of climate change: our dependence on energy. It’s both engaging and insightful, with little dogmatism (particularly in its approach to nuclear energy). It’s no surprise that A World Without End was last year's top book in France.
Blurry by Dash Shaw (New York Review of Comics)
Blurry, the first comic by Dash Shaw that I’ve read, is a visually captivating and emotionally intricate graphic novel that delves into themes of memory, identity, and the flow of time. The narrative centers around a character struggling with the blurred lines between reality and perception. The highly stylized artwork perfectly complements the book's themes. It's one of the most thought-provoking comics I’ve encountered.
I also got to read for the first time the work of Yoshiharu Tsuge with “The Swamp”, one of the most sweeping contemporary Italian artists; Fumettibrutti with “La mia adolescenza trans” (thanks to my friend Valerio Stivè for introducing me to her) and last but not least I finished my reading into the whole body of work by Italian maestro Vittorio Giardino.
***
Mark Peters
Precious Metal by Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram
Probably the comic of the year, I reckon. A post-apocalyptic tale of redemption, blah blah blah, but with all respect due to Darcy Van Poelgeest’s writing, the star here is artist Ian Bertram. This is a prequel to Little Bird, and since that series Bertram’s art has ascended to Moebius-level heights of imagination. This is visually gobsmacking stuff and a must-read.
The Major by Moebius
Speaking of Moebius, it’s a crime against humanity that so many of his works are unavailable or hard-to-find in English. That problem is alleviated with this edition of Le Major, an improvisatory mind-bender of a comic, and a beautiful book to boot.
Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto
This manga is reliably batshit. A great anti-depressant.
The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV and M. Simmonds
I generally like my comics to provide an escape hatch from the nightmare of reality, but there’s no comic more stunningly relevant to current life than this one. Based on the premise that if enough people believe something, reality itself changes, this comic is pure horror.
True-Man the Maximortal by Rick Veitch
Rick Veitch, the most underrated creator in comics, continues his exploration of the Superman mythos with his latest self-published volume, starting a new chapter in his King Hell Heroica. Veitch weaves the history of Superman, America, and comics into a narrative full of surprises that always makes perfect sense. Plus, each issue contains oodles of bonus material by the prolific Veitch. Look out for his next comic: a new issue of dream journal Rare Bit Fiends.
Damned by Eric Haven
Eric Haven continues making cheerfully warped comics with this highly entertaining single issue. Probably the funniest comic I’ve read this year.
Get Fury by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows
What beats Garth Ennis writing the Punisher? Maybe only Ennis writing Nick Fury. This series features both Marvel characters and allows Ennis to continue writing world-class war comics, along with artist Jacen Burrows, one of Ennis’ best recent collaborators.
Houses of the Unholy by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips might be the most reliable duo in comics, cranking out a noir classic once a year at least. 2024 was no exception, as they delved into Satanic panic with Houses of the Unholy, a grim yet gripping read. I’m itching for these two to get back to the Reckless series, but I can’t complain about any of their consistently excellent output.
Batman: The Dark Age by Mark Russell and Mike Allred
Like most years, DC produced a metric buttload of Batman content, and my favorite was this spin on the dark knight by Mark Russell and Mike Allred. Featuring an aging Batman in a nursing home trying to remember what the heck he’s been doing all his life, Russell crafts a smart story brought to life by the eternally poppy Allred.
Popeye Volume 4: Swee’ Pea and Eugene the Jeep by E.C. Segar
E.C. Segar (pronounced cigar) is one of the all-time masters of cartooning, and his Popeye comics are consistently a hoot. They are also quite weird, as seen by fourth-dimensional critter Eugene the Jeep. Spoil yourself — read some Popeye.
Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theater by Tom Scioli
I first read Scioli when he was doing Transformers vs. G.I. Joe, a Hasbro crossover that improbably became one of the most visually creative series of the century. Since then, Scioli has kept evolving, as seen in Gobots, Fantastic Four: Grand Design, and his biographies of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. The latest evolution of Scioli returns to the realm of crazy crossovers, as Godzilla battles the Great Gatsby (and a crew of other public domain characters, including Dracula). This comic, like all of Scioli’s work, overflows with creative joy.
***
Leonard Pierce
“2024 isn’t likely to be much better [for the comics industry], some brave truth-teller wrote for last year’s TCJ best-of-the-year recap. That person was absolutely correct, whoever they were, and should be lauded for their prescience.
It’s true; 2024 wasn’t much better and was in fact worse, both for the world for and the world of comics. A shrinking economy led to comics mirroring the publishing industry as a whole, with a few big names at the top essentially funding the rest of the industry and leaving those without access to it scrambling to survive. Far too many talented creators faced age, infirmity, or alienation without access to the support they needed to keep working. Media consolidation and the flattening effect of social networks chipped away at both the ability of good work to find an audience and the ability of intelligent criticism to help that happen. And the industry’s ongoing identity crisis deepened thanks to both internal and external factors.
But people kept making comics. That’s the one great thing, the eternal truth, the thing that keeps me going no matter how dreary things seem. People will keep making comics, and some of them will be great, and as long as I can find them, I’m going keep reading them. Here’s ten that I really liked this year.
Blurry, Dash Shaw (New York Review Comics)
Dash Shaw surely had nothing to prove before, but he certainly does now. Blurry, one of the easiest choices on this list, raises the stakes on an already outstanding career by delivering a series of interlocking and entirely engaging short stories that form an unexpectedly perfect whole. Cinematic in the best way, it is also undeniably a great work of the comics medium, with Shaw’s perfectly drawn characters building a familiar rhythm that he immediately disrupts. Conjuring Roberts Altman and Coover but distinctly of its medium, Blurry immediately joins the canon of great comics of the 21st century. Its brilliance and precision only increase on re-read.
Chernobyl: The Fall of Atomgrad, Matyáš Namai (Palazzo Editions)
There has been a renewed interest in the particulars of the Chernobyl disaster in recent years, perhaps because we find ourselves at the end of our own empire as it remains in deep denial about the crises that tear it to pieces. Though slight, Czech artist Matyáš Namai’s Chernobyl: The Fall of Atomgrad is one of the most successful of these revisitations, using a striking art style that invokes both socialist realism and Soviet iconography to tell a compelling story of ordinary people dealing with an unthinkable catastrophe. It neither indulges in knee-jerk anticommunism nor apologia for the Soviet leadership, choosing instead to focus on the psychological stresses of people placed, with no alternative, in a monstrous situation.
Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, Maggie Umber (self-published)
I found Maggie Umber’s latest and best work both surprising and rewarding, and it has only increased in my estimation since then. A series of interpretations, retellings, and echoes of the folk tale of the Demon Lover, influenced by the circumstances of Umber’s own recent life and health, the almost wordless work does something that I find immensely satisfying: It imposes harsh limits on itself and then meets them in a spectacular manner. This book deserves a much wider audience, and while I’m happy that Umber was able to bring it into existence herself, I hope a publisher who can pay her and give her that audience will take an interest in one of the most haunting books of 2024.
Evil Eyes Sea, Özge Samancı (Uncivilized Books)
Another book that grew on me the more I thought about it, Evil Eyes Sea – cartoonist Özge Samancı’s semi-autobiographical story about two college friends in Turkey in the 1990s who become involved in a mysterious death, a corrupt political climate, and the temptation of a big score – struck me at first as an inventive, well-illustrated narrative, but a bit light in the telling. The more I revisited it, the more its emotional heft, thematic depth (appropriately expressed in the color and art), and humor became clear, and the more they helped it coalesce into a whole. Sneakily great, and broadly appealing without being pandering.
Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusk Rampage, Pierre La Police, translated by Luke Burns (New York Review Comics)
Wait a minute! Isn’t this another book I reviewed for this very publication? Yes, it is. Isn’t it another book from the surprisingly deep bench of New York Review Comics? Yes, it is. Take it up with my editors, you bunch of haters. I told you, 2024 was a bad year for comics! But it wasn’t a bad year for French veteran Pierre La Police, the sole exception to the ACAB rule, because he graced us with this ludicrous, barely-there collection of absurd and incredibly hilarious one-panel gag strips that hangs together like a shantytown. Sure, it's one long shaggy dog story, but who can say no to a dog in these trying times?
My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book 2, Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)
The second installment of one of the most electrifying, impressive works of comics art of the last quarter-century was a long time coming and difficult in birthing, but it finally got here, and saying it was worth the wait is the understatement of the year. Ferris’ work has progressed and improved without substantially changing and Book 2 expands both the scope and the focus of My Favorite Thing is Monsters to give the book more depth, power, and impact while deepening our connection with the characters and their circumstances. A powerful slam-dunk by one of the most vital creators in this country today.
Portrait of a Body, Julie Delporte, translated by Helge Dascher & Karen Houle (Drawn & Quarterly)
The debate about the universality has become as tiresome as any other argument over authenticity, but it still seems true to me that the best art transcends its origins and audience and becomes something in which anyone can find beauty or meaning. Julie Delporte’s lovely, enigmatic book is a story of lesbian awakening, a memoir of sorts, and an amalgam of all its influence, but it takes all those threads and stretches and weaves them to the point of transcendence, becoming something that is both what it seems to be and something much more. Ethereal, carnal, and exceptionally real, it turns ever inward but never loses itself.
Return to Eden, Paco Roca, translated by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics)
Paco Roca doesn’t need my help. He’s already a justly celebrated graphic novelist and Return to Eden – an alternately grim and joyful memoir of the lives of a family under the fascist regime of Francisco Franco – has won one European comics award after another. But a great comic is a great comic, and this is his best work to date, a profoundly felt and deeply feminist narrative that is drawn in a style both technically outstanding and perfectly suited to the story’s moments of small victories and deep despair. Twists of Fate was already one of my favorite books of the 2010s, and this is a follow-up that’s beyond worthy.
Self-Esteem and the End of the World, Luke Healy (Drawn & Quarterly)
Luke Healy has, for me, become one of those creators who is so consistently talented and rewarding that I follow news of his every new project with real pleasure. Of course, that’s what I thought about Chris Ware, too, and a lot of people – for some reason – don’t’ like Chris Ware, including Chris Ware. So, where does that leave us? Just with Healy’s most ambitious, insane, and, let’s just come right out and say it, funny graphic novel yet. There’s something about the intersection of soulless capital domination and wry self-loathing that … uh, look, this review is becoming about me. It should be about this great comic by Luke Healy, so let’s leave it at that: one of the best of the year.
Young Hag and the Witches’ Quest, Isabel Greenberg (Harry N. Abrams)
Look, we’re almost done here. Let’s be honest: My relationship with “young adult” fiction in any form is, well, fraught. And yet …and yet. There is something about Isabel Greenberg’s work, from its inventive and original approach to tiresomely familiar material (did I expect to put a book where a clever young person discovers how to use magic and engages on an exciting quest on a top thousand list, let alone a top ten list? I did not.) to her wondrous, rough, effective, and symbolically laden art. It brings something new and strange to a type of literature that is increasingly routine and stale. Some years, that’s enough.
***
Oliver Ristau
As it is with trends, I'm not following those, instead they're following me. This year's trend is that there is no trend. Which makes it way easier to present the comics I found interesting during the last twelve months.
Anzuelo by Emma Ríos. By threading hooks through their backs and then allowing them to swim around, fishermen often use live bait to attract worthwhile prey. Anzuelo, being the Spanish word for "fishing hook," operates in a similar way by using scenes floating between rarely seen elegance, and body-altering horrors laid out in beautifully conceived and often muted watercolors, which only seems appropriate when creating a scenario set in a world after the ocean has risen, enforcing the few remaining humans to adapt or getting physically enhanced. This book decided to settle down between the explosive color and flexi-narrative threads dramaturgy of Anatomy Of An Atom by J.U.L.I.A.C.K.S., and the harsh brutality of Land Of The Sons by Gipi, all three overwhelming achievements in stories involving aqua-ærobics. Not only in terms of huge sizes these comics share similarities, they also leave you sometimes dangling on the hook a tad bit too long. Nonetheless, Anzuelo is absolutely recommendable because of its visual conception, I haven't seen anything more eye-capturing created in 2024.
My Body Unspooling by Leo Fox. A marriage not made in heaven, a divorce made in kingdom come – this is how I'd subsume the story of a body with militating halves inhibiting further progression. All told in a cartoon~y, liquid style, which, coming to think of it, and despite my initially proclaimed showing-off of being trend-free, might at least be a spotted tendency among some of my presented titles here. Also a trait is arresting your colors mostly in front of darker backgrounds for narrative contrast. I like that it doesn't end as you expect it to, which speaks to the talent of Leo Fox. I even more appreciate that lots of readers will die to read this comic as a metaphor for trans people, but a real good author*ess refuses to hammer down a message that sorta bold and simple to its readership, and therefore would leave more room for interpretation to target a broader audience – and by thus spreading their key issue on a wider scale and more sustainable.
Cutting Season by Bhanu Pratap. Another alumni from the school of Toontown, but leaving those city limits waaay behind by now, is Bhanu Pratap. In his latest effort, he actually switched to making music, because nowadays, and compared to its predecessor Dear Mother, I'm convinced these are jazzy improvisations, or– to stay within the borders just torn down – looney tunes: So hello, Tex Avery! Also coming in, because of the constantly emerging raunchiness, but infamous because aiming it also at kiddos, John Kricfalusi, and, sorry once again, this time for repeating it notoriously, Lorenzo Mattotti – whom I'd add much more in favor of Fires, though, as for his work on the animated feature Fear(s) Of The Dark, because of Fires' constantly reshaping of form and function, exploring new formats of storytelling then, as well as in coloring those. So in the end, Cutting Season appears not only literally to be more of Tropic Appetites by Carla Bley, than, let's say, A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, the first album mentioned would also be fitting well for scoring these deformed love stories.
Limit Formation Initial by Paul Jon Milne. Scotland's last Highlander hit the ceasing year with at least three sword strokes, and Creep Heap 2025 showed PJM in shape, and, once again, at the top of his game. Another release of his, These Aren't My Brutes, is fan art of corporate IPs, and if Marvel took itself more seriously in being committed to fresh offbeat art, they'd hire this guy on spot and place him on the throne next to Peach Momoko. But – and yes, that from the dude who once chose an Italian Vogue issue as his favorite comic of the year – both aren't comics, much more look-books, so maybe Emanuele Farneti would've contracted him instead, if still in charge of Vogue Italia; because Mine's got some great sense of costume AND color design, too. Anyway, his third release is Limit Formation Inertial, and continues the line of last year's Torse, which got deservingly awarded in 2024, by the by. Milne's weaving a narrative that deeply striking, you'll think Douglas Sirk has had his hands in it somehow, so tearjerking it gets at your throat with brutalist brush strokes and sensitive coloring of the acid kind. It's like E.T. done with meth, and particles of the gruesome British SF flick Xtro infused, or the Alien Sex Fiend cover to Acid Bath. The relationship between mother and main protagonist is truly heartwarming and told in a believable way most artists would shy away from, because of fearing to come over as calculating bastards feeding on emotions, which Milne is definitely not. A rare gift, thus maybe the best comic to give as a present to your loved ones for Christmas.
A Very Fragile Release Coming Along As A Light Breath by Jules Valera. It's not that often that I manage to make it on a wrapper of a release, but here we are. In 2019, I chose Jules Valera's self-published mini comic Jupiter And The Moon as one of my favorite publications when contributing to TCJ's best of the year, with the actual line introducing it being “So why is a very fragile release like Jupiter & The Moon, coming along as a light breath, in need of such a pompous introduction?” Valera liked it that much, that, when re-releasing it, next to the successor from 2022, Venus In Capricorn, and adding his latest, 2024's Kingdom Of Uranus, to the package, chose it in reverse for entitling said package. It's a very Lucasian joint, and though there are stars at war, sometimes arising, sometimes dying out due to a hostile environment, while fighting mostly over themselves, and even more so a trilogy, this attribute goes just for adding technologically advanced features being out of reach to Valera back in the day. And as much as I don't care about the empire and such, and hate THX 1138's additional FX, those features appended here do no harm to the actual art. I see Valera as a poet, not a belletrist, and sometimes I even thought of Celan, or Cordwainer Smith – what they did with language, Valera does by combining comics' inborn forms of expression: just add a flavor of scrupulously precise art influenced by geometrically conceived playgrounds, and manga-influenced physiognomies, soon afterwards everything will become a rhyme.
12/14 by Manix Abrera. Manix Abrera's strips are a gift for publishers and a death wish to translators. They feature no words, which makes them seemingly easy to read – like tons of other strips populating the web in a similar simple emergence – but they are in fact heavyweights. But actually, this is a re-release of two single publications from two years ago, made available together for the first time this autumn as a container. Abrera is a Filipino artist apart from the archipelago's tradition of creating detailed and traditionally illustration-influenced art, but in telling stories with huge impact by just relying on his art skills, he's in a deep kinship with those. Like, let's say, Alex Niño, who's completely wordless An Alien In New York kept riffing on equal strings. The first installment has grim shorts, hitting even harder because of its personnel made of Aswangs, Duwendes, and the very worst of all, humans. The second one serves a menu in a more Scheherazadian way by framing the episodes in an Infernoesque setting worth a Dante. Abrera's shorts though also stand in an honorable line of tradition, be it that of the masters of the form like Roald Dahl or Brian Evenson, or the mythology of the Philippines, see Trese by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo, or Mervin Malonzo's Tabi Po.
One more think: Shout out for today's equivalent to the sorely missed newspaper strips, migrated to the web: Maxim Peter Griffith has been doing three panel strips for years, and I first learned about his art on Twitter (RIP). He, however, is still around on Bluesky, thank God, and tirelessly distributes his daily observations of changing landscapes and, accordingly, mindsets. That he's able to still leave you behind in wonder despite adding an evening companion to his morning postings is just the greatest gift of all. As is Tym Godek, emerging once a year on Tumblr and now Bluesky, to post a comic once a day through the whole of November. He never ceases to amaze me with his musings on personal and/or global topics, and I'm really glad that there are people still so devoted to their art. His 2024 run shines especially because of its coloring and page sequencing, improving further year by year.
The final reveal: Mostly though, yours truly read German translations of DC mystery stuff from the '60s to the '80s, and reactionary comics about American fighter pilots as imagined by French artists, c'est mon truc.
***
Cynthia Rose
A dozen comics I enjoyed in 2024:
- Deux filles nues ("Two Naked Girls") by Luz (Albin Michel). This year's star turn is based on the life of Otto Mueller's 1919 painting, from whose viewpoint much of it is told. The work was acclaimed, declared "degenerate", hidden, stolen, then, finally, reclaimed – a saga Luz uses to broach not only history, but salient disputes over art and censorship.
- La Roi Méduse, Tome 1, ("King Medusa") Brecht Evens (Actes Sud BD). Evens never stands still but, with this saga, his storytelling has reached a new level. It's a surreal meditation on fear, self-delusion and the consequences of solitude. With, as ever, stunning art.
- La Route, Manu Larcenet (Dargaud). This forceful BD version of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" became a best-seller in ten days. Fiercely rendered in black, white and shades of grey.
- Le Petit Nazi Illustré, Pascal Ory (Locus Solus). A history of Le Téméraire, the only mag available to kids in Paris between 1943 and the Liberation. Entirely written and drawn by French collaborators, Le Téméraire used story and fantasy to sell Nazi ideology. Ory is a member of the Academie Française and this reprinting of his classic shows you why.
- Cornelius: La vie pleine de joie du triste chien ("Cornelius: The joyful life of a desolate dog"), Marc Toricès (Actes Sud BD). Despite a lowly job cleaning out swimming pools, anxious anthropomorphic pooch Cornelius longs to be a writer. Toricès tells his story through an anthology of fanzines – i.e. a Rolodex of BD styles and homages.
- Crieurs de Crime ("Those Who Cry 'Crime'"), Sylvain Venayre and Hugues Micol (La Découverte-Delcourt). The re-telling of a 1907 murder that, because of a circulation-conscious paper, stops an attempt to abolish the death penalty. A vivid evocation of the crime-crazy Belle Époque and its warring press.
- Dalí, Tome 2 : Gala, Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie (Dargaud). After their magnificent four-volume Pablo, Birmant and artist Oubrerie tackle another Catalan, Salvador Dalí. This installment covers his meeting with Elena Diakonova ("Gala"), who dumps the poet Paul Éluard for him. Told with a clever use of surrealistic tropes.
- La Lettre d'Egypte ("The Letter from Egypt"), Benoît Jacques (Benoît Jacques Books). Back in 1822, Jean-François Champollion cracked the hieroglyph to decode ancient Egypt's pictographic language. Artist Benoit Jacques has theorised a love letter from Champollion to his wife: a rebus constructed using hilarious hieroglyphs.
- Pauvres Bêtes! ("Poor Beasts"), Coco (Les échappés). After the Charlie Hebdo murders, surviving artist Coco surfaced with the amazing Dessiner Encore ("Still Drawing"). Here, she goes to bat for our animal friends.
- Missak, Mélinée et le groupe Manouchian, Jean-David Morvan and Thomas Tcherkéz (Futuropolis). Recently elevated to the Panthéon, Armenian immigrant Missak Manouchian was a refugee poet and communist who joined the French resistance. His story – drawn here by Armenian artist Tcherkéz – ended in torture, death and a Nazi attempt to blacken his name.
- Charlie Liberté: Le journal de leur vie ("Charlie Liberté : A diary of their lives"), collective, (Les échappés). January 7, 2025 is the tenth anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which killed five cartoonists, an economist, a psychiatrist, the paper's sub-editor, a visitor, a maintenance worker and two policemen. Charlie's webmaster, incurably wounded, died this year. Yet this homage by the magazine's survivors is unconventional, joyous and funny.
***
Tom Shapira
From the best, for the best.
Rogue Trooper: Blighty Valley (Garth Ennis, Patrick Goddard, Rebellion): “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” – William Tecumseh Sherman
Sunday (Olivier Schrauwen, Fantgraphics): “Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracts and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a halfpenny matter — away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.” – Laurence Sterne
I Wish I Was Stupid (Yoshikazu Ebisu, Breakdown Press): “Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” – Herman Melville
Solver (John Allison, Self-Published): “Two are better than one: they get a good wage for their labor. If the one falls, the other will lift up his companion. Woe to the solitary man! For if he should fall, he has no one to lift him up. So also, if two sleep together, they keep each other warm. How can one alone keep warm? Where a lone man may be overcome, two together can resist. A three-ply cord is not easily broken.” – Ecclesiastes
Fielder #3 (Kevin Huzinga, Drawn and Quarterly): “Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?” – David Foster Wallace
“The Incident” in Oba Electroplating Factory (Yoshiharu Tsuge, Drawn and Quarterly): “What is the self amid this blaze? / What am I now that I was then / Which I shall suffer and act again, / The theodicy I wrote in my high school days / Restored all life from infancy.” – Delmore Schwartz
Iris: A Novel for Viewers (Lo Hartog van Banda, Thé Tjong-Khing, Fantagraphics): “Life organized around consumption, on the other hand, must do without norms: it is guided by seduction, ever rising desires and volatile wishes – no longer by normative regulation. No particular ‘Joneses’ offer a reference point for one’s own successful life; a society of consumers is one of universal comparison – and the sky is the only limit. The idea of ‘luxury’ makes little sense, as the point is to make today’s luxuries into tomorrow’s necessities, and to reduce the distance between ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ to the minimum – to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’.” – Zygmunt Bauman
Griz Grobus (Simon Roy, Image): “In all parts of the world men fled from one place to other places, and there was a confusion of tongues. Much wrath was kindled against the princes and the servants of the princes and against the magi who had devised the weapons. Years passed, and yet the Earth was not cleansed. So it was clearly recorded in the Memorabilia.” – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
***
Valerio Stivè
I’ve read a lot this year, maybe more than usual, and I’ve tried to read as much as I could (comics and novels). So, let’s give a shoutout to the ones I enjoyed the most.
In 2024, some good friends of mine published their books after years of work. La novella dell’avventuriero (Coconino Press in Italy and Glénat in France, under the title L’Aventurier) by Alessandro Tota (writer) and Andrea Settimo (artist) is possibly the most beautifully drawn book I’ve seen in months.
After years of self-publishing anthologies and short stories, Bianca Bagnarelli has collected her comics into a book titled Animali domestici (Coconino Press). It includes works spanning over ten years, showcasing her evolution as a solid writer and a delicate artist. You might already know her as an illustrator for The New Yorker and several other magazines. Some of her comics were already available in English, but my guess is this book will soon be translated into French and English.
My brother from another mother, Maurizio Lacavalla, has finally completed his new graphic novel, HPL - Una vita di Lovecraft (Edizioni BD), written by Marco Taddei. I loved Maurizio’s work on the book, especially for how much he has grown as an artist, mastering his inking techniques and achieving impressive page compositions. Plus I had the pleasure of working alongside Maurizio on the book as an editor over the past 3–4 years.
Another book I was lucky enough to work on is Bottleneck by Marco Quadri (originally published in 2023 in France by Les Requins Marteaux, while the Italian edition curated by me for Edizioni BD with the title Collo di bottiglia). Marco is an incredibly talented young artist, and his book is one of the most exciting debuts I’ve seen in years. His work is visionary, capturing the essence of our contemporary world while adding a soft touch of magic and surrealism.
This year, there are two manga I’ve absolutely loved; Tokyo Higoro by Taiyo Matsumoto, which is an incredible work — his most mature and thought-provoking so far, and a must-read for anyone who is in the comics business. Hirayasumi by Keigo Shinzo was equally amazing, but you can read my review here.
I’ve also been “reading” a lot of manga in Japanese. Well, not exactly reading, as my knowledge of the Japanese language is quite limited. However, with help from Google Translate, I’ve revisited some of my favorite manga from my youth in their original language — Dragon Ball, Hokuto no Ken, City Hunter, Orange Road, and Saint Seiya. This allowed me to fully appreciate their wonderful page structures and storytelling. Reading these manga without focusing on the words has been a truly enriching experience. Highly recommended.
In anticipation of the A Occhi Aperti festival (held in Bologna in Novembre), where Belgian artist Dominique Goblet was a guest and had an incredible — beyond amazing — exhibition, I took some time to read and reread her work. Pretending is Lying, Souvenir d'une journée parfaite, and Ostende are all masterfully drawn and deeply inspiring books.
I finally picked up a copy of PeePee PooPoo #1 by Caroline Cash, whose sense of humor I absolutely love. I love me some well-packaged indie comic books, the way they used to be. Another excellent indie (self-published) comic I’ve read this year was Bambine Matte, by a queer collective of artists coordinated by Percy Bertolini, who is also author of the series Scuola di Butch (online on Instagram and on paper by Eris Edizioni)—the most hilarious satire comic series I’ve read in ages.
I’ve spent a good part of August rereading Daniel Clowes’ The Complete Eightball. Revisiting Clowes’ early work is always a mind-blowing and, at times, painful experience. Painful because of how mercilessly inspiring and brutal those stories still are, and painful for me personally as I had to edit my own translation of the book from seven years ago. Now, the book was finally published (in Autumn by Coconino Press in Italy).
One of my favorite contemporary artists is Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. In 2024, I had the chance to read two of her works: The Naked Tree (Drawn & Quarterly) and La saison des pluies (Futuropolis), all translated in Italy by Bao Publishing. Her stories are so delicate and her talent is simply astounding — her black-and-white art and mesmerizing brush strokes always leave me in awe.
Other books I very much enjoyed this year include: Compagna Cuculo by Anke Feuchtenberger, Vera Bushwack by Sig Burwash, Roaming by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Transformers by Daniel Warren Johnson, Goiter by Josh Pettinger, Une éducation orientale by Charles Berberian, Console 2073 by Ding Pao-Yen, Fall Through by Nate Powell, and Esther by Keizo Miyanishi, René∙e by Elene Usdin.
***
Fredrik Stromberg
2024 has been a tumultuous, and in many ways depressing year. So many forces in the world seem to be herding us in what I would consider to be the wrong direction for humanity, and the optimism I once held for the future has been harder and harder to cling to. So, when there are people working against these negative trends, that makes me happy. In Sweden, where I live, we have a rather newly formed group of 200+ Swedish artists calling themselves Tecknarupproret (The Draftsmen’s Rebellion), who for the last couple of years have been using their artistic abilities to draw attention to things they feel are wrong with our society.
The group's latest effort is the gorgeous, 240 pages hardcover book Palestinaboken (The Book of Palestine). The book contains drawings and comics by about 130 artists, many of whom are cartoonists, who have all donated the rights to their art. As the printing costs have been sponsored by several nonprofit organizations, 100% of the price for the book goes to relief help in Palestine. The book also contains texts about the war in Palestine, a preface by the award winning Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh, poems by Palestinian poets and much more. Oh, and it sold out within days of its release.
Due to the theme, the content doesn't really make you happy, but the fact that the book exists and that people are getting involved, and resisting the downward spiral that the world seems to be in, does. So, for theses reasons, I choose this book as the one that made the biggest impression on me this year.
***
Ian Thomas
It begs a closer look than this venue will permit, but I would like to recommend that readers spend some time with the archive of the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium, a weekly comics discussion forum founded by Ben Katchor and run by a coterie of creators and critics. This year’s programming was co-curated by Katchor, Austin English, interdisciplinary artist Lilli Carré, comics historian Bill Kartalopoulos, and writer and editor Danny Fingeroth, and features an eclectic and lively series of discussions from every corner of comics. The Symposium is supported by a grant from the Will and Ann Eisner Foundation.
My experience with the Symposium has been limited to the YouTube channel, which houses an archive of conversations going back to 2020. Some of these events were also held as live events at the New School. As I understand it, the group has been conducting these interviews for just over a decade. This season culminated with Austin English’s interview of Marc Sobel, author of Reading Love and Rockets. It was the Symposium’s 409th meeting. While the format of interviews would translate well to the podcast format, the video format in which it is presented online — essentially a Zoom meeting with screen sharing — creates a sense of intimacy that invites the viewer’s undivided attention. If you are like me, you will find yourself squinting to discern the details of the interview subject’s living rooms and bookshelves.
Clark Burscough does a great job including links in the weekly link roundups, but the casual manner in which the group makes its presence known makes it easy to miss. That was my excuse, at least. The simple presentation belies the depth and insightfulness of these conversations, many of which include a Q&A that is open to viewers watching live. It is simply a crime that most of these videos have fewer than 1000 views and I would like that to change. My favorite conversation from this year was English’s interview of James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook on the subject of their collaboration with artist David Wojnarowicz on the classic graphic novel 7 Miles a Second. Like many of the conversations, it peeled away the superficial veneer of commercial concerns to reveal the artists’ motivations and experiences making and living with their art and revealed the connective tissue that binds seemingly disparate elements of this sprawling industry. Secret histories abound!
Here is a list of the programming from this year.
- Nate Garcia, the Cartoon Life
- Michael Fikaris on Silent Army Projects and the Australasian Comics Scene
- Allee Erico
- Lat, Still a Simple Man from Malaysia
- K A Ryan & Gary Groth: The Blacklist and Burne Hogarth
- Paul Kirchner: Fifty Years of Visual Storytelling
- Nicholas Meyer in conversation with Danny Fingeroth
- Peter Blevgad on his book, ‘Milk, Through a Glass, Darkly’
- Lee Marrs, Career-Hopping for Survival
- Alex Beringer: Lost Literacies
- Clemens Krummel on Feliks Topolski - Expressionism Home and Abroad
- Nina Rowe: Word and Image in Medieval Manuscripts
- John Porcellino
- Bob Levin
- Séverine Bascouert
- Mohammad Sabaaneh
- Paul Buhle and Benjamin Fraser
- Nancy Burton in Conversation with Alex Dueben
- Domingos Isabelinho: The Reading Gaze and the Expanded Field of Comics
- Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies
- Damian Mandzunowski & Lena Henningsen: Heroes and Villains in Chinese Comics
- Ole Frahm on ‘The Language of Comics"
- Larry Lieber in Conversation with Danny Fingeroth
- Yara Elfouly: Turning Corners Like Reading Pages
- Eli Valley on his new book Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque
- Pei-shan Huang on The Slow Truth: Asian Graphic Novels
- Melissa Ferrari: Witnessing the Magic Lantern
- James Romberger & Marguerite Van Cook
- Anna Haifisch
- Marc Sobel
***
Andrew White
Blurry, Dash Shaw and Sunday, Olivier Schrauwen – Two different answers to how you might construct a comic in which each page, each plot point, evolves from or responds to what came before. Two complex works, as a function of that mechanism, but at the same time very straightforward and readable. I particularly loved the endings, which again in two different ways play with the reader's expectations and understanding of the book's structure.
Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, Maggie Umber – There's a quiet confidence here in Umber's willingness to let images speak for themselves, with just a few panels or a single drawing per page in this mostly wordless comic. Her strength and range as an artist means there's raw, undeniable emotion in her markmaking. I found it very moving.
Distant Ruptures and Lowtide #5 reissue, CF – Two different answers to how you bring an important body of work back into print. In this case both approaches are correct. Distant Ruptures is a great overview of CF's work, including many short pieces that probably couldn't have been reprinted except as part of a big book. But with Lowtide #5 and his other recent reissue projects as Toybox Coffin, Noel Freibert displays an impressive level of printing craft and strong curatorial taste bringing back into print notable small press comics from across time.
Kingly, Nick Edwards - It merits a place on this list due to the 2024 publication of the first two chapters in print, but as a follower of the online strip this work is top of mind for me due to the more recent twists and complications in the story. Kingly is very funny, and each installment can easily be enjoyed as a standalone humor strip, but the plot is very compelling despite at times happening in the background. It's also an impressive commitment to the restraint and precision of the strip format, from a cartoonist who has shown himself in other work quite capable of visually impressive set pieces.
Running Numbers 6, Frank Santoro - Really what I'd like to mention here is Santoro's entire convoluted output over the past few years: Running Numbers, Hypepup, an ongoing project of drawing flowers each spring, a brief offer to renew your Santoro-verse subscription by buying him a specific ink cartridge. At one point I imagined this prodigious but scattershot output could be edited down into a single, coherent work. Even the hardbound Running Numbers collection felt like it might be another draft, not the final project, especially after the series continued in this year's issue six. Maybe another, bookstore-ready version of some or all of this work will eventually appear, but I've come to understand the loose, even frenetic nature of Santoro's publishing project as part of the point. Maybe that wasn't the plan, maybe under different economic conditions – a regular topic of discussion in Hypepup – we'd already have a carefully constructed Running Numbers volume produced in one fell swoop. But I've grown more attached to the work we do have, vibrantly colored and handmade, messy and direct.
Star of Swan, Margot Ferrick - I considered listing all of Ferrick's 2024 output, including Half Gold/Half Dung and new short work quieted posted online, because it all seems to fit together in a way that I can't quite articulate. Maybe I'm just responding to the excitement of seeing several new works in a relatively short period from a cartoonist working through a set of compelling themes and interests. But Star of Swan is my favorite among these new releases. Full of strangeness, tenderness, tension, and beautiful drawings.
Szarlotka, Jas Hice - A compelling, unsettling story paired with sparse, energetic drawings. Maybe it's a deliberate choice, maybe it's a natural evolution over time, but it's interesting to compare this comic with Hice's ongoing project adapting or responding to X-Files episodes in comic form. There, her drawings are at times a bit denser and more rendered, though the line is just as energetic. Whether it's in the moments of crisp dialogue in Szarlotka or the X-Files phrases that read like poetry out of context, Hice also has an impressive eye for details that convey a lot with a little.
The post The best comics of 2024, as chosen by TCJ contributors appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean. 
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