I’m doing two years here since I didn’t do a “best of” last year (Actually, I’ve never done one, but I did write about my two favorite comics of 2023).

2024

My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Feriss

It’s about an unsolved murder. It’s about family, chosen and otherwise. It’s about the holocaust. It’s about Chicago in the 1960s. It’s about art. It’s about coming of age and coming out. It’s sad and funny. But most of all, it’s about monsters.

The first volume came out in 2017, then the second in May 2024, but I didn’t read any of it until early 2025. Of course I’d been reading and hearing about how great it is since it came out, but I put it off but I kept putting it off because the art didn’t speak to me, and parts of it look and read more like illustrated prose than comics. Despite bouncing it off it initially, I got totally engrossed in it. Part of me wishes I’d read the first volume sooner, but I’m also glad I didn’t have to wait seven years between reading the first volume and the second.

Here are a couple of quotes from the Holocaust survivor narrative in volume 1:

A lot of people were in a state of terror. They tried to be happy, have parties, play records, see their friends. But it was as if they were infected by a virus. Like fear was a virus. It passed from person to person. Like from a bite one to the other. The bitten became the biters. Parents were more silent in the presence of their children, fearing that their words against the Nazis might get repeated as school. People put their heads down and shuffled through their lives, hoping to escape the notice of the authorities. But that was nearly impossible.

And:

After the war many things were said about Germans but truthfully there were many Germans who risked their lives to protect others. I wonder if American were in the same place would they be as courageous?

(The slipcase edition came out in 2025, so I guess this could count for either year)

Ribbon Queen by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows

A horror/police procedural. I’m not a particular fan of Ennis or Burrows, but I noticed a lot of people getting excited about this one and it’s included in my GlobalComix Gold subscription so I decided to give it a shot and I’m glad I did. Ennis managed to conceive of an visual gimmick—literally cutting people into ribbons—that seems obvious now but that I’d never seen anywhere else. And it turns out Burrows was the perfect person to illustrate it. But at its heart is a character-driven, socially relevant story that (mostly) avoids the sort of juvenile, macho digressions that Ennis too often makes.

Mothballs by Sole Otero

An inter-generational family drama, unfolding as a young woman reads her late grandmother’s diaries. Not necessarily the sort of thing I usually pick up, but when I saw a couple drawings from this I knew I just had to have it. Otero’s style is just so fresh and different. She approaches time and space in a wild way, and deploys proportion as a beautifully unhinged storytelling technique.

2025

Witchcraft by Sole Otero

A story about witches told over multiple generations with different point-of-view characters. I liked Mothballs more, but this is still great, continues her experimentation. On paper, it sounds like it would be similar to Emily Carroll’s work. Definitely some similarities, but this is very much Otero’s own style.

The Night Eaters vol. 3 by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

The surprising and satisfying conclusion to this trilogy. I suppose you’d classify this as horror and/or dark urban fantasy. To say much more is to tread into spoiler territory. I love Liu and Takeda’s work on Monstress, but this is nice because it’s a complete and easily approachable story, as opposed to the long and epic fantasy of Monstress.

Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, and other artists

Wonder Woman, but she was raised in Hell, rides a skeletal Pegasus, and fights Kaiju with a huge sword. Sherman delivers awesome, clean-line, Moebius-esque work, and Thompson tells a story that is at turns horrifying and heart warming. I dropped off of Tom King’s Wonder Woman run, but that and this have turned me into a Wonder Woman fan. I still need to read Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons.

I was really skeptical about the Absolute line at first. It seemed like an answer to Marvel rebooting the Ultimate universe, and DC’s previous answer to the Ultimate universe, the All-Star line, was pretty mixed. But I gotta say the Absolute line is one of the most interesting things to come out of mainstream comics publishing since Vertigo.

Nosebleed by Derick Jones

Some legit Outlaw Comics material published by Reptile House Comix. There are three issues or “Seasons” as Jones refers to them on artblog, where you can read the whole run for free. The story follows a group of teenagers who have discovered a stash of drugs that give them psionic powers, the government agents that lost the drugs in the first place, and the bullies who got in the kids’ way. Jones is going places, mark my words.

Absolute Martian Manhunter by Deniz Camp with art by Javier Rodríguez

Camp describes it as “psychedelic noir” inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and The Crying of Lot 49. Absolute Martian Manhunter seems just so outside of anything that mainstream comics has done in a long time. It reminds me in that way of Legion, the TV show, which was just so outside of what a superhero TV show or movie was supposed to be. Visually, it’s much closer to “art comics,” but it’s still, ultimately a coherent superhero comic narrative.