My annual list of the best things I read in comics got a little lost in the shuffle this year. I read many comics, more than most years, though these were the clear leaders.
Final Cut, Burns, 2024: Burns is well known and justly celebrated for his teen horror comics. These are hyperreal clear line epics, often about a strange plague of some sort, which function as a metaphor for the terrors of sex in the modern adolescent psyche. This follows a similar template, but with a big leap forward in subtlety and vision. This Hitchcockian tale about a group of teens making a horror movie is really about mental health, and is very affecting for it.
Alive Outside, Bell 2025: Close to #1, but much of it is really zine art, not comics. Not that there is anything wrong with that; we can definitely thank the 3rd big wave of zine artists, in the punk era (following #1 which helped launch 20s sci fi and 30s superhero comics; and #2, which grew out of early comics fandom, and also soccer fandom in the 50s and 60s), for some of the inspiration for the alt comics explosion of the 80s. Zines can be seen as a reaction to elite gallery art as much as to mainstream pop culture, and they do play well with the mini comics boom currently ongoing, with some artists such as this collection’s editor, Marc Bell, excelling in both.
This is a beautiful book, with actual zines and mini comics bound in, so if you are curious about this burgeoning street art movement, a grandchild of the underground comix of the 60s, it’s a good place to start.
Crickets, Sammy Harkham, 2025: Harkham edited the pioneering Kramers Ergot anthologies and published Blood of the Virgin, about a C Grade filmmaker in 70s L.A. This is an actual comic book, not what the marketing people like to call a ‘Graphic Novel’. But it’s only part of a larger work that will be collected when finished, about a Mexican fugitive in SoCal in the 1890s. So I’ll reserve judgement, but like Blood, it’s off to a start that is both hilarious and tragic at the same time.
The Book Tour, Andi Watson, 2020: Ultimately a fairly precious bit of Kafkaesque dark humor, but well done with an elegant cartoony style.
Blessed Be, Rick Altergott, 2024: Funny but Lynchian romp with Altergott’s lovable pervert Doofus at its center, about a murder in a quaint middle American town.
Resties:
I like to put older, collected work, ancient re-reads and histories and criticism, along with honorable mentions in a separate list.
THB V. 1, Paul Pope, 2025: Mostly 1994-6 material, some new to me, and for that, didn’t feel right putting it with the top titles. It is still thrilling work, innovative and fresh then and never finished and properly collected. His expressive, gestural brushwork, breathless pacing, and spacious layouts in cinematic black and white have still never been matched, though many have tried. So if the famously mercurial Pope can follow through with a proper ending, then maybe it will move up to the proper Besties next year.
Comics Studies Reader, Jeet Heer, 2009: Very readable. As a work of criticism, I felt it must defer to a milestone comics work like THB, but it is a very well organized book, with an editorial strategy that explicates comics from many different angles. First giving a capsule history of their emergence, then exploring formal opportunities, and finally, their cultural diversity and impact. Then several iconic creators through their history are examined up close.
Without excluding the general reader, this book makes a coherent intellectual case for comics, the art form.
Akira V1, Otomo, 1984: Wonderful cyberpunk. The first full manga I ever read, after being introduced by several shorts published in Raw Magazine in the early 80s. Wonderful composition and design, about a post apocalyptic Tokyo. Only one volume of 6, so again I will come back to it when finished.
I like to check for presumed diversity in my own picks, as well as editorially in anthologies. Most of the authors in my 8 picks are white male, one Asian. One likes what one likes, of course, and one of the women on the full list read came close to the top 5. I’m usually more diverse, but only 4 of the 20+ books I read were female authors. 8 of the 33 artists in Alive Outside were female. 4 of the 31 writers in Comics Studies reader were women.
Already I’m well into next year’s candidates, including a survey of female superheroes through comics history, and a well researched study of the men ( yes, men mostly), both gangsters and nerds, who invented the comic book industry. I hope to see more of the Paul Pope collection this year, and a Joe Matt retrospective.
Stay nerdy.
#readinglist #besties #comics #zines
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