The Best Comics of 2024

This was an especially hard year to pick the best comics because there were so many that, for  me, had to remain on the shelf, which just means that 2025 will have a lot more new material to go through. We saw incredible bright spots, however, particularly with the creator-owned effort DSTLRY becoming one of the most important places for science fiction and horror (and even pulp and Westerns), and the silent return of the Vertigo branding on James Tynion !V new Nice House on the Lake (another good book that didn’t make it to this list). There were also strange surprises, like the return of Love and Rockets (which I simply didn’t read enough of yet to get onto here) and Penthouse Comics, which this time around actually has incredible serials (alongside kitschy airbrush spreads) in the vein of mid-generation Heavy Metal.

Check out what’s here and feel free to send in your own suggestions and I will be digging into some more genre-specific lists in 2025.

The Sickness - Jenna Cha and Lonnie Nadler

Uncivilized has hit an incredible gem with this utterly terrifying allegory for the fears of both the atomic and mass infection age, this one with striking black-and-white art and cross-temporal timelines.

Saga - Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

For over a decade Saga has continued to be the groundbreaking space opera that made it a nearly immediate success over a decade ago, and this most recent arc is bringing together some of the most necessary evolutions in our characters’ biographies since the series was launched.

Deviant - Jeff Lemire

This is Lemire at his most orchestral since he is involved in every creative aspect of this extended miniseries. A queer comics writer interviews a likely innocent man framed as a deviant serial killer, and subsequently has to defend himself against the same homophobic attacks a generation later. Expertly written and drawn, paced to perfection, and with a well oiled allegory about the monstrosities society projects onto queerness.

Victory Parade - Leela Corman

One of the best books released this year no matter what the format, Corman’s story of German-Jewish women trying to survive in the United States amidst one of the worst periods of their families history. Beautifully drawn, intimately personal, and refusing the saccharine revisionism of so much Holocaust literature.

The Bat-Man: First Knight -  Dan Jurgens and Mike Perkins

One of the best short-run Bat-books in years, and a perfect fit for what DC Black Label was supposed to be when they cut loose from both the censors and the continuity police. Set in 1939, the year Batman was first characterized in Detective Comics, this book has the great honor of being explicitly anti-Nazi and having the pulp sensibility that made books like Sandman Mystery Theatre such a gem in the memories of 90s comics fans.

Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis - Ezra Rose, Dave Maas, and Patrick Lay

A revival of a 1943 anti-war opera created during the height of the Holocaust and elevated here in a music-turned-graphical cacophony of big characters and loud ideas. 

Poison Ivy - G. Willow Wilson and Marcio Takara

This is again on my year’s best list since it remains a shining example of a lighter superhero book that has an eco-queer vibe that is always fun and embodies why super books continue to have the cultural appeal they do. Wilson fully realizes the anti-corporate green consciousness that a character like Poison Ivy can have and, while becoming expressly political, never devolves into didactic preaching.

Phantom Road - Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Hernández Walta

This continues a second great year of Lemire’s new horror-mystery Phantom Road, which picks up on a lot of the energy he cultivated with books like Gideon Falls, Family Tree and currently in Bone Orchard (also on this list). This distinct style, which has such an impact on the industry that it is opening up new channels for genre books, is ensuring Lemire remains perhaps the most important writer in mainstream American comics.

Final Cut - Charles Burns

Burns’ books are few and far between, but they are always magisterial as character portraits filled with haunting and stark mythologies that help us to grapple with the loneliness of each narrator. This is especially true in Final Cut, perhaps his final book, as the creation of a student science fiction film outlines the fantastic stories we tell ourselves about who loves us, who doesn’t, and what it means. Truly breathtaking cartooning and comics storytelling on par with earlier books like Black Hole.

Come Find Me: An Autumnal Offering - Various

One of the great examples of anthology horror comics from DSTLRY, a creator-owned new effort that has been the frontline of inventive genre books over the last few years. This captures something rare in the comics form, folk horror that connects directly to traditional art styles and methods of storytelling while maintaining ferocious and disturbing visuals.

Bone Orchard - Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino

This shared universe has existed across a number of different miniseries and a graphic novel, and this year’s offering was the ten-issue run of Tenement. While Tenement is an incredible apartment-horror story that defines the multi-dimensional visual storytelling that defines Sorrentino and Lemire’s style, it can only be seen as part of the ongoing Bone Orchard series that hopefully continues as the worthy successor to Gideon Falls.

Maria Llovet in General

2024 was the culmination of artist-writer Maria Lllovet’s entire recent career, with a series of books that have profound stylistic and thematic overlap in their tales of sex-obsessed, destructive and lovable teens and college students, always passionately dipping into the excesses of pulp genre fiction. Crave, Violent Flowers (which promises to return), and All the Things We Didn’t Do Last Night came out in 2024, and it’s also a good moment to go back and read classics like Heartbeat.

Miracle Man: Silver Age - Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham

This is a strange and brief run from Marvel Comics attempting to revive the lost scripts by Neil Gaiman after he took over Miracle Man from Alan Moore in the 1980s. The few issues we received this year are incredible (but part of my feeling is likely through the lens of three decades of hype), and it’s doubtful that we will get any others given what happened the rest of 2024. It has been a great chance to return to just what this character meant for modern comics and what superhero revisionism offered as a philosophic deconstruction that helps us to re-analyze the myths of heroism nearing the end of the 20th Century.

John Constantine, Hellblazer Dead in America - Si Spurrier and Aaron Campbell

Overwhelmingly the most satisfying John Constantine in a decade, and one of the best books to pick up on the Sandman/Vertigo legacy and to return it to the near-anthology form. When Dream makes Constantine locate his stolen sand, he takes a trip through modern America, with vignettes from both the mythical and modern and strung together in a way that while fantasy-like, feels instead grounded in the distorted mirror of the American dream. 

Honorable Mentions

• The Cull - Kelly Thompson and Mattia de Lulis
• Penthouse Comics - Various
• Fables - Mark Buckingham and Bill Willingham
• Tender - Beth Hetland
• Peep - Brian Nicholson
• Lore (Remastered) - Ashley Wood and T.P. Louise