These are the best comics of the year

2025 gave the past shimmering clarity and showed us what "new" really means.

Alienation: Final Cut (Inechi; Gatoshop/Floating World Comics)

Alarmingly prescient science fiction psychedelics in a raunchy, witty, modern style, much closer to Julie Doucet or Sloane Leong than typical genre art expectations. Dystopia that I felt could happen to me might be happening to me already. Distressing, but also powerful and magnetic to read something so impossible and so familiar. A thoughtful, measured critique of where the track we’re on leads, showing you instead of telling. The telling is genre fiction! Cyberpunk infested with digital bedbugs. — AOK (Buy it.)

Basket (Paco Moccand, Marie Derambure; Lucky Pocket Press)

I’m totally blown away by the art style. Love the underdog local team story, the friend group dynamic, and off-the-court side plot. But the portrayal of playing is different from anything else I’ve seen in a sports comic. The whole game becomes a blur, a multi-exposure montage the reader is completely immersed in. It’s about making plays, yeah, but the art conveys how one gets lost in playing the game, how executing them must feel. I get these Ai Yazawa vibes from how fluid the art is, but I also see a bunch of Bradley of Him in there. A one-of-one comic. I cannot gush enough. — AOK (Buy it.)

Mansect (Shinichi Koga, Ryan Holmberg, Sean Michael Robinson; Smudge/Living The Line)

For a creature feature about freaky bug-men that will eat your guts, Mansect has a lot on its mind regarding evolution, the exploration of what lies beyond the known. What are we, and where are we headed? That’s above my paygrade, and Mansect’s. Still, Koga’s curiosity for these questions provides a layer of textual power that encases the juicy, icky innards of his gnarly monster manga. Living The Line has done a great service for horror hounds by publishing this 1975 shocker, preserving a deeply frightening piece of sequential art that borders on the profane and pokes holes in reason. Whatever you do, don’t read it with lunch. — JJ (Buy it.)

Flea (Mara Ramirez; Fieldmouse Press)

A comic where the art brut sketchbook style absolutely clobbered me. These little lowlife character exploration vignettes trick the reader into a sense of relative safety — a night out at the hipster bar ends with nothing worse than a punch in the face (and doing it in the bushes) — only to then break their heart with unprecedented realness, and then pass into total fantasy. Devastating and raw. Unexplored aesthetic territory. Unprecedented realness. — AOK (Buy it.)

Batman & Robin: Year One (Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, Mat Lopes, Clayton Cowles; DC)

Origin stories are a dime a dozen. When they change with the times, they come off like reheated nachos — gooey texture, no crunch. That’s why Batman and Robin: Year One is so good: it’s got some edge to it and reads fresh. Here’s a character-first superhero yarn set on the rooftops, streets, and sewers of Gotham that updates the Batman-Robin Team while honoring the Golden Age shadows and pulp that make their world so elemental. Heap primary accolades at Chris Samnee and his colorist Mat Lopes, whose tightrope contrast of noir’s forbidding corners with Waid’s squishy father/son dynamic gave us this year’s most consistently entertaining adventure strip. — JJ (Buy it.)

The Hanging (Aaron Losty, Becca Carey; Strangers Publishing)

Rare and special is the comic that draws you in with the promise of politics and humanity and dynamic art design, delivers, and then throws something else at you — something that undermines all its lofty aspects of social resonance by just being so goddamn cool that you have to talk about it instead. So a bomb has dropped, as they do, and the fallout protection at this level of poverty isn’t something you can wear, or somewhere you can go. Just smoke a government-provided anti-radiation cigarette and get back to making things worse. — AOK (Buy it.)

Absolute Wonder Woman (Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Matías Bergara, Jordie Bellaire, Becca Carey, et al.; DC)

The closest I’ve seen a superhero comic approach myth without feeling dusty or distant. The Absolute line is hype personified and, as such, a mixed bag, but don’t miss Absolute Wonder Woman in the noise. Thompson has tapped into legend and retrofitted it with brilliant contemporary power — look at WW’s armory: Nemesis lasso that punishes the penitent, skyscraper-size Athena blade, Pegasus reborn — fun stuff, for sure. And more. Bolstered by Sherman’s dizzying fresco-styled panelwork and layouts best described as, dare I say, epic, this isn’t just the best cape comic going, it’s a new standard. From hype comes something so much better: a monthly comic worth investing in. — JJ (Buy it.)

Rodney R Rodney: The Omnibus (Violaine Briat; self-published)

A murderer who lives next door, the quirky sitcom comic strip. The strips themselves have a slice-of-life feel, dwelling in the overwhelmingly awkward interactions (the rent is good, the neighbors not so much) instead of burdened by moving a story forward. Yet a story is built by the strips as a whole; Briat’s omnibus is about family, trauma, misjudgment, home invasions. It’s funny and creepy and creepy-funny and occasionally sweet. The collection is a very pretty printing. — AOK (Read it.)

The Sickness (Jenna Cha, Lonnie Nadler, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou; Uncivilized Press)

A collected comics volume that is the epitome of armchair reading. Dense with history and science, rich with character, the obvious comparisons to the supernatural blight that permeates both would be to King and Derry. The Sickness is fun like that: it lulls you with reason, with emotion, and floors you with unexpected, perversely inventive horror. It makes you squirm in your cozy seat. Cha’s etched panelwork is Junji Ito and Norman Rockwell, two disparate threads woven into a single stitch, working a fully realized terror tale about comfort and reason lost to a growing, throbbing malevolence, one that affects an ever-changing country as it does our perception of it. — JJ (Buy it.)

Stop!! Hibari-kun Vol. 1 (Hisashi Eguchi, Jocelyne Allen, Jane Mai; Peow2)

So cool that this exists. She’s a girl, and that’s final. He isn’t sure about how he feels, but he’s undeniably feeling something. Slam bang in the middle between Takahashi and Toriyama, or a third side to a well-meaningly horny triangle. It’s funny, smart, unapologetic, in love with the sincere and the absurd. I love how it feels dated; the casual treatment of the subject matter is a real 80s vibe, and also timeless. The realness that makes the emotions connect when they well up past the slapstick, the way the characters act and talk, feels as now and today as any comic out there. — AOK (Buy it.)