Best Comics 2020

[HotFingersClub]

Our annual thread for listing good comics

[HotFingersClub]

Usual disclaimer: my list is limited to books that came fully out in 2020 and series that began in 2020, so the older long-running titles don’t qualify. Not that any of them would have made the cut anyway, apart from maybe The Immortal Hulk.


20. Chelsea Cain & Elise McCall - Spy Island
Cain brings genuine innovation to mainstream comics, along with a sensibility that’s actually fun without just resorting to a parade of bland quips (cf. every single Marvel comic). Spy Island, like her previous series Mockingbird and Man-Eaters was a riot of mixed media, fake adverts and formal trickery, all in the service of a very Cain story that blended 60s-era James Bond, Sex & the City and the Bermuda Triangle. It's great to read an image comic that respects your intelligence enough to try and wrong-foot you every few pages.

[sevenarts]

Excited to see what people list. I'm finishing up mine too, felt like it was a pretty slow comics year in terms of stuff I really loved but still had a good set of favorites.

Didn't read Spy Island, I wound up disappointed with Man-Eaters over time but should still check that out.

[Drinky]

Can't contribute, but I'm looking forward to seeing some lists!

[HotFingersClub]

19. Al Ewing & Juann Cabal - Guardians of the Galaxy
My only criticism of Ewing’s work in the past on (fantastic) books like The Ultimates and The Immortal Hulk is that sometimes he takes a few issues to straightforwardly fulfil the brief before he accelerates to running speed and starts introducing the real cool shit. For Guardians of the Galaxy, the run-up was shorter than ever. All the classic Ewing strengths are there: high-concept scifi shit, great spotlight issues and, most of all, A to Z-list characters being given a new lease of life with invigorating new takes. Hickman aside, Ewing is comfortably the best writer at Marvel right now, and this is one of his most slept-on books. Just classic high stakes cosmic fun every month, with some great crisp superhero art from Juann Cabal working in the Jamie McKelvie mode.

[HotFingersClub]

18. Jason Aaron & R.M. Guera - The Goddamned: The Virgin Brides
The first series of Jason Aaron’s pre-historic old testament grindhouse felt like a bit of a trudge by his standards, aside from Guera doing typically thrilling and grimy work to establish the world, but this follow-up has had so much more energy. The gloomy immortal protagonist Cain has wisely been dumped, and we’re now on a mountain somewhere where little girls are being groomed by a tribe of warrior women for ritual sacrifice to an “angel” that waits somewhere out of sight in the clouds above. The two heroes here are so vulnerable, and the environment they’re escaping from is so dangerous, the book seems caught in a loop of raising tension. Part of the excitement here is just waiting for Guera to finally reveal his angel, which I’m sure is going to be fucked up beyond belief if his mutant offspring are anything to go by, but in the meantime he’s drawing the hell out of the girls’ ongoing escape attempt. This is one of the best new books Aaron's given us since his glory days.

[HotFingersClub]

17. Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez - Locke & Key: ...In Pale Battalions Go...
Hill & Rodriguez have been reuniting on a semi-regular basis for one-shots set in the Locke & Key universe, but it’s mostly felt insubstantial and aimless compared to the original run of miniseries, which so perfectly captured the kind of watertight entertainment factor and sense of adventure that you expect from a classic 80s kids movie. Pale Battalions is the first subsequent entry to match those heights. It’s 1915 and the teenage Jonathan is too young to enlist for WW1 – against his father’s wishes he wants to use the house’s collection of reality-bending keys to turn the tide of war in France and he’s prepared to be as manipulative and deceitful as necessary to get to the trenches. Hill writes him as a great, morally suspect child antihero, probably the strongest protagonist the series has had so far, and it’s exciting to see the complex world-building and magical systems of the house being opened up into this dark and threatening world of trench warfare. Locke & Key is a genuine modern classic as far as I’m concerned, and this miniseries has been a total return to form.

[HotFingersClub]

16. Jonathan Hickman et al. - X of Swords
So I think I may be in the minority on this one, but on balance I still really enjoyed X of Swords. I think most people would accept that Hickman’s X-Men has been a bit of a slow start at best, and after the expert worldbuilding of HoXPoX, it may seem like an odd move to then burrow down into some obscure swords n sorcery Captain Britain lore for your first big crossover but heck, I guess it’s also pretty cool. I loved the dramatic expansion of the X-Men’s world into this bizarre collection of fantasy universes, and the parade of weird new characters with outlandish power sets. Even if I was sometimes disappointed in how it played out with its frustrating narrative tricks and wild tonal moodswings between issues, I really welcome Hickman’s ambition in going off-piste and bringing something to the table other than the same old rota of Phoenix/Sentinels/Magneto. In the backstory of Apocalypse, his vengeful children and his lost bride, I think he found a grand romantic sweep, and a sense of genuine dramatic weight and epic scope that was only partially undermined by the silly stuff going on in the margins. If he could have written the whole thing himself I think it would have been a genuine smash.

[HotFingersClub]

Excited to see what people list. I'm finishing up mine too, felt like it was a pretty slow comics year in terms of stuff I really loved but still had a good set of favorites.

Didn't read Spy Island, I wound up disappointed with Man-Eaters over time but should still check that out.

I think Spy Island is closer to Mockingbird if that's helpful, and doesn't outstay its welcome the way Man-Eaters did

[Drinky]

Man-Eaters somehow managed to get ahead of itself (by diving into self-referential metatext) and not really go anywhere (basically failing to develop any character or relationship, or even resolve a plot line) at same time.

So yeah, I avoided Spy Island because of that (and because I didn't really like Mockingbird all that much once it was all said and done), but maybe I should give it a shot?

[Smiling Penner-Lite]

thanks guys, one of the threads I look forward to every year. I appreciate your hard work and willingness to share so that I can binge them every January

[HotFingersClub]

Man-Eaters somehow managed to get ahead of itself (by diving into self-referential metatext) and not really go anywhere (basically failing to develop any character or relationship, or even resolve a plot line) at same time.

So yeah, I avoided Spy Island because of that (and because I didn't really like Mockingbird all that much once it was all said and done), but maybe I should give it a shot?

If you didn't like either of those books I'd say you could safely skip it. It's good, but not drastically different

[Ron]

I need to check out Ewing's GotG. Immortal Hulk is easily my favorite book of at least the last few years

[sevenarts]

Love to see some attention for the new series of Locke & Key and The Goddamned, both very solid returns. Aaron's star has seemingly fallen so much these days, but the new Goddamned is such a good reminder of how brutal, intense, and inventive he can be at his best. Really strong, agreed that it's much better than the comparatively forgettable first miniseries.

[bugsbunnyseance]

Didn't get to read as much as I wanted to this year, but I liked 'The Montague Twins' a lot. Looking forward to the next book.

[sevenarts]

TOP 10 GRAPHIC NOVELS, ONESHOTS, MINICOMICS, ETC. (PART 1)


10. Paying the Land | Joe Sacco
Sacco's first book of long-form journalism in 8 years, a look at the northern Canadian indigenous people the Dene, and the complicated issues of land, religion, colonization, traditionalism, and climate change that swirl around them. True to form, this is thoughtful, probing journalism, based mostly on interviews and research conducted during a couple of trips to the remote, hard-to-reach areas where these tribes live. This feels like something that could be a long, in-depth Atlantic or New Yorker piece, fleshed out with Sacco's crisp, detailed visuals. The Dene are a fascinating people, and their history and present situation have a lot to say about white North America's mistreatment and exploitation of the native tribes who originally inhabited all this land. Especially harrowing were the chapters on Canada's longstanding policy of separating native children from their parents and forcibly sending them off to faraway Catholic-managed schools, where at best they were deliberately stripped of their heritage and punished for using their own language, at worst sexually and physically abused or killed through neglect and mismanagement. There's profound empathy in the way Sacco continually captures and documents the Dene, focusing especially on their faces, bringing their stories and views to life, giving them a concrete reality that was so often denied by the Canadian government and the companies that sought to exploit them. Though a daunting read and in some ways rather stodgy formally, it's also a powerful and important book, a great piece of journalism, and a great reminder of why Sacco is one of the few people who does comics journalism at this level.


9. Maids | Katie Skelly
Skelly applies her deadpan, quietly minimalist, elegant style to the grisly "true crime" tale of the Papin sisters, the infamous maids who brutally murdered their employers and have inspired many previous fictionalized media accounts over the years. There's an obvious class subtext to the story's focus on young women from miserable family circumstances, forced into servitude with few other options available to them, but Skelly doesn't really foreground those concerns. Her approach is austere and direct, focusing on surfaces and the mundane rhythms of the everyday - which makes the ultimate complete rupture all the more startling and effective. Eerie, inexplicable, and subtly beautiful, this is really great - a book that at times can feel so simple and straightforward until its meaning twists away, uncaptured, into darker shadows.


8. Goblin Girl | Moa Romanova
For a debut autobio comic from a young creator, this is remarkably confident and complex. Romanova's comic alter-ego struggles with crippling panic attacks while trying to maintain connections with her friends, make art, and juggle an increasingly complicated relationship with an older "Known TV Guy" who she meets on Tinder. Romanova's art is straightforward on its surface, and there are definite echoes of DeForge and Parrish, but she gets a lot of expressiveness out of a few lines, especially the way she draws faces and body language - at one point I could practically hear the voice of her therapist just because of how good the subtle way the character shrugs and leans forward is. The shifting textures of her backgrounds, and her use of screentones and spot color, adds to the book's strong personality. There's lots of intense emotion throughout, often from unexpected places - the scene where a store owner breaks down crying over his cat is a standout - and it's funny as hell just as often.


7. A Gleaming Part 2 | Adam de Souza
An inventive, formalist party scene, with a constant Altmanesque clatter of side conversations and snippets of dialogue. De Souza has a good rhythm in showing the overall chaos, then carving out a quiet little character moment amidst the tumult, then letting the din crowd back in again. It's all such simple stuff in theory - friends reuniting after having gone their separate ways, exes longing for one another, misunderstandings and unrequited feelings and so on - but de Souza's confident, distinctive cartooning makes it all pop as though it's the first time this kind of story has ever been told. The characters just all look so good and all so distinct from one another, and de Souza is so good at enacting little gags with body language and motion - like the way the drunken Joon stumbles forward off the couch across several panels when she's excited to greet an arriving friend. I'm also really enjoying the way the story starts to subtly shift into stranger territory, like the seemingly innocuous nighttime montages that mix in a few disturbing non-sequiturs hinting at darker ongoings in the surrounding town.


6. Magician A | Natsuko Ishitsuyo
An incredibly strange and haunting manga about young women who feel separate from their peers, and who enact their difference in sexual experimentation and oddball business endeavors (usually also sexual). Ishitsuyo is a really unique talent, with an unusual art style - she spent several years studying in the Czech Republic, and her art definitely seems like an organic blend of Japanese and European styles. Her characters' eyes, especially, are striking, these tiny inexpressive circles that give the faces she draws an eerie, doll-like quality. The stories are mostly of a piece thematically, with a sequence of young protagonists, each of whom believes she's special, not like those around her, and who struggles to make the world understand what it is she has to offer. The stories are often squirmy and unsettling in their sexuality, but there's little sense of titillation or exploitation in Ishitsuyo's approach - sex, in these stories, is often just another business transaction, or else a chance for the characters to work out their sense of their own identities and what they want. Fascinating stuff, rich and twisty and ambiguous in all the best ways, with an incredibly assured aesthetic in every panel.

[sevenarts]

TOP 10 GRAPHIC NOVELS, ONESHOTS, MINICOMICS, ETC. (PART 2)


5. Familiar Face | Michael DeForge
Even for DeForge, this is a pretty rich and resonant work, capturing the not-so-far-fetched experience of living in a world increasingly mediated by synthetic AIs, sentient corporate brands, and bizarre transformations to both the environment and the body triggered from afar like phone app updates. It's haunting, even when the imagery is absurd and deadpan funny. I think the key DeForgian touch here is the way he makes the main character's clingy phone app an actual, affecting character - programmed to be romantically attracted to its owner, which mostly manifests as an irritating over-eagerness to fulfill every desire before it's even verbalized.


4. Cowboy | Rikke Villadsen
Villadsen pulls apart the western genre and its conventions - especially regarding gender and sexuality - in ways that are both irreverently funny and really incisive. Her art is dense and detailed, and makes the process very transparent, continually calling into question the reality of the story. Lines are partially erased, limbs are drawn multiple times in sloppy copies to convey motion, and at times the characters seem almost ghostly, the backgrounds showing through them, multiple layers of reality bleeding together on the page as all these lines overlap and conflict. She also uses very obvious cut-and-paste inserts in even more disruptive ways: at one point one of the characters inexplicably gets doubled up within the same panel, standing next to himself. It gives the feeling of a witty Godardian collage, which is supported by the way Villadsen borrows tropes and quotations from western classics, making them her own by radically undermining the genre's assumptions about gender and character. Villadsen makes amazing use of the comic form throughout; this book is as formally playful and inventive as it is thematically rich.


3. Sports Is Hell | Ben Passmore
Passmore's ferocious new book grapples mightily with the current political and racial landscape through a satirical apocalypse in which riots over a contested Super Bowl game explode into a civil war with multiple factions murdering one another in the streets. He's engaging in complex political commentary that includes multiple layers of back-and-forth debate about organizing tactics, racial justice, and sectarianism, while also making it work as a bold, cartoony piece of action-packed entertainment with characters who are always very obvious symbols but also function as real characters with real voices and arcs of their own. It's an incredibly difficult thing to pull off, this 60-page political cartoon/action movie, but Passmore balances it all brilliantly. It's as wildly, darkly funny as it is trenchant, packed with memorable figures, but Passmore's vision, for all its uneasy laughs, is bleak and unsparing. Part of the book's despairing brilliance is the clear sense that there's no easy answer, no obvious opening for all these warring ideologies to come to terms with one another and work together towards anything. Everyone's talking past each other, even those ostensibly on the same side, and the system around them does such a good job of amplifying those differences while those in power violently defend their positions. It's all rendered in big, blocky panels with Passmore's elegantly rubbery figures often framed against backgrounds of pure stark black.


2. Vision | Julia Gfrörer
Eerie, unsettling, and thoroughly ambiguous, Gfrorer's latest book explores the sexual frustration and seething, repressed rage of a 19th century widow watching herself settle into a lonely life of service, caring for her needy brother and his ailing but contemptuous wife. Gfrorer's scratchy, meticulous drawing is really something: made up of so many angry little marks, and yet there's always this gulf of space and emptiness in it as well, which creates a lot of the tension in her art. I think this is some of her best work, absolutely ferocious in the way it picks at these themes of a woman's longing and this restrictive society's disdain for her desires. The supernatural elements winding through it all - namely a haunted mirror inhabited by a voyeuristic demon - end up being somehow secondary to the more grounded, everyday horrors.


1. Boston Corbett | Andy Douglas Day
A 1,400-page pseudo-biography of an obscure historical footnote: the hatmaker, Union soldier, and deranged religious zealot Thomas "Boston" Corbett, the man who briefly became an American hero for killing Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth. It's drawn in a loose, fluid style that's tempting to call amateurish on first glance, though deeper investigation reveals the compositional and textural sophistication in Day's approach. His style is constantly shifting. Character designs are unstable from page to page, including the central character who drastically changes his appearance without explanation several times. A single figure or surface might feature a mix of inked and uninked pencils for some interestingly crude effects. Day has a wholly idiosyncratic style and philosophy that's all his own, marrying aesthetic looseness to traditional serial virtues like narrative and gag construction. His lumpen drawings and wiggly-limbed figures can look kinda ugly or merely functional at times, but his aesthetic is quite effective at conjuring the feelings of unease, hilarity, and surreal instability that are at the core of his work.

It all comes together into a book that's utterly without peer: "there's nothing else like this" is maybe overused but it certainly applies here. It's a uniquely difficult book to grasp in its entirety, and not just because of its length. Day embraces uncertainty, allowing his characters and situations to transform themselves - sometimes literally on the page, right in front of us, sometimes somewhere off-screen, between pages. Boston Corbett is overstuffed, grand, simply bursting with wild images and ideas - amoral parables, terrifyingly rendered visions of religious ecstasy, leaps outside of time or into a pristine sci-fi future. At the same time, there's nothing scattershot or half-assed about Day's approach, and he commits completely to the logic of each situation, even if what came before or what's coming next exactly contradicts it. Each scene just reads so well - so smoothly and naturally and often hilariously - that it's easy to lose sight of just how weird this book is in its totality. That contradiction, maybe, is part of the point, and gets to the heart of Day's philosophy of biography: in capturing a single life, he presents a series of scenes that each have a certain logic and internal consistency as stories in themselves, and only when assembled together as a portrait of a person and a span of years do they begin to seem so absurd and incongruous.

[sevenarts]

BONUS: 5 GREAT COMIC SHOP SERIES


5. Hellblazer | Simon Spurrier, Aaron Campbell, & Mattias Bergara
4. Strange Adventures | Tom King, Mitch Gerads, & Doc Shaner
3. Lost Soldiers | Ales Kot & Luca Casalanguida
2. Decorum | Jonathan Hickman & Mike Huddleston
1. Wonder Woman: Dead Earth | Daniel Warren Johnson

[window]

1. familiar face
2. a gleaming 2
3. 8-Lane Runaways
4. sports is hell
5. william softkey & purple spider

[bluemovers]

this thread is an annual board highlight for me. thanks so much for keeping it going, can’t wait to check all of these titles out.

[Quizzical]

do i have to go in comic stores to buy these? i dont know any. obv amazon is an option, but is there a good digital source? i dont mind paying for things (or not...)

[Quizzical]

or: how do i buy comics

[brian dennehy fan]

afraid i’m going to have to ask you to hand over your dr. manhattan homer av after those posts

[Quizzical]

fine ill just do a google

[Quizzical]

were you kids just on my lawn?

[teratoid_heights]

Are re-issues fair game or only new releases for this?

[sevenarts]

do i have to go in comic stores to buy these? i dont know any. obv amazon is an option, but is there a good digital source? i dont mind paying for things (or not...)

Most of the stuff we’re talking about in here is going to be collected which means you can buy it anywhere you’d buy books. If you’re into more indie stuff I like to buy direct from artists/publishers whenever that’s an option but the more mainstream books will be available anywhere.

I don’t really know where people buy digital books these days, free digital is certainly around but kinda a pain in the ass to manage for casual readers.

[sevenarts]

Are re-issues fair game or only new releases for this?

There’s no rules, do whatever you want.

[HotFingersClub]

do i have to go in comic stores to buy these? i dont know any. obv amazon is an option, but is there a good digital source? i dont mind paying for things (or not...)

Most of the stuff we’re talking about in here is going to be collected which means you can buy it anywhere you’d buy books. If you’re into more indie stuff I like to buy direct from artists/publishers whenever that’s an option but the more mainstream books will be available anywhere.

I don’t really know where people buy digital books these days, free digital is certainly around but kinda a pain in the ass to manage for casual readers.

I think Comixology is still the big one for digital comics right? Most of the mainstream stuff will make it there eventually

[HotFingersClub]

Great list sevenarts, obviously mirrors mine uncomfortably closely because we have almost the exact same taste. Boston Corbett has been a total nightmare to get hold of in the UK - currently waiting on my second copy after the first one was lost