The best comics and graphic novels of 2024

Nothing beats having a brand new comedian e-book in your sizzling little arms and settling in for a superb learn. Fortuitously, 2024 has delivered incredible comics from each facet of the business — and there are tons extra on the way in which.

However for now, these are Polygon’s finest comics of the primary half of 2024. Keep tuned for extra!

Comics had been thought of eligible in the event that they had been graphic novels printed for the primary time in 2024 or sequence that had been collected for the primary time, or printed their last assortment, in 2024. Every part on this listing is out there in paperback or collected type to your keen arms — no worries for trade-waiters.

Tokyo These Days

By Taiyo Matsumoto

I’ve by no means learn a cartoonist that makes me really feel the area between every panel as strongly as Taiyo Matsumoto. He doesn’t need to fill a web page with the buzzing of cicadas or the heartbeat of a metropolis’s streets for me to listen to them in my ear; on a deep instinctual stage he is aware of what two photographs juxtaposed collectively will create that atmosphere, and fill his pages with room tone. He’s a grasp of quiet.

There are additionally few cartoonists as loud as Matsumoto. His distorted figures and grotesquely expressive close-ups are a gonzo hallmark of his work like Tekkonkinkreet or Ping Pong, which makes the nonetheless moments in these tales stand out all of the extra.

Picture: Taiyo Matsumoto/Viz

But Tokyo These Days has none of these moments of noisy bravura. It’s a extra restrained, somber work, about Shiozawa, a profession manga editor who surreptitiously decides to give up the enterprise. But earlier than he totally settles into retirement, he provides himself a last to-do listing: to satisfy with a number of struggling cartoonists he used to work with and ask what occurred to the love and fervour that after lived of their tales, to see if there may be any little bit of romance left within the medium that wrung all of them out. Burning out has by no means appeared so stunning. —Joshua Rivera

Transformers

By Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer

Picture: Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer/Skybound

Picture: Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer/Skybound

Picture: Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer/Skybound

Picture: Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer/Skybound

Skybound Leisure’s stealth launch of an interconnected G.I. Joe/Transformers setting was one of many best-kept comedian e-book secrets and techniques of 2023. What has develop into clear because the Energon Universe has rolled out, nevertheless, is that Transformers is amongst 2024’s finest comics set in any interconnected model universe.

Daniel Warren Johnson’s Transformers is a struggle comedian the place the tanks and planes can punch and kick and vertical suplex one another off of cliffs — and it’s a number of the most stunning motion placed on the web page this 12 months. There’s extra of a way of scale and weight in any given panel of Transformers than there may be in the entire of a Michael Bay film. And with regards to implied movement in a static picture, Johnson is solely probably the greatest within the enterprise.

Picture: Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer/Skybound

However for a e-book that’s 90% the wildest “large robots that may flip into vehicles and planes” motion you’ve ever seen, the stakes are as small and private because the households of precocious teenagers Spike and Carly. The true miracle of Transformers is how Johnson retains all of it pinned to an emotional floor — and when the fights are so good, that’s saying one thing. —Susana Polo

Doom

By Sanford Greene, Jonathan Hickman, Rachellle Rosenberg, and Joe Caramanga

Picture: Sanford Greene, Jonathan Hickman/Marvel Comics

There’s a tendency to overrepresent the contribution of writers in discussions about comics, particularly after they loom as giant as Jonathan Hickman. So it’s one thing that Doom doesn’t even open along with his phrases, however with late rapper MF Doom’s. “Residing on borrowed time/The clock ticks quicker” begins the stand-alone one-shot, cribbing the opening bars of “Accordion,” a observe off the era-defining album Madvillainy. It’s a superb tone-setter: The author, just like the reader, is simply alongside for the trip.

The splendidly kinetic artist/author Sanford Greene is the MC right here, setting the stage for a narrative concerning the biggest villain within the Marvel Universe on the finish of all the things. This wouldn’t be the primary story about Physician Doom because the final man standing between a model of the Marvel Universe and a Galactus gone mad — however it’s maybe probably the most thrilling. Doom’s lean, imply script units the stakes as large as they arrive, after which will get out of the way in which to let Sanford Greene completely rip, folding the character’s total historical past into one cosmic battle. His linework is unrestrained chaos becoming the story’s scope, with Greene and colorist Rachelle Rosenberg rendering the top of the world in magenta and inexperienced.

Picture: Sanford Greene, Jonathan Hickman/Marvel Comics

In a fallow period for American superhero comics, Doom is a goddamn meteor streaking throughout the sky, with metaphors made flesh wrestling above all of existence. The magic trick Greene and Hickman pull here’s a very previous one, when you concentrate on it. Right here it’s, the naked minimal of what a superb superhero comedian ought to be, spun into one of many coolest rattling books you may learn. Straw spun into gold. —JR

My Favourite Factor Is Monsters Guide Two

By Emil Ferris

Picture: Emil Ferris/Fantagraphics

Picture: Emil Ferris/Fantagraphics

In 2017, Emil Ferris’ debut graphic novel, My Favourite Factor Is Monsters, exploded out of nowhere to develop into one of the acclaimed books of the 2010s. Offered because the spiral notebooks of Karen Reyes, a precocious grade schooler who loves artwork and creature options, the comedian was dazzling in its voice and density. By means of Karen’s monster-obsessed eyes, Ferris gave readers a vivid ballpoint-pen portrait of ’60s Chicago and its intercourse staff, queer and BIPOC denizens, and associated outcasts as Karen makes an attempt to unravel a homicide and uncovers a household secret.

The primary half of a two-volume work, My Favourite Factor Is Monsters spent seven years suspended on a cliffhanger as a dispute between Ferris and publisher Fantagraphics stored the destiny of Guide Two in limbo till now. Ferris’ battle to publish this voluminous work has not been in useless — My Favourite Factor Is Monsters Guide Two is as awe-inspiring a conclusion as its predecessor was a gap act.

Following the template set by the primary quantity, Karen’s journals depict a woman coping with tumultuous change inside and with out, in parallel with town round her. Underneath Karen’s pen, fictitious monsters are a consolation as she involves grips with a life extra perilous than she realized, one haunted by gangsters, crooked cops, and killers that threatens to swallow her and her older brother Diego alive. Solutions to the questions posed within the first act elude her within the second — and those she does discover are overwhelming.

Picture: Emil Ferris/Fantagraphics

Ferris has completed one thing unbelievable in these two volumes. She’s crafted a coming-of-age story like no different, a comic book that considers the methods we now have made monsters out of the harmless so monstrousness can run rampant, and funneled all via the pen of a 10-year-old unaware she’s skilled a lifetime of horror. She attracts herself as a little bit werewolf to manage, but additionally possibly to encourage. There are good monsters and unhealthy monsters, and it’s on us to resolve which we’re going to be. —JR

Newburn

By Chip Zdarsky and Jacob Phillips

Picture: Chip Zdarsky, Jacob Phillips/Picture Comics

Against the law drama lives or dies on its tone, and a detective sequence lives or dies on its hook — and Newburn, a contemporary noir crime drama with the construction of a detective sequence, lives fairly nicely certainly.

Newburn’s tight two-volume story introduces Easton Newburn, personal detective, as he takes on an apprentice accomplice. The twist is that Newburn doesn’t work for simply anyone: He’s the impartial social gathering that every one of New York Metropolis’s organized crime households depend upon to get to the true reality. Author Chip Zdarsky spins up a cadre of homicide mysteries the place the reply is rarely simply whodunit however “who’s gonna pay for it with out throwing town into gang struggle,” whereas artist Jacob Phillips’ understated colours and linework belie simply how gifted you need to be to make a e-book with this many conversations really feel tense and dynamically staged.

Picture: Chip Zdarsky, Jacob Phillips/Picture Comics

Picture: Chip Zdarsky, Jacob Phillips/Picture Comics

Newburn’s marriage of crime comics and the odd-couple detective duo slides simply into probably the most compelling questions of each genres: This detective is the most effective at what he does, however has he left his humanity behind him? And if these righteous folks dwell so near the unrighteous, how lengthy till they topple over the brink? Or have they already? —SP