Another year passed, and another year of reading a lot but not as much as I would have liked. Surrounded by stacks of comics, graphic novels, novels, and impassive action figures observing the chaos, I finally curate a 10 great list. Not a BEST list, but a great. Because I didn’t read everything. Even then, this article is so late into 2025 because I bought books I knew I’d love and then didn’t get around to reading them until after the disaster that was January.
Then I’ve noticed something – I’m drawn to books that aren’t just about superheroics. They’re about things we should know and take inspiration from. My thoughts on at least one shifted in the months since I first read it; it went from great to “ah… that’s what it means.”
These are Great Comics of 2024. Not all the Great Comics of 2024. Just a list of 10 I narrowed down, rules for inclusion:
- Should be reasonably accessible in one volume, either already or about to be when the first arc has finished.
- Unless it’s a standalone graphic novel (still comics), more than 1 or 2 issues had to come out this year. A book can start out strong and falter, so at least 3 issues need to establish this is one to recommend.
- Crossover events are right out. The average reader looking to pick up a good read can be easily drowned in the muck of other continuity.
- A slight cheat here – in three cases, there’s a sub-line occurring that you might have skipped over and so I’m recommending one specific book from each sub-line. You’ll know when we get there.
- Any given writer, no matter how good, should only get one slot here because if you like one book by them, chances are you’ll like more and seek them out.
Books are listed in alphabetical order; it’s hard enough narrowing down to 10. If something you loved isn’t here, recommend it to me! Fanboy Planet is an Amazon affiliate, so purchases made through links on this and other pages may generate a commission for this site. If you would rather support your local comic book store I applaud and encourage that! (Clearly, I’m as bad a businessman as I am a schedule keeper.)
Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta, Clayton Cowles, and Frank Martin
To my surprise, 2024 was a year that found me reading more Batman books than in the last five. Part of it was DC taking risks and allowing creators to tell little one-off stories, and almost all were excellent. But Absolute Batman stands out because sight unseen I thought I was going to hate it. The premise of a universe infused with the evil of Darkseid sounded like this would be nothing but depressing. Especially as it was going to be a whole line of titles running parallel to the regular DC Universe. Eventually, they’ll no doubt crash into each other. But for now… all the titles are good.
Absolute Batman stands above the rest by an inch, and DC editorial knew that because that’s where they started the “Absolute” line. Snyder and Dragotta did what a good reboot should do. It isn’t just a “what if Batman were poor?” twist. Instead, it’s stripping the character down to the core of why he is who he is, and what would really happen in a world where it feels like darkness is always ascending.
This Bruce Wayne is younger and angrier. Most of those we know of as his Rogues’ Gallery are actually his friends, who he leverages for inside information on the criminal enterprises in Gotham City. And the further you get into the story, the line between comic book and real world current events blurs with frightening consistency. Here, the Joker is a billionaire industrialist who never smiles but sure seems an awful lot like someone running rampant in our government who thinks he’s hilarious. Before the Absolute line launched, I didn’t think I needed a new Batman. Now it’s the book I look forward to most. It’s dark and angry and yet offers hope. (The same is true for Absolute Superman and Absolute Wonder Woman — both versions of the heroes you think you know but here, really don’t. Yet the core is the same.)
Battle of the Black Stone by Jim Zub, Jonas Scharf, Jao Canola, Richard Starkings, and Tyler Smith
Technically, I should label this under Conan the Barbarian. But this Robert E. Howard character crossover from Titan Comics is so much bigger than just Conan. Zub and the creative team find a not too implausible way to bring characters together from prehistory to modern history, all fighting something dark and unknowable that eternally plagues mankind.
Set firmly in the Hyborean Age with side trips to more familiar times, the story highlights characters the average comics fan may have never encountered before. You may have heard of Solomon Kane; he even had a movie. However, a pulp writer named James Allison differs from creator Howard only in an ability to remember past lives – though he did appear in Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian: Serpent War, that may not have had the impact and reach of Titan’s books. Since Red Sonja is actually a recreation of a Howard character and thus NOT eligible for this book, we get the interesting Dark Agnes. There’s more – all of them still in print somewhere on Amazon, and which I’m slowly working my way through.
It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t also a cracking good adventure. So if you think you know Conan, but only through the movies, this is a terrific way to discover the wider world of Robert E. Howard. As a bonus, you can also pick up James Lovegrove’s prose novel, Conan: Cult of the Obsidian Moon, also from Titan. It obliquely ties into Zub and company’s comic book saga, but in all candor isn’t absolutely necessary. Yet you’d be missing out on a terrific adventure. That’s a sentence I can write about the regular ongoing Conan the Barbarian comic as well as the magazine Savage Sword of Conan. What can I say? Titan got me hooked.
Big Jim and the White Boy by David F. Walker, Marcus Kwame Anderson, and Isabell Strubel
When I was in high school, a teacher told me that Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was possibly the Great American Novel. Do critics still hold it in that high esteem? Probably not, but it still casts a long shadow in which living writers find pockets of light. Last year saw two revisions of Twain’s novel from Jim’s point of view, and it’s hard not to read Big Jim and the White Boy with thoughts of Percival Everett’s novel James.
Instead of comparison, though, it’s better to marvel how two authors can take a similar idea and create such original works. Big Jim and the White Boy acknowledges Twain’s drawing from his own boyhood for Huck Finn, then makes it a small part of a larger history. As runs through much of Walker’s work, the focus is on the power of story. Not just in writing a narrative, but in a legend growing beyond itself across the decades.
We “see” the original “real” story of Jim and Huck’s journey, but it’s being spun by an elderly Jim and Huck in the 1930s. Twain captured a fiction, but the two old friends still argue about what happened in truth. Then Walker adds another layer with a fictional modern historian exploring her own connection to the past.
Anderson delineates it all with a cartoon line that draws the reader in without skimping a bit on the emotion. As old men, Jim and Huck are still recognizable as their younger selves. For all its simplicity, the art packs a wallop.
Big Jim and the White Boy is complex and powerful, especially so as I write this in a year in which these stories and legends are actively being squelched by an elected administration. Goodness may triumph, but never forget that Huck’s Pa is alive and unfortunately well. Thankfully, artists like David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson are alive to remind us what matters.
The Boy Wonder by Juni Ba, Chris O’Halloran, and Aditya Bidikar
Speaking of the power of stories… I started this list off with a Batman story and here we are again. Sort of. Born to inherit the mantle of R’as al Ghul, Damian Wayne is a sort of dark fairy tale prince. Taken or given to his father Bruce Wayne, he struggles to subsume his upbringing as an assassin to his father’s mission. Sometimes Damian can be a very good boy, and sometimes his anger overtakes him.
When taken hostage himself, he spins tales of his siblings in Batman’s war on crime to the kidnaper. Through these tales, he recasts all the Robins as fairy tale archetypes. In the telling of legends, he comes to understand his own place in the family and his importance as both a crime fighter and as the son of Batman.
Ba draws this in a fantastical stylized way, with the colors of O’Halloran and lettering of Bidikar playing just as important a role. The result turns the down to Earth street-level Bat-family into an almost magical children’s story, if not for the violence.
Sure, somewhere else on the stands there’s a Batman/Superman book that retells it all from a magical medieval perspective, but this book could technically fall under “main” continuity. Though really, it shouldn’t. It’s a unique and enchanting spotlight on characters the average non-reader thinks of as being in the shadow of the Bat. Ba and his co-creators prove that just because many of them once called themselves Robin, they’re all different, and all heroes in their own right.
Especially Damian.
Huge Detective by Adam Rose and Magenta King
40 years ago, the Giants woke up from their slumber in the Earth. No one knows for sure how many millennia they had been there, and if they know, they’re not telling. What matters is they stride across all lands and what should have been a one-sided war somehow wasn’t. Humanity didn’t just survive; we found a way toward a reasonable if occasionally uneasy peace. It involved giving them Australia.
Now, an horrific murder has occurred involving a human witness who both thinks he was the murderer and that he’s a Huge. He’s wrong about that, but because the crime does involve a Huge, the giants send a detective over to assist in the investigation.
From the first issue, Rose and King’s mystery is compelling enough with the twist of this ancient race and the difficulties they have co-existing with our tiny species. Each chapter gets weirder and twistier, adding stranger detail to an incredible feat of world-building. The back of the book includes histories and case files that help illuminate what happened 40 years earlier, and while fascinating, they rightfully still add more questions.
Despite having an almost hilariously blunt title, Huge Detective is a unique book that you can’t forget. I’d say you can’t put it down but we’re still only in the middle of the mystery. Each issue keeps drawing me forward, but I did have to read other books in the meantime. For reasons I don’t know, it’s a little behind schedule right now, but that just means you can pick up the first three issues with plenty of time for the fourth.
Just be careful on your next visit to Australia.
Medusa by Tony Parker, Tamra Bonvillain, and Taylor Esposito
When I first read Medusa last summer, it struck me as a beautifully drawn book with a cool take on a classic figure from mythology. Tony Parker could get a lot of mileage out of telling “lost” stories of a secret protector of humanity that most of us think of as a monster.
That’s thanks to a curse from Zeus that causes everyone to forget the good deeds of Medusa. Only her confrontation with Harry Hamlin, er, Perseus can be remembered. Yet still she fights on, tackling creatures from the mythologies of many cultures. Always, she strives to save humans without reward and without glory. For millennia, she has done what is right simply because it is right.
As with Absolute Batman, however, the past few months have deepened my initial impressions of the book. That Medusa truly acts selflessly is a given, heroic and admirable. Whether Parker intended this or not, she also seems far more Christian than most Christians smugly screaming at some of us. Because of the curse, Medusa’s good deeds have essentially been done in secret. No one lauds her.
In the special chapter Parker let Fanboy Planet run, it’s clear no one thanks her even when they want to. It all fades away to become some other memory.
Enough philosophical musing, though Medusa earns that respect. It’s all done with lush artistry from Parker teaming with Bonvillain for beautiful colors with Esposito providing a stellar lettering job. For now, it’s one volume, and you’ll be glad you let yourself get lost in it.
My Favorite Thing is Monsters: Book 2 by Emil Ferris
I cannot lie. It had been so long between the first and second volumes of Emil Ferris’ heartbreaking story that I feared we’d never actually see Book 2. And sometimes creators work to when the universe really needs them and not when publishers and readers would really like to finish the story. Because re-reading My Favorite Thing is Monsters in February 2025 (it came out in March 2024) means it’s only gained in importance.
The layers are complicated only in describing it. Officially, it’s the “memoir” of Karen Reyes, a biracial queer adolescent investigating the death of her upstairs neighbor in 1960s Chicago. Drawn in ballpoint pen allegedly on lined notebook paper, Karen’s journal veers from expressing the people in her lives as movie monsters to art history lessons from her older brother Deez to trying to process the cold terrible history of the Holocaust uncovered in her investigation. It’s layers upon layers, beautiful and riveting in how Ferris guides us to connect the dots before Karen can without ever losing Karen’s voice.
That voice. We can empathize with the moment Karen finds a friend she can confess to how she sees herself: a werewolf detective. That might sound silly, but it’s a powerful metaphor for not just accepting who she herself is but having the confidence that it’s okay. Her investigation also leads her places she knows she doesn’t want to find, but her resolution is beautiful.
Ferris throws in a few extra wrinkles Part 1 had only slightly alluded to, which means really that it may be best to take both volumes together. If it’s a slow journey, it’s because you don’t want to miss a detail. It’s important because the points Ferris makes need to be said even louder for those in the back. I’m happy to say that in the last decade, my favorite thing remains My Favorite Thing is Monsters.
Origins of Marvel Comics Deluxe Edition by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Don Heck, Gene Colan, Larry Lieber, Herb Trimpe, John Buscema, John Romita, Jim Mooney, Artie Simek, Alex Ross, and Chris Ryall
That’s a lot of names, and I’m sure I missed some. Thanks to Chris Ryall’s editing on this Deluxe Edition of the classic Marvel reprint volume, the names after Stan’s get more focus than the original edition gave.
This isn’t to rip into Stan Lee’s ego. For a book that continued changing people’s minds about the value of comics, Stan was as useful to comics’ image as the image was to Stan. When Origins of Marvel Comics first showed up in bookstores, it gave some younger readers access to old stories that they’d only seen referenced in footnotes.
50 years later in 2024, though, we know a lot more. This book is still pretty good to give to new readers, but the source material is available in many formats. What this offers is a balance – Stan’s original “face of comics” pitchman material with Ryall bringing in what was really going on. There’s perspective from Tom Brevoort, Stan’s younger brother Larry Lieber, the original editor Linda Sunshine, and master artist Alex Ross.
You’ll still read the myths of Marvel’s creation as told by Stan, but Ryall provides a handy cellar of salt for that consumption. The stories are still magical, and that’s not just referring to Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange. If the Marvel Cinematic Universe has lost some of its luster, go back to these tales from the 1960s and really understand why we came to love the Fantastic Four, Hulk, and even Namor (though he’s different onscreen). Dive into that lush Ditko art on Doctor Strange and really wonder what would have happened if he had continued on as the Asian character Ditko so clearly intended. (Never mind that weird Chandu the Magician explanation Stan gave.)
Even if you have an original copy of this book, you owe it to yourself to have this version on your shelf.
Ultimate X-Men by Peach Momoko, Travis Lanham, and Zack Davisson
Another slight cheat as somehow the entire “new” Ultimate universe from Marvel has been solid. But if you must choose only one because you don’t want to get drawn into yet another intertwined universe – understandable – Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men is the one.
It’s a Japanese horror manga masquerading as an X-Men book or vice versa. Eventually a few characters are vaguely recognizable as people in the mainstream X-books, but not in the way that Spider-Man is obviously Spider-Man. (Storm has been referenced, but she plays an important role in Ultimate Black Panther, so it’s only a reference.)
They’re not even really X-Men yet, a full year in. Instead, these are young teens in Japan coming to grips with horrific abilities that cause death and destruction around them. To find guidance, some flirt with a cult called the Children of the Atom. Most just want to hide in a culture that provides rigor and stability with a healthy respect for the natural world.
Which is where Davisson contributes understanding in the back matter of the book. Momoko isn’t just telling a horror story; she’s opening a gateway to a culture many Americans minimize or fetishize. In each issue Davisson offers context about food, holidays, schoolyard behavior, what have you. This isn’t just a book about creeping dread. You might actually learn something.
But as a side note, yes, all of the Ultimate line has been good if not out and out great. Ultimate X-Men is just something truly different and a cut above the rest.
The Unknown War from Ghost Machine
Redcoat by Geoff Johns, Bryan Hitch, Andrew Currie, Brad Anderson, and Rob Leigh
Finally, we have Johns playing where he should have been for years. Instead of handling other companies’ toys, he’s teamed with some of his favorite writers and artist to create a line of comics both interconnected and not interdependent.
Some of the books have been a little derivative but earnest, such as Geiger (which people have complained to me is just a spin on Fallout but I enjoy anyway). Junkyard Joe feels like it’s what Johns would have done with G.I. Robot had DC given him the chance (also, a solid book).
But it’s Redcoat that provides the most bang for your buck. It may also provide the best foundation for what the long-promised Unknown War actually is. The redcoat in question belongs to and is Simon Pure, a British soldier in the American Revolutionary War who accidentally became immortal. Actually, the founding fathers meant to sacrifice him to make George Washington immortal. For Pure, things tend to go really wrong but somehow benefit him in the long run.
The first arc teams Pure with a young Albert Einstein – as in, a child – to save 19th Century America from another supernatural menace. As fun as that is, it’s not why this book resonated most with me. It’s a deconstruction of the myths of American history that maintains respect for the best of what we’re supposed to be. That’s badly needed right now.
It’s also clearly a redemption tale, which always has my attention. Pure sees himself as a perennial loser but somehow keeps doing noble things. Along the way he seems to be in the wrong place at the right time to make the best of our history happen. At the same time, he might say he’s also there to take the piss out of it.
We need a lot more of that, methinks.
