Last week I reviewed this year's Eisner nominees for Kids and Early Readers. Today, finally, I review the nominees for Teens (see my post of May 19 for a summary of all young readers’ categories). The voting deadline, gulp, is this Friday, June 5!

I have to say, I am very sorry not to see Ngozi Ukazu's Flip, one of last year's best graphic novels, in this category. Not to gripe, but, man, Flip is great: a body-swap story about self-loathing, self-love, class, race, gender, privilege, and a bunch of other things we may think we understand but don't, and can't, never enough. It steers into controversy but avoids cant in favor of well-earned, and delightful, characterization. It's laugh-out-loud funny yet sometimes hits like a cold slap. The plot is expertly rigged, knotted and surprising and never obvious. Ngozi is a terrific cartoonist, she knows her characters inside and out, her writing is generous, never cheap, and this is a book I'll always remember. I taught Flip this past semester, and I'll be teaching it again this fall. If you don't know it, check it out!

Even without Flip, oof, this is a VERY hard category to judge. Every book below is good -- not just pretty good but genuinely good: distinctive, memorable, and gutsy. Most are excellent, so I've been wracking my brain trying to decide which one to vote for. This slate is historically strong, as strong a selection of graphic novels as I've ever seen in the Eisners in any category. Choosing is hard!

​Left with his grandparents in the countryside when his parents are in crisis, a young boy, Antoine, strives to avoid provoking his domineering grandfather, a skilled, obsessive, and dangerous hunter. One day, when “Grampy” and Antoine are in the woods foraging for mushrooms (black trumpets, or Craterellus cornucopioides), something inexplicable and magic-realist happens, shifting the tale into a new register: a surreal survival story and a meditation on wildness versus humanity. Bournel-Bosson’s style is compulsively detailed, his figures often grotesque, and the book is a suite of saturated colors, each new scene boasting its own palette. An enigmatic, unnerving parable.

​Overachiever Angelica hides her griefs behind perpetual busyness, until one day she crashes. Then she starts chatting, via socials, with Peri the Bear, costumed mascot of a local theater troupe. His messages comfort her. As the troupe rehearses the fairy tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (which stars a white bear), Angelica wonders, who is Peri underneath that suit? Will they click in person? Nguyen says he set out to create something “fun and frothy,” but this gorgeously cartooned romance, with its superbly written cast and multidimensional plot, wrong-footed me in the best way. Extraordinary.

​This smart-as-hell mystery, set at a girls’ academy in the 1980s, follows Abby, an alienated misfit who reluctantly begins sleuthing after one of the school’s social butterflies winds up dead. What Abby learns unravels the school’s history and careful façade. Tamaki writes competitive young women brilliantly, with a simmering sense of classism, conformism, and the brittleness of friendship. Abby’s queerness, suspected and gossiped about by the other girls, adds a crucial layer; their skulking homophobia cuts like a knife. Goux’s expressive cartooning, done in a delicious pink-and-gray palette, is inventive, exacting, and elegant. This made my early Faves of 2025. 

​The finale of Walden’s Walking Dead spinoff trilogy hits like a hammer. Somehow, its franchise origins only underscore its undiluted Walden-ness. Here, a walled-in town provides a would-be refuge from the zombie plague, a kind of utopian respite, but the vibe is anti-utopian and fierce, as rival leaders argue over what’s best. What is the price of security? What happens when you trade human vulnerability for militarized strength, openness for armored defense? Clementine, savaged by grief, wades into this trouble and begins to lose her moorings. Astringent and harrowing, then again touching, this humane thriller also made my Favorites list.

​This queer romance set in the aughts depicts first love and codependency shadowed by long-suppressed grief. High-school seniors Carson and Ash are the kind of friends whose friendship seems impenetrable to everybody else. At first, I could not grasp their dialogue, but I could tell that Wroten did, and that the two fit together. Gradually, their connection turns to romance; I found myself charmed, but worried for them. The novel is structured as a mix CD of emo bands (each chapter a song) and rife with telling period details. I love the restless pages, kinetic cartooning, and teeming social background.

Alex has disappeared, a suspected runaway or victim. Three of his friends, plus his angry, guilt-haunted brother, team up to find him, and each new chapter takes a different perspective. This novel is very dense, partly due to a cramped format, partly because Young mixes literal supernatural horror with a searching depiction of schizoaffective bipolar disorder and the stigmatizing of mental illness. The cartooning is exquisite, the characterization sensitive, and the pages often stunning (the chapter that reveals Alex’s plight is a terrifying tour de force). Alas, it doesn’t quite work: the horror tropes are distracting, the rules baffling. Sigh.

Final notes: There are seventeen books, all told, in the three young readers' categories. Over the past week and a half, I've read or reread them all. All but four I got from the Los Angeles Public Library, and believe me, that's a privilege I do not take for granted. To have access to one of the nation's largest municipal libraries, with more than seventy branches, plus a request system that can move books from any one branch to another in a matter of days, is a great gift. I've been able to do these Eisner roundups over the past three years because the Library keeps me supplied! Thank you, LAPL.

FWIW, Teens was the hardest category for me to choose a favorite in. Early Readers was a bit challenging too. Kids, for whatever reason, was easier. But all three categories include more than one book that I would be glad to see win. Teens has, I think, at least four nominees that merit Eisners.

Last year, when the dust cleared, I thought that about two-thirds of the nominees were books of historic heft: titles to be remembered over the long term. I pretty much think the same thing this year. Last year's slate included three or four of my favorite 20th-century graphic novels, and I can say the same this time. This is a great time for book-length comics, and for children's and YA comics.

First, though, I have to say that I would have loved to see Jose Pimienta's Halfway to Somewhere in this category. It's a brave and inventive graphic novel about immigration, assimilation pressure, and cultural and linguistic resistance. Pimienta's deep characterization and refusal of easy answers impressed me, and I'm sorry not to see his book here.

​I reviewed Halfway to Somewhere here on 1/20/2026. If you haven't read it, do seek it out!

Now, on to the nominees:​

A hospital in “Myth Valley” treats creatures from myth and legend: trolls, unicorns, et cetera. Humans are emphatically unwelcome. So, what happens when a human, lost and injured, arrives, then decides that he wants to work there? How will resident Kara Orc hide this human from the hospital’s intimidating chief of medicine, who happens to be her own mother? Cute, antic and fairly predictable, with a Hotel Transylvania-like premise that grants Aung Than license to hijack familiar tales and characters. I dig the crisp cartooning, smart layouts and surprising gags, plus, the welcome attention to medical ethics and narrative medicine.

In a dystopian future, two “left-behind” children wait in the desert for their mother to return from her grinding industrial job in faraway Oasis City. Meanwhile, they reactivate a derelict robot (design-wise, an echo of Lang’s Metropolis) that becomes their doting “AI Mom.” This strange book is at times uncanny, even disturbing, but also sentimental. Its tone is hard to peg. Visually, it’s transporting, its parched world rendered in a gray-to-sepia palette achieved with pencil and toner powder (I was reminded of Tan’s The Arrival). The layouts are smartly uncluttered, the text sparse. The abrupt ending left me dazed, unconvinced.

Twelve-year-old Abby, big sister to four siblings, would like nothing more than to be an only child and hang with her older friends. However, she and her squirrelly sibs are struck with chickenpox and forced to quarantine together. Cue the raw comedy and bruised feelings! This lightly fictionalized memoir, told from the POV of the author’s older sister, happens in Indonesia in the mid-1990s, but you’d hardly know it; this is very much a Raina-style middle-grade sitcom. Lai’s cartooning, however, favors metaphor and hyperbole, and Abby, egocentric and resentful, is a pill. Vivid, funny, with expected lessons but sharp edges. 

O’Neill (The Tea Dragon Society, etc.) has been building a body of work that blends medievalesque high fantasy and Miyazaki-esque pastoralism with anticapitalist, genderqueer, and ecotopian vibes. Community, bonds of obligation, and ritual are abiding themes. The work is subdued, melancholy, and implicitly post-traumatic, yet somehow hopeful. It’s also gorgeously drawn. This may be their best book yet: the tale of a headstrong young ranger who makes a terrible mistake, then atones for it by helping out a young shepherd. Each helps the other live more fully, and freely. This lovely, loving book made my Favorites of 2025. My pick!

A lone raccoon hides in the walls of a restaurant and emulates the human chefs she sees. Imagining herself as “Night Chef,” she cooks while the humans are away. When an egg she wants to cook hatches, revealing a crow chick, Night Chef sets out to take the hatchling home to roost. The journey entails evading an angry (implicitly, rabid) owl, meeting other critters in community, and learning something about her own origins. This aesthetically delicate book, brush-inked and watercolored, is warm, smart, and often surprising. I dig its distinctive characters, telling dialogue, beautifully organic art, and unforced thematic depths.

This book about an after-school comics-making club is many things at once: a Raina-style middle-grade dramedy about kids alone and together, a formalistic metacomic and how-to manual, a loving nudge to young artists’ creativity, and a paean to comics as participatory culture. Basically, it sells the idea of comics, as well as an inclusive communal ethos surrounding comics. The story captures many of the things that, separately, Telgemeier and McCloud have done so well. Perhaps that is why I found it a touch predictable. Still, I expect it will be a very important book for many. Reviewed here on 10/08/2025.

This year's Eisner Award nominees went public on May 15, and my most recent post here listed the nominees in categories that interest me particularly, including those for young readers' books: Early Readers, Kids, and Teens. Since then, I've checked out more than a dozen of these books from the LA Public Library in hopes of reading all nominees in Early Readers, Kids, and Teens before the (yipes) June 5 voting deadline. Wish me luck!​

So far, I've read all the nominated books in Early Readers. See below! It's a strong category. Clicking on a title, BTW, will take you to a publisher's page about that title. I've denoted the book I'm likely to vote for with a ♥​.

This remix of The Ugly Duckling stars a pint-sized dragon, adopted by ducks, who knows he is different but doesn’t understand why. Guided by a friendly bluebird, he quizzes one animal after another to find out just what kind of “duckling” he is (his anxious questions recall P.D. Eastman’s classic Are You My Mother?). The story is simple, affirming, and unsurprising, but Cammuso’s cartooning is lively and assured. His neat three-tier pages, keyed to emerging readers per the TOON schema, have an irresistible rhythmic bounce. The climax, in which questioning gives way to heroism, is a hoot. 

Like the nominees by Cammuso and Fong, this is a funny animal story. It stars Steve the Horse, an irrepressible goofball whom Collier created for a picture book (2017), then recreated for a graphic novel series. This entry (the series’ second) is one of two Steve books published last year. Here Steve adopts a balloon, which he takes for an unhatched egg, while Bob the raccoon, a skeptic, plays the part of the sensible naysayer. The plot is blithely absurd, but what sells it is Steve’s cocky self-belief and enthusiasm, delivered with droll cartooning and sly wit. Dryly, weirdly, hilarious!

A blackout at bedtime sends a parent and child out to gather stars from the night sky. With a bag of borrowed stars, they light up their darkened room -- until they hear the weeping of the moon, now alone in the dark. How can they all share the light? The situations are familiar, and Emberley’s digital colors a touch cloying, but his cartooning is sure and his pages inventive, with staggered, overlapping, sometimes free-floating panels. The vaguely humanlike characters hail from two prior books (one a Geisel Award winner). The approach, while TOON-like, is more complex than Cammuso’s. Charming.

Ostensibly the start of a new series, Wally’s Route depicts an idyllic green community, a sort of suburban Hundred Acre Wood in which anthropomorphic critters hold various jobs (imagine a sylvan Busytown). Wally, a raccoon, is the mail carrier (a benign Postman Pat type), assisted by his friend Bo, a rabbit. Across four quick chapters, Wally delivers mail, helps neighbors, annoys a grumpy one, then catches a cold and must be helped by others. Conflicts are simple, the mood friendly. Fong’s cartooning is decorous, but her pages are dynamic and Catanzaro’s coloring gorgeously mixes brightness and texture. I’d read more.

Santat is often wonderful, yet I came to this book skeptically, wary of yet another corporate superhero riff (mis)targeted at early readers. I was wrong. Somehow, Santat manages to deliver a picture book about emotional regulation (see When Sophie Gets Angry…, The Color Monster, and countless others) that works perfectly well as a Hulk comic. Here the Hulk and his human alter ego Bruce Banner leave each other notes (scrawled in crayon on scraps of paper) that enable them to better understand each other and channel their feelings. This is done with deadpan wit, energy, and formal flair. My pick! 

The nominations for this year's Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (honoring work published in 2025) were announced last, Friday May 15. ​I look forward to this announcement every year! The Eisners are a great resource when it comes to seeking out great new comics.

Note: clicking on a title below will send you to a publisher's page about that title.

​Contributing to The Comics Journal’s year-end best-of list has become something of a tradition with me. So has apologizing for my list and complaining that I cannot quite do the job. This last time, in December, I said:

​Too true. It’s the ides of March, St. Paddy's Day even, and still I’m getting to grips with what 2025 brought us, comics-wise. Still I’m working to borrow or buy, and read, some of the most acclaimed titles from last year. I joked in my TCJ piece that my comics year “runs from roughly May to May,” but even that’s too optimistic. Basically, comics, or even book-length comics in English, is too big a field to ever cover entirely – not even for a mere year’s worth.

​Below in slideshow format are 33 comics from 2025 that turned my head. This list differs from what I offered TCJ (though 21 of the titles are the same). I’ve read quite a few recommended comics since TCJ’s deadline. Not many titles here are obvious KinderComics material — that is, young readers' comics. I did review a couple here, though.

I note, with a great heaving sigh of gratitude, that the tireless Jamie Colville has once again published his combined list of the year’s "Best Comics & Graphic Novels," a compilation of rankings from myriad sources — this time out, "284 different URLs" and "over 4,500 different listings." This is a great resource; readers, you should definitely check it out! FWIW, more than twenty of my choices can be found in Colville's list of "books with 5 mentions or more," and three of my choices are in his "Top 10."

I apologize in advance for the lack of webcomics, but refer readers to K-Comics Beat's list of Best Webtoons and Webcomics of 2025, which I’ve begun to study.

(Note: Clicking on a comic's slide below will, in most cases, take you to a publisher's or creator's webpage.)

Readers, tell me which worthy titles I have missed! What would YOU put on your list? Please comment and help me learn!

Here's another good book from 2025 that I just got around to reading. I bought it from the author, Jose Pimienta, at the Latino Comics Expo in Long Beach on December 7, 2025.

What's more, while Halfway to Somewhere is formally traditional, it is also dynamic and ingenious. Pimienta paces the action mainly through offset grids, rhetorically adjusting the layouts to context, with occasional widescreen or unbordered panels to show meaningful action or immersion in environment. He uses nine-panel grids sparingly, sometimes with split panels, to evoke haste, impatience, or process. The book begins with a lovely wordless sequence depicting a desert hike (to La Casa de Piedra, in La Rumorosa) fondly remembered by Ave as a bonding time for their family. Memories of that hike, and Ave's gradual realization that each member of their family remembers it differently, punctuate the story. At times, Pimienta simply puts past (the family hike) and present (Ave's struggle to adjust) side by side, so that readers have to negotiate uncued transitions. In this way, Pimienta trusts his readers to do interpretive work. 

In all, Halfway to Somewhere ​is an artful, disarmingly sophisticated novel. Its conclusion, affirming  yet ambiguous, refuses easy answers but lets us know that Ave will thrive. Pimienta shows that different family members may adjust to cultural displacement differently -- for example, siblings may have divergent attitudes toward assimilation -- and that's okay. Above all, his awareness of language as both social divider and bridge brings a sensitivity that sets the book apart. While Halfway to Somewhere clearly has didactic elements, it's not preachy and it's not pat. I dig.

Another good book from 2025 that I've read just now, in 2026:

How to Say Goodbye in Cuban, a middle-grade GN set during the Cuban Revolution, is not a memoir but a fictionalized biography of the author Daniel Miyares' father, Carlos, or at least a character based on his father. In the back matter, Miyares acknowledges that he "aged [Carlos] up a few years" to better "connect" with the book's target audience; I take it that a middle-grade coming-of-age story was the goal. It seems obvious that the story entailed a lot of imaginative projection and fictive patterning as well as serious research. Carlos is the first-person narrator, and in effect a mouthpiece character explaining the Cuban Revolution to young readers. This is a challenge, because Carlos doesn't really know what's going on. Essentially, the novel treats the Cuban Revolution as a family story interrupted, and partly dictated, by obscure outside forces. These forces, and how his parents respond to them, frustrate Carlos, and anger him. 

Historical exposition of this kind is a heavy lift for a concise middle-grade book, but Miyares meets the challenge ably. While leaning into familiar tropes of children's historical fiction (children overhearing or spying on adults and questioning them; adults trying to protect children from knowing), Miyares also provides interchapter pages that, very briefly, give the larger political context from a perspective beyond that of Carlos. These pages consist of just one image and one or a few sentences each. They punctuate the narrative. Miyares mostly lets things unfold from Carlos' viewpoint without added explanation, while also showing how partial and uncertain Carlos' narration is. In fact, Carlos gets frustrated when patronizing elders try to shield him from political news (a major plot point). The novel's messages are mixed: Carlos would like to know what is going on, and clearly deserves to know more, but on the occasions when he does learn what adults have been keeping from him, he is overwhelmed. In this way, Miyares stresses both children's need for honest communication and their vulnerability. ​

In the back matter, Miyares acknowledges that this book project began some twenty years ago with a sudden outpouring of stories by his father Carlos. At the time, he notes, the two of them "weren't close," yet the project became a way for them to "make up for lost time." Interestingly, much of the book's suspense stems from Carlos' fraught relationship with his own stern father, Papi, a man driven, first, by dreams of success, and then by the desperate need to get his family out of Cuba. Carlos' unhappy displacement from his idyllic rural hometown, caused by his father's ambitions, and his anger toward his father's remote and controlling ways, fuel the story, even as Miyares sketches in looming political dangers. The book's anticommunist (but not reactionary) thrust could compare with that of the 2011 graphic novel Cuba: My Revolution; its depiction of popular revolution turning into statist oppression might seem familiar to readers of, say, Persepolis, The Best We Could Do, or Feeding Ghosts. But the father-son dynamic defines the novel as, first and foremost, an intimate coming-of-age story happening against a political backdrop. The resolution of that dynamic feels a bit fated and oversimple, I think: a quick reconciliation just when things seem most difficult. This comes just before the book's final act, in which Papi has to do some truly dangerous and violent things to ensure the family's passage out of Cuba. Had the father-son reconciliation not happened first, the book's climax might have left a frightening or ambiguous impression of the father. Creative license and a shaping hand are evident in these moves. 

Miyares is an experienced children's author and picture book illustrator, one who seems to have an earned sense of that market and its genre expectations. How to Say Goodbye in Cuban is a children's graphic novel, not coincidentally or as a matter of marketing only, but because Miyares has a firm commitment to creating for child readers. I see that both in the book's sensitivity and in its silences and feints. I also see Miyares' picture-book craft in the drawings, which are rendered in old-school, predigital ink and watercolor (though lettered in a custom digital font based on Miyares' handwriting). The style is less cartoony than illustrative, marked by extensive hatching (delicate penwork) and evocative washes of color. I enjoy seeing the grain, the earned texture, of the drawings. Sometimes, especially when conjuring place, the pages are very immersive. On the other hand, sometimes the scene-setting is loose and gestural. Miyares avoids overcrowding and has a good sense of when to let the page breathe out. If his depictions of sudden action or movement are sometimes a bit stilted, or his compromises between naturalism and stylization a bit tentative, still, the book is a feast of textures and Carlos and his family remain vivid and recognizable throughout.

On balance, How to Say Goodbye in Cuban is an ambitious and assured, but still vulnerable, open-hearted, and deeply personal work. It wears its didacticism lightly, and at times seems genuinely heartsore and challenging, though its ending is affirming enough. This historical fiction could be a revelation for many young readers, as its depiction of the Cuban Revolution is not one-sided or flat.  It's worth reading for comics lovers, period.

Ngozi Ukazu's Flip, a YA graphic novel set at a tony prep school, offers a body-swapping story and a complex lesson in empathy. Its plot hook is simple and perhaps obvious, but what Ukazu does with it is anything but. The book is smart, complex, surprising, and, finally, moving: a wonderful novel.

Briefly, Flip follows Chi-Chi, a shy, socially withdrawn Nigerian American Blerd from an impoverished family, and her crush Flip, a popular white jock from a super-wealthy family, as they trade places and learn how to navigate the world as each other. After Chi-Chi invites Flip to the senior prom and he publicly turns her down, her shame precipitates a psychic crisis that somehow triggers their body-swapping, which leads to complicated and embarrassing maneuvers as the two try to play each other's social roles. The body-swapping isn't constant, but comes and goes. Ukazu never explains the mechanisms of this; the body-swapping has no pseudoscientific or magical root cause. But there are rules, of a sort, one of which is that each period of body-swapping seems to last twice as long as before. Chi-Chi and Flip are terrified that the swapping may eventually become permanent. The two develop a deeper understanding of each other, not only because of the body-swapping but because they have to work together. Chi-Chi experiences Flip's crumbling family and deep depression; Flip experiences Chi-Chi's self-hatred and unquenchable longing to be someone else. For both, self-love requires looking at the world through the other's eyes.  

This may sound obvious, even platitudinous, but Ukazu avoids crude signposting. She lets every character develop complexly, not according to received generalizations about privilege or race but out of their own circumstances. Necessary points about Blackness and whiteness, about social ostracism, structural disadvantage, and envy, become earned insights as Ukazu pits the two characters against each other. Provocatively, there are many moments in the book at which the actual identity of the characters (who is speaking, from what POV?) becomes indistinct or ambiguous. As Chi-Chi and Flip begin to identify with one another, Ukazu pushes the story further and further, into fascinating tangles. The conclusion, which redefines the two leads, is affecting and tonally complex: affirming, yes, but surprising almost to the very end.  

Ukazu's brilliant writing and delightful, elastic cartooning are, above all, socially astute: alive to the interworking of personalities and groups, to social complications, to hierarchies and compensatory habits. Each named character, not just Chi-Chi and Flip, navigates the world differently, and grows more distinct and interesting as the story progresses. There's a remarkable scene in which Flip's ex, a conventionally beautiful alpha girl, asks him to the prom, only to be rejected by Chi-Chi, in Flip's body, who is spurred on by jealousy. There's a great scene in which Chi-Chi, in Flip's body, braids Chi-Chi's, or for the moment Flip's, hair. This is somehow both tense and encouraging. And then there's the stunning scene in which Flip, in Chi-Chi's body, confronts Chi-Chi about her own self-loathing. Complexities like these, delightful and confounding, mark the novel from start to finish.

In short, this is a great book! Ukazu's character-writing is remarkably sensitive, her pages lively and dynamic, and her use of visual metaphors tricky and smart. Flip is the kind of book that certain readers will embrace devotedly, and it's likely to be remembered as a watershed. It's that good.

The results are winsome, affirming, and, I'm afraid, fairly predictable. As a story, The Cartoonist Club feels like a sketch rather than a novel; it's streamlined, and packs in no more character development or complexity than I might expect in, say, a brief picture book or early reader. The characters and setting conjure up Telegemeier's previous middle-grade stories but don't get the same complex treatment; the plot is telegraphed and swift. She delivers something like her usual mix of tenderness and high spirits, with characters who seesaw between exuberance and anxiety, but the plot doesn't give them much room to grow. Then again, as a McCloudian incitement to cartooning, The Cartoonist Club is pretty effective, but at times it reads like a potted summary of McCloud's earlier work. I came away not quite as bowled over as I had hoped to be when the project was announced, to much fanfare, in June 2024. 

It's not bad. Not at all. It just feels more like a set-up than a thing delivered. The characters and their relationships feel schematic to me. Again, see the cover: there's Makayla, a bubbling extrovert full of notions who can't seem to focus on turning them into stories. Craft is not her thing, but she's a fountain of ideas. The club itself is one of her ideas; the book starts with her, and her wide-open sense of possibility. Then there's her friend Howard, a compulsive drawer starved for story ideas, who hides his cartooning from a disapproving father. A team-up between Howard and Makayla seems inevitable. Then there's the character Art, his very name a nudge (he's often greeted with the punning line, "Hi, Art!"). His dad is an animator and comic artist manqué who loves to talk shop. Art, though, is less beholden to the idea of pure Comics, more of a Duchampian boundary-pusher who loves any creative challenge. He's a zinester and paper engineer who likes making devices with his hands, as opposed to simply drawing or telling stories. I see a lot of McCloud in him (maybe there's a touch of Ken Wong or Jason Shiga as well?). Finally, there's Lynda, perfectionist and introvert, who only gradually gets involved in the club. Lynda harbors an unspoken loss and bereavement that she ends up confronting in tender autobiographical comics. It's hard for her to get things done because she sees only the flaws in her drawing, but, naturally, she is the most expressive artist. All of the kids' comics (that is, the comics-within-the-comic) are penciled by McCloud, and the revelation of Lynda's work gives him a chance to shine. 

The Cartoonists Club is not as uproarious as Pilkey, nor as technical as Crilley. It gingerly evokes the spirit of today's children's comics movement: a mix of grassroots creativity and adult chaperoning. Notably, a school librarian, Ms. Fatima, serves as the kids' comics literacy sponsor, exhorting, affirming, and, yes, schooling the young artists. She is constant, reliable, and encouraging. The kids, meanwhile, have quiet challenges to get through: settling on ideas, committing to sharing their work, coming to terms with loss, gaining the approval of a skeptical parent. The book's climax is a mini comic-con at a local library, where the club members sell their work and get to see the impact they are having. Actually, this is the last in a series of climaxes, preceded by, first, a meta-comics chapter in which characters break the fourth wall and traverse the blank page (channeling everyone from McCay to Crockett Johnson to Wiesner); and then the chapter in which Lynda finally decides to share her very personal work with the rest of the gang. Throughout, Telgemeier exercises her trademark vulnerability and emotive cartooning chops, while McCloud provides meta-comics, formalist lessons, and encomiums to creativity. Everything clicks, yet leaves me wanting more.

To be fair, The Cartoonists Club is not simply a cynical marketer's dream, a team-up between Telgemeier's branding and McCloud's. The two genuinely admire each other. For Telgemeier, Understanding Comics is a touchstone, while McCloud has been singing Telgemeier's praises since at least her book Drama (2012), which, as editor, he excerpted in The Best American Comics 2014. In some ways, this is the proverbial match made in heaven. Furthermore, the book's celebration of unbounded creativity, artistic community, and risk-taking is genuine; you can't fake that kind of feeling. That said, The Cartoonists Club reads like a reminder of the things that Telgemeier and McCloud have done so well separately, rather than a case of striking out toward something new. Along with Share Your Smile, it feels like a means of consolidating Raina's popularity, as well as reflecting on what the last twenty years have brought to kids' comics. Not a bad thing, though not the newest, freshest thing either.

This post is the last in a series of three.

Yesterday I reviewed this year’s Eisner nominees for Early Readers. Today I finish this series by reviewing the nominees for Kids, which in practice mostly means middle-grade readers, roughly 8 to 12 years old (see my post of May 22 for an overview of all the young readers’ categories). As usual, clicking on a book's title will take you to a publisher's page about that book.

Kids is another a very strong category this year, so choosing which book to vote for is hard! See the end for my favorites, and some other notes and reflections. 

​How It All Ends, by Emma Hunsinger (Greenwillow/HarperCollins)
A precocious seventh grader skips directly into high school, then worries that she is not up to the challenge. Her mind runs a mile a minute as she attempts to age up to proper teenagehood. Hilarity ensues, but also a loving relationship with a classmate, another girl, who becomes her lifeline and then some. This is all thematically familiar, but, wow, Hunsinger made me laugh out loud in the first few pages. From then on, I was invested. The novel is uproarious, offhandedly quirky, and sweet. Hunsinger’s loopy characters and freehanded cartooning are delightful, her world humanly weird and vivid.

Next Stop, by Debbie Fong (Random House Graphic)
Pia, a shy middle-schooler, takes a summer bus tour to kitschy tourist traps: a cactus-themed park, the World’s Biggest Melon, etc., all leading to an underground lake that, legends say, grants wishes. Unaccompanied by parents, Pia learns to make friends en route, yet harbors a deep grief, its causes revealed through agonized flashbacks. Balancing cynicism against wonder, the layered narrative recalls Sharon Creech: loss is denied, but then processed via travel and friendship. Fong’s artwork is clean and simple-looking yet conveys a tonally complex story, at once farcical, lighthearted, and gripping. The plot, though obvious in hindsight, is quite suspenseful.

Plain Jane and the Mermaid, by Vera Brosgol (First Second/Macmillan)
A feminist fairy tale in a fantastical underwater world: Jane, a young woman turned out of house and home by the patriarchy, literally walks into the sea to rescue the mermaid-abducted man she thinks she is going to marry. This is her alternative to living in a cruel, sexist world without a husband. A colorful, sometimes nightmarish quest results, with the young man cosseted by the beautiful but dangerous mermaids while Jane bonds with a selkie. Brosgol’s typically well-tailored plot and expressive cartooning deliver in spades. Reviewed here on 6/27/2024, this later made my best-of-2024 list for The Comics Journal.

Weirdo, by Tony Weaver, Jr. and Jes & Cin Wibowo (First Second/Macmillan)
In this semi-fictionalized memoir, Tony, an eleven-year-old blerd, attends a super-competitive school where he endures bullying and isolation until, implicitly, a suicide attempt leads to a change of schools and the growth of new friendships with other nonconforming nerds. Together, Tony and his friends rally their school when it is threatened with closure. Rife with visual metaphors, funny details, and character business, this one goes by in a rush; I wish I got to know certain characters better. Bright and affirming, if sometimes vague, it wills itself a happy ending. The art excels at character, less so place or atmosphere. 

Young Hag and the Witches’ Quest, by Isabel Greenberg (Abrams Fanfare)
I was ready for yet another GN about a young witch, but this turned out to be a sly, inventive reweaving of Arthurian legend—a feminist reinvention focused on Morgan le Fay, her granddaughter, and the sword Excalibur, now broken. At once a quest fantasy and a metanarrative, Young Hag stresses roaming and storytelling, with playful nods to myriad intertexts (Spenser, Rosetti’s “Goblin Market,” etc.). The dialogue avoids archaism and the artwork favors penciled immediacy over slickness: no fluid, inflected lines here, just roughhewn scratching. The reversals and twists are ingenious, the art hypnotically cool, and the spirit catching. Wonderful.

Final notes: Going in, I thought Plain Jane would be my vote in this category, but then I read How It All Ends and Young Hag. Damn, choosing is difficult! I have just another day or two to decide...

This year the Eisners' young readers categories are exceptionally rich. Both the Kid and Teen categories are dazzling. IMO, the last few years have shown the wisdom of growing out the young readers' categories to three and making sure that the judging panel always includes at least one expert on young reader's comics. These categories have definitely affirmed their maturity and relevance this year.

Over the past two weeks, I've read or reread sixteen books in these three categories. I borrowed a dozen from LAPL. While I've become pickier about the comics I buy and keep, I'd be happy to have at least ten of these books in my home library so that I could reread them at my leisure. There are so many keepers here.

If you haven't already, please, seek out these comics and read them!