2025 Eisner Nominees: Teens

This post is the first in a series of three.

This year's Eisner Award nominations came out on May 15, and my most recent post here listed the nominees in categories that especially interest me, in particular those for young readers' books: Early Readers, Kids, and Teens. Since then, I've been scrounging books from the LA Public Library in hopes of reading all the nominees in those three categories before the (gulp!) June 5 deadline for voting.

Below are this year's nominated books for Teens. This is a fantastic list! Clicking on a book's title will take you to a publisher's informational page about the book. At the end of this post, I'll discuss which book I'm most likely to vote for (or at least the ones I'm having trouble choosing between!). 

Ash’s Cabin, by Jen Wang  (First Second/Macmillan) 
In this morally complex fable for living under the climate crisis, Ash, a disaffected fifteen-year-old fed up with human inertia and corruption, hikes into California's Shasta-Trinity National Forest in hopes of locating a secret cabin built by their late grandfather and staying there forever. Sympathetic, shaded, and beautifully drawn, Ash’s Cabin refuses simplicity and asks to be reread again and again. I found myself, first, chiding Ash for their stubbornness, but then rooting for them: a confounding experience that forced me to check my own moralisms at the door. Reviewed here on 12/05/2024. This made my best-of-2024 list for The Comics Journal.

Big Jim and the White Boy, by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson, color by Isabell Struble  (Ten Speed)
This is not so much a retelling of Huckleberry Finn as an adventure story intertwined with Twain’s novel: a reimagining of the characters Jim and Huck, their origins, and their relationship. Framed by sequences of the aged Jim and Huck sharing their story during the Depression, and then again by the reflections of a 21st-century descendant, Big Jim depicts the traveling pair as Underground Railroad agents and soldiers against slavery whose long-buried history must be told. It’s a statement about how history gets made, and remade — suspenseful, complex in its sympathies, and bittersweet. The visual storytelling is expert and absorbing.

The Deep Dark, by Molly Knox Ostertag (Scholastic)
This magic-realist novel charts a slowburn romance between two young women: Nessa, bright, determined, and transfem, and her childhood friend Magdalena (Mags), now elusive and withdrawn, whose family harbors a frightful secret. Nessa comes back to town hoping to reconnect, but Mags can’t embrace the opportunity; something in (literally) her cellar is eating at her. This is by far Ostertag’s best-written, most persuasive book — to me, the only one that doesn’t feel rushed. She writes deftly about race, culture, and gender, and conjures a beautiful Mojave Desert setting. The two leads are wholly convincing, the cartooning gorgeous. A new classic.

The Gulf, by Adam de Souza (Tundra Books)
Thematically parallel to Ash’s Cabin, yet tonally and aesthetically very different, this Canadian GN follows a group of runaway high-schoolers who escape to a rustic island. There they hope to join a commune and opt out of social expectations and the heartless grind of capitalism. One of them, Olivia — impulsive, at times furious, and complex — is the story’s driver, but all the characters are well realized. De Souza captures their confusion, cluelessness, and changeability so well that I sometimes wanted to shake them! I love De Souza’s scratchy cartooning, artfully limited color palette, and powerful sense of environment and space. 

Lunar New Year Love Story, by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham (First Second/Macmillan)
This winsome romcom, another structurally ingenious graphic novel written by Gene Yang, is sumptuously drawn by LeUyen Pham, whose Vietnamese heritage informs the book’s choice of protagonist and depiction of diverse Asian American communities. The plot is rigged: a young Vietnamese American woman, Valentina, traumatized by the revelation of family secrets, rejects the once-loved rituals of Valentine’s Day (her namesake) and swears off romance. However, connections made through the joyful practice of lion dance test her resolve. The story is typically charming, though daubed with Yang’s usual darkness, and the hoped-for climax arrives by unconventional means. A robust, delightful collaboration.

Out of Left Field, by Jonah Newman (Andrews McMeel)
In this frank coming-out story, a nerdy high schooler goes out for his school’s baseball team while closeting his gayness. Newman charts the anxious social maneuvering of teens with secrets while evoking adolescent homophobia (including internalized homophobia) in a sharp and knowing way. The story skirts cliché, with an open-ended denouement that does not quite exonerate its morally confused protagonist but foretells an out and happy future. The depiction of teen sex (and sex talk) startled me with its openness, though the visuals are not explicit. Alas, Newman’s cartooning feels bland and sterile, and is no match for his writing.

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​Final notes: This is such a hard category to choose from — an excellent list of books! I was glad to read every one of them. I came in with a bias toward Ash's Cabin (Jen Wang's best book, IMO), but in the last week have read two or three others that I'd be almost equally likely to vote for. At the moment, I'm divided between Ash's Cabin and The Deep Dark (a new high for Molly Knox Ostertag). Big Jim is going to be remembered as a landmark book, rightly so, and The Gulf is a tremendous feat of cartooning.

The above books are affirming, progressive, and either explicitly or implicitly political, yet also complex, layered, and unpredictable. Several are challenging in ways that "adult" graphic novels usually don't manage. Most are splendidly designed and graphic beautiful. One hell of a ballot.

Wish me luck as I race against time to finish reading all the Early Reader and Kid nominees!