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.