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!

This post is the second in a series of three.

Yesterday I reviewed this year’s Eisner nominees for Teens. Today I review the nominees for Early Readers (see my post of May 22 for an overview of all young readers’ categories). As usual, I’ve tried to describe each book fairly, though at the bottom I do signal my favorites. FYI, clicking on a book's title will take you to a publisher's page about that book.

​​​Bog Myrtle, by Sid Sharp (Annick Press)​
Picture-book and graphic-novel aesthetics mingle in this morbidly clever Gorey-esque fable about two sisters who live in “a hideous, drafty old house,” the spiders they live with, the looming forest outside, and a monstrous “old woman” who guards it. Ultimately, this becomes an impish satire of unchecked capitalism (versus sustainability). It’s in the same wheelhouse as William Steig’s original Shrek! or Eleanor Davis’ Stinky, sly, sharp books that cheerfully embrace the unlovely and weird. It feels too long (150 pages), too arch, and too verbose to be for “early readers,” but it’s a lovely, formally ingenious book, regardless of category.

​Club Microbe, by Elise Gravel, translated by Montana Kane (Drawn & Quarterly)
This spirited picture-book primer on microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, etc.) has a pleasingly random quality, as if inspired by Gravel’s enthusiasm rather than any pedagogical grand plan. Gravel’s odd examples and transitions, and the way she simultaneously undercuts and indulges in anthropomorphism (giving microbes eyes, for example), make for a book as daffy as it is didactic. The dangers posed by germs are duly noted, yet so is the whole biosphere’s dependence on microbes. The book presupposes an adult chaperone, as it delights in scientific names and glosses concepts such as antibodies and vaccination. Gravel’s wacky cartooning is a strong plus.

Hilda and Twig Hide from the Rain, by Luke Pearson (Flying Eye)
A new Hilda book? Sign me up! This one, though, is different: while still in BD album format, the story is briefer (mostly the events of a single afternoon), the pages less dense, the cartooning looser and even freer. Also, this is a prequel unencumbered by continuity, and really belongs to Hilda’s deerfox friend, Twig. Pearson seems to have rediscovered his characters with this short, sweet episode, which is witty, smart, rambunctious, but also warm and soulful. Call it a “new phase” Hilda book, perhaps an entryway for younger readers. I hope there will be more, because this is terrific.

Night Stories: Folktales from Latin America, by Liniers (TOON Books/Astra Books)
​Argentine comics genius Liniers, always delightful, does another TOON book, this one similar in format to Jaime Hernandez’s The Dragon Slayer (likewise a folktale sampler). Typical of TOON Graphics, it frames charming comics with didactic front and back matter. This one’s rather textbook-like introduction did not prepare me for the funny, spooky comics inside: three brief tales rooted in Argentinean, Brazilian, and Mexican folklore, framed as bedtime stories that two kids tell each other. Liniers’ ink and watercolor cartooning feels scruffy and alive, and he has a knack for droll, offhand details. I wish the stories and book were longer.

Poetry Comics, by Grant Snider (Chronicle Books)
I came to this skeptically, jaded by previous brushes with “poetry comics,” but Snider delivers what he promises: poems that are comics, comics that are poems. Over four cycles (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) and about seventy poems, he builds satisfying pages and sequences, varied in layout, graphic rhythm, prosody, metaphor, and mood. The poems (one or two pages each) balance the playful and pensive. Along the way, the child reader implicitly becomes a child poet. The overarching themes are familiar (love of nature, growing up, self-doubt, searching for words) but the delivery is artful. Snider’s simple, sketchy drawings work perfectly.

Final notes: a good category. I started with Bog Myrtle, which I dug, but then Poetry Comics impressed me greatly, appealing to my love of form and of books that encourage art-making among young readers. Ironically, I didn't come to Hilda and Twig, sentimental favorites of mine, until last, and although I was on guard against my own fannish bias there, I think I've finally come to the conclusion that, yes, Hilda and Twig is the one I'll vote for. It's just so good!

I'll be back tomorrow with a final post, about the nominees in the Kids category.

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.

​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!

​The nominations for this year's Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (celebrating work published in 2024) were announced a week ago, on May 15. ​As ever, I'm looking up and seeking out things to read. It’s an excellent, wide-ranging ballot, with props to this year’s judges: editor, writer, and historian Robert V. Conte; librarian and ALA comics advocate Kacy Helwick; critic, editor, and podcaster Meg Lemke; comics retailer and ComicsPro board member Eitan Manhoff; and scholar and professor Rocco Versaci. I know from experience that judging the Eisners is one hell of a job.

​I’m not conversant with everything, or even most of the things, on this  year's ballot. Who could be? What follows is a personal inventory that I first posted to Facebook the day after the ballot was announced. Bear in mind that the ballot includes more than 150 words, divided into 32 categories: 

Again, it’s a phenomenal list. I'll try to read every nominee in the young readers’ categories (below) in time to vote by the deadline, June 5 (note that prospective new Eisner voters must apply by May 29). Besides the young readers' categories, I've also listed the categories for publications about​ comics, which are particularly important to me.

LA Public Library, here I come!

Best Publication for Early Readers
​Damn, I haven't read any of these yet!
​​

• ​Bog Myrtle, by Sid Sharp (Annick Press)
• ​Club Microbe, by Elise Gravel, translated by Montana Kane (Drawn & Quarterly)
• Hilda and Twig Hide from the Rain, by Luke Pearson (Flying Eye)
• Night Stories: Folktales from Latin America, by Liniers (TOON Books/Astra Books)
• Poetry Comics, by Grant Snider (Chronicle Books)

When I wrote my best-of-2024 list for The Comics Journal last December, I predicted that what I had to say there would "differ sharply from whatever I say months from now." I was right. These days, I don't get to catch up with the talked-about comics of the previous year until, at least, the ides of March. In fact, mid-March is here and I am still working to track down acclaimed volumes from last year.* In the meantime, Jamie Colville has published his annual combined list of "best comics and graphic novels," a compilation of opinions and rankings from more than 250 sources, which is an useful resource you should go check out right now.

Below in slideshow format are twenty-two comics from 2024 that I found interesting and vital. Of these, nine appeared on my list for TCJ. The others I've mostly read since January 1, 2025. Of these, I consider perhaps five or six of them to be in KinderComics territory — that is, comics that could plausibly be labeled young readers' comics. I reviewed three of those here.

(Note: Clicking on a book's slide will take you to a publisher's or creator's webpage.)

A few more notes:

• Five of the above comics appear in the Top 20 derived from Jamie Colville's list: Absolute Wonder Woman, Final Cut, Sunday, Blurry, and Lunar New Year Love Story.
• Jamie's data suggest a disconnect between what's being talked about most and what interests me most. For the record, I am following the current Ultimate Spider-Man, Absolute Batman, and The Ultimates, but don't think of them as Top 20 books.
• The book above that I wrestled with the most was Tessa Hulls' Feeding Ghosts, probably because it is thickly narrated in what I think of as post-Fun Home style. I fought the book until the home stretch, but its layering of familial and sociopolitical history is amazing and I nearly drowned in Hulls' drawings. 
• I subscribe to Mike Dawson's Monthly 'Zine Club, which means I get something delightful in the mail roughly every month. 
• The long-awaited My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two, was, alas, a letdown.
• My Books of the Year? On reflection, I'd say Ash's Cabin, Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies, Arctic Play, Grand Electric Thought Power Mother, and Sunday.
• I just finished reading Sunday today (a Sunday!), and it works wonders with the familiar sequential grammar of paneled comics. Its density and connectedness are mind-boggling. So is its playfulness. Meanwhile, Grand Electric Thought Power Mother overflows the grammar of comics; it's a stunning series of experiments with patterned image-making. As I worked my way through it, I moved from stymied confusion to reveling in its sheer chutzpah. And Arctic Play — as it combines collage, pattern poetry, list poetry, and a even a visual sonnet — has me rethinking, again, the possible relationships between comics and verse. These books reinvigorate the idea of comics; they've rewired my understanding of what comics can be.

I eagerly await the Eisner Award nominees for 2024, which will probably be announced in May.

*PS. I'm still anxious to read acclaimed 2024 titles such as Big Jim and the White Boy, I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together, The Library Mule of Córdoba, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke, Tender, Tokyo These Days Vol. 1, and Young Hag and the Witches' Quest. I've requested these from my local library.

Gotta admit, I spent a good part of Ash's Cabin waiting for its protagonist, Ash, to "come to their senses." For a while, I was less a sympathetic reader than a fretful parent, waiting for his wayward child to realize the error of their ways. This kneejerk response of mine had the effect of, not exactly blunting, but complicating my interaction with the book. In fact, Ash is not depicted as senseless, unreasoning, or in error, but their story challenged my preconceptions. It's quietly radical and, true to form for author Jen Wang, beautifully told.

Ash, an alienated fifteen-year-old from a complex Chinese American family, is working through a tense transition. They are implicitly trans or nonbinary (resistant to labeling, certainly), also lonesome and inward-turning, mindful and resourceful, and strong of will. Repulsed by the routinized world around them, Ash plans to withdraw into the wilderness: to hike into California's Shasta-Trinity National Forest and find a secret cabin built by their late grandfather, in hopes of staying there "forever." Ash perhaps has a touch of Greta Thunberg about them, but strikes me as not so much an outward-looking activist as a lost soul seeking a Walden-like retreat from everyday compromise. Lost, but determined.

It seems fair to assume (in a YA book like this) that the protagonist will come to realize that they need community, their quest for beatific isolation will fail, and they will end up back in the bosom of family and schoolmates. And indeed (no spoiler here, I don't think) Ash's Cabin does trace that sort of arc. Yet it's not predictable. To Wang's credit, the desires and values that drive Ash into the wild are never dashed or scolded away. What Ash stands for is never dismissed as naive or impossible. Although Ash's quest resolves in a way that they do not expect, it is transformative. That's why I call it radical.

It may come as no surprise that even during the loneliest parts of Ash's journey, the most telling scenes are those that depict social encounters, interdependence, and the process of getting and giving help. Even in the wild, Ash is never quite alone, and of course they eventually realize this. Though the novel focuses resolutely on Ash (and their loving dog Chase), and Wang devotes many pages to the  fascinating details of wilderness survival (sheltering, foraging, fishing, improvising), what sticks with me are the vivid characters and the connections they make. The same sensitivity and social acuteness that distinguish Wang's Stargazing and The Prince and the Dressmaker (the first book I ever reviewed on this blog) are abundantly here. 

The book's gorgeous, open pages suggest a journal — essentially, this is Ash's survival diary, even before they enter the wild. There is an uncluttered airy quality about the spreads, which are less packed, or more loosely joined, than in Wang's previous books (even Stargazing, with its open spaces). Lovingly drawn with mechanical pencil, ballpoint pen, and watercolor, Ash's Cabin often seems like Ash's own fugitive handiwork. Ash moves freely through the layouts, as they move through and explore the world. Wang excels at scenes of research and handiwork, and Ash does plenty of both. They are a character we get to know through their doing: dogged, brave, brilliant, often alone. Much of the book involves getting ready to do things, then learning to do things differently when push comes to shove. In a way, the book is a record of mistakes, missteps, and losses — and yet not. Ash has integrity and never stops living intently. They never stop risking everything, so the story's ending doesn't register as defeat.  

Thematically, I think Ash's Cabin ​could pair interestingly with Kengo Kurimoto's Wildful (reviewed here recently), a fable about biophily as a salve for grief, or with Jonathan Case's Little Monarchs (reviewed here in June 2023), a postapocalyptic environmentalist adventure. I'd even put it alongside Miyazaki's classic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (in its extended manga version), a work that wavers between humanism and misanthropy and whose naturalist-hero faces a similarly impossible set of choices. (Just thinking about these connections makes me want to design another syllabus!)

This is a great book, full stop.