ComicsXF’s Best Comics of 2021

Comics came roaring back in 2021 and we couldn’t be happier for it. As we look to close out the year, our staff wanted to highlight some of the best comics we read in 2021. Each person was asked to pick on title that resonated with them and stretched what comics could be. We all have different tastes but anyone should be able to look at this list and find a hidden gem they missed this year. Even though we love ranking things here, this has simply been presented in alphabetical order. Dig in and find a new favorite!

Action Comics

Writer

Phillip Kennedy Johnson

Artist

Daniel Sampere with Miguel Mendoca & Christian Duce

Colorist

Adriano Lucas

Letterer

Dave Sharpe

Publisher

DC Comics

I’ve read Action Comics pretty regularly for the last 20 years, and this year it simply knocked my socks off. After a prelude story that seemed to just be set-up for another “Superman overcomes overwhelming odds” story, we instead got something much deeper and darker. After finding his footing with a Future State and prelude story, Phillip Kennedy Johnson dove into a Superman epic for the ages. By revamping Mongul into the fascist despot he really could be, Clark Kent suddenly had an enemy unique amongst his rogues. Suddenly we have a new wrinkle to Krypton’s history that creates a fascinating mystery for the book, we have a villain that hasn’t been this terrifying since Alan Moore wrote him, and a Man of Steel facing a challenge that he never expected.

The run has also been a revelation of its art team. Sampere and Lucas have been flying under the radar, but with Action Comics, they have stepped up and shown that they’re on the cusp of being DC’s premiere art team. Their Kal-El is a grand and powerful figure, but he radiates a warmth that draws you to Superman.

This is what Superman needs to be, a hero fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves, even if that means that he may have bitten off much more than he could chew. And I can’t wait to see what’s next.

-Tony Thornley

Barbalien: Red Planet

Writer

Tate Brombal & Jeff Lemire

Artist

Gabriel Hernández Walta

Colorist

Jordie Bellaire

Letterer

Aditya Bidikar

Publisher

Dark Horse Comics

Since his introduction in the original Black Hammer #1, Barbalien has used the central premise of a Martian posing as a human police officer as a parallel to the character’s other secret double life, as a closeted gay man. What Tate Brombal does in this miniseries is to push the metaphor further, exploring the character’s dualisms more deeply than was ever possible in the mainline series.

While the story is set against the 1980s AIDS crisis, it also echoes the serial killings in Toronto’s gay village during the 2010s. The police refused to even acknowledge that there was a serial killer until one was caught, eroding an already uneasy trust between them and Toronto’s gay community.

Gabriel Hernández Walta and Jordie Bellaire continue to be one of the best art teams in comics, and I highly recommend the oversized library edition of the miniseries, which is paired with the startlingly beautiful Colonel Weird: Cosmagog.

-Mark Turetsky

Batman: Wayne Family Adventures

Writer

CRC Payne

Artist

Rhett Bloom, with additional assistance from Lan Ma

Letterer

Kielamel “Kiela” Sibal

Publisher

Webtoon

Sometimes, you miss fun. You remember fun. It’s something that people used to have before we were all miserable. I choose this Webtoon series as my best comic of 2021 for a few reasons. When DC first announced its partnership with Webtoon back in August, I was, at best, skeptical. Thankfully, I was wrong big time. The standalone Webtoon series gives new and old readers a chance to have fun. It doesn’t rely on the audience having any prior knowledge about Batman continuity. As someone who falls into that category, it gave me a way to learn about these characters without feeling like I was being punished for not having kept up.

A great example is in Episode 7: Vigilante Bingo. There’s some great back and forth banter between the team as they talk about how many times they’ve been killed and brought back to life. The episode takes the piss out of the weirder elements of comic continuity without relying on you knowing any of the terminologies.

The dialogue and humor feel natural and, well, actually funny. The series makes the best of what Webtoon has to offer, vertical scrolling, expansive white space, and bite-sized episodes you can dive into whenever you want. That’s why Batman: Wayne Family Adventures is my pick for 2021 because it reminded me that sometimes, comics can still be fun.

-Andrea Ayres

Cheer Up: Love and Pompoms

Writer

Crystal Frasier

Artist

Val Wise

Letterer

Oscar O. Jupiter

Publisher

Oni Press

Last year my pick was Guardians of the Galaxy. This year? It’s a YA OGN about queer cheerleaders in love. Trust me, I wasn’t expecting it either.

Honestly, Cheer Up just completely caught me by surprise. I volunteered to review it because I’m a fan of Frasier’s and an explicitly trans YA OGN sounded like it could be fun. And it was fun! And emotional. And devastating. And joyous. It gave me an experience I never had: growing up queer and trans living through all of those milestones as your true self and left me a sobbing mess, in the best way possible.

What Frasier and Wise have crafted in Cheer Up isn’t just a cutesy coming-of-age queer romance (although it is that and is ADORABLE), they have made one of the most authentic trans stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. The highs and lows of gender euphoria and misgendering, triumphing as yourself and hearing people who you thought were friends make transphobic jokes behind your back. Especially with Wise’s masterwork skills at body diversity and emotionality ensuring every person and emotional beat feels beautiful and genuine.

While it’s appropriate for all audiences, the story doesn’t pull its punches and crafts an emotionally satisfying, powerful story that I hope every young queer person has the opportunity to read.

-Zoe Tunnell

Dead Dog’s Bite

Creator

Tyler Boss

Publisher

Dark Horse Comics

It could only be a comic. Boss couldn’t tell this tale another way. Dead Dog’s Bite is a singular ode to form and structure. The oppressiveness of his precise, instructive cartooning reflecting the all encompassing stasis of the town of Pendermills. This is a story about the patterns we fall into. The way our history echoes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over ad infinitum.

It could only be a comic. Boss couldn’t tell this tale another way. The medium is the message as Joe digs through history and spirals towards a revelation that could never been what she wanted. When she’s stuck in patterns of Pendermills, we’re trapped in the clinical presentation of the comic. When she is confronted with a decision point, a moment her ennui never readied her for, the book looses the shackles of formalism and presents us with the vision of a wider world.

It could only be a comic. Boss couldn’t tell this tale another way. As emotions quicken, and stakes rise, the tempo of the gutters begins to escalate. The form forces us to feel what Joe feels. Her pain, panic and pathetic attempts to understand a system that was in place long before her, and will remain long after. It’s not quite dread, but it is something more than anxiety. It’s a yearning to understand the form, to experiment with what you can do when you box yourself into a corner and have to creatively find a way out. It’s precise in the way you can only be when you have mastered the tools of comics and are not beholden to them because you must be, but because you choose to be.

It could only be a comic. Boss couldn’t tell this tale another way. I’d never want him to.

-Zachary Jenkins

Demon Days

Writer

Peach Momoko

Artist

Peach Momoko

Localization

Zack Davisson

Letterer

Ariana Maher

Publisher

Marvel Comics

One of Marvel’s “Stormbreaker” artists this year, Peach Momoko’s array of variant covers has been one of the best choices the company has made in 2021. Momoko’s artistic vision and talent is obvious at first glance, but what Demon Days proves is how supremely good she is at making comics. Momoko introduces us to an alternate Marvel Universe grown out of Japanese folklore, full of characters we ought to recognize but under a ukiyo-e filter.

What initially reads like a whimsically light fairy tale turns out to be a clever framing device that zooms out to reveal a more engrossing tale of revenge and bloodshed. The character redesigns are great, and there’s a lot of fun picking out what elements Momoko is remixing for her world. The fluidity of her line and painstaking devotion to her craft – clearly hand-painted – make this comic as joyful to read as Momoko’s excellent pacing and composition.

This series offers a peek at a different, dare I say better way of comics storytelling for Marvel comics. Almost every issue that’s come out for the past six months has graced Momoko’s work on the outside, but I’m praying for more of her work between the covers, too.

-Karen Charm

The Department of Truth

Writer

James Tynion IV

Artist

Martin Simmonds

Letterer

Aditya Bidikar

Publisher

Image Comics

I don’t think I ever expected to be living through a time in human history where Americans were willing to eat dirt instead of get vaccinated. But that’s where we’re at: a point in the American story where the myth of rugged individualism and a quiet thirst for facism has driven large swathes of citizens to snake oil salesmen ready to provide horse dewormer, or, in the case of BOO, literal dirt from a landfill, marketed to solve everything from disease to yellowing teeth.

There could not be a better time for Tynion and Simmonds’ Department of Truth and its central conceit: That when enough people believe something, it becomes a literal, corporeal truth. In some cases, this is a magical tulpa, in others it can literally rewrite history. DoT did its fair share of world building this year, but the standout was a quiet pair of issues about a generational obsession with Bigfoot that not only used the book’s thesis to create a dangerous physical manifestation of what can happen when enough folks become obsessed with the tale of a famous cryptid, but also managed to tell a heartbreaking story of obsession and loss.

Told in large part by handwritten letters scrawled with scribbles and symbols, Tynion & Simmonds pull off an impressive and tragic twist about the identity of the author that hones in on how nostalgia can tinge our view on the present, and how our own personal fixations can drive those we love the most away from us. It’s a timely parable that echoes our present while also giving a nuanced look at what makes so many of us tick.

-Adam Reck

The Dreaming: Waking Hours

Writer

G. Willow Wilson

Artist

Nick Robles

Colorist

Matheus Lopes

Letterer

Simon Bowland

Publisher

DC Comics

I wrote at length the things I loved about this series, but the short of it is that it takes one of the weaknesses of the original Sandman series and turns it into a strength. When Sandman was written 30 years ago, trasngender representation in comics was next to nothing, and so it was a big deal when Neil Gaiman introduced a trans character in the biggest comic of the time. However, it was done with the biases and care that that era would be known for, and as such does not hold as good representation today. The Dreaming: Waking Hours updates the story of Sandman for a modern lens, one that has more respect and care for trans people than even allies had in the 1990s. Rather than making her a side character, but instead the new character of Heather After (a trans disaster protege of bisexual disaster John Constantine) is one of the protagonists of the story, and her transness drives the climax of the series in a way that it provides her power and not victimhood. I love Heather dearly, and hope that we see her again soon.

-Cori McCreery

The Eternals

Writer

Kieron Gillen

Artist

Esad Ribic

Colorist

Matthew Wilson

Letterer

Clayton Cowles

Publisher

Marvel Comics

Of Marvel’s various “secret races hidden from public knowledge”, the Eternals have long come in third, lacking the Silver Age creds of the Inhumans and the breadth and commercial zing of the X-Men. With their new series, writer Kieron Gillen and artist Esad Ribic set out to rectify that. Far more than the response to a commercially-driven desire to simply have an Eternals title on the stands when their movie hit theaters, the inuagural arc of Eternals, “Only Death is Eternal”, is presented as a murder mystery (wherein the victim is “immortality”). But by the time the story closes, Gillen and Ribic manage to both pay tribute to and completely upend the history of the Eternals, breaking their status quo and replacing it with something new to an extent not seen since House of X/Powers of X did something similar for the X-Men.

But Gillen and Ribic aren’t just changing things for the sake of change, instead using their story to probe questions about what the appropriate response is when systems we believe in break down or are revealed to be deeply flawed. In the process, the creators succeed in crafting a series about a 70s-era secret race of ancient Jack Kirby evolutionary offshoots in the service of obtuse space gods that is relevant to the world of today (while also being a cracking good read). The conclusion of the series’ first arc is satisfying on its own, but also doesn’t present any easy thematic answers, creating a compelling hook for the subsequent arc that serves to underscore the biggest flaw of the series: it simply can’t come out fast enough.

-Austin Gorton

Far Sector

Writer

N. K. Jemisin

Artist

Jamal Campbell

Publisher

DC’s Young Animal

Far sector sees her.

The Black, queer, confident, curvy woman who owns her place in a society that oscillates between ignoring and deriding her existence. We see her carve out space in deep space to protect the needy, give justice to the persecuted, and find love, lust, and an appreciation for life.

Far sector sees me.

In a galaxy filled with beings both organic and electronic, we find a treatise on the nuances of humanity: impatience and imperialist, kind and conniving, selfish and selfless. The best science fiction uses fantasy to provide dissonance so we can better examine ourselves. We might not like what we see, but we can’t improve unless we can see – and acknowledge the truth.

Far Sector sees us.

Jamal Campbell beautifully illustrates fanciful flowing action juxtaposed with familiar, forthright faces. The art is a tour de force, itself well worth the price of admission.

You need to see it – to experience it – to fully understand.

You should see Far Sector.

And you’ll see parts of you (and me, and her, and us) too.

-Jude Jones

The Good Asian

Writer

Pornsak Pichetshote

Artist

Alexandre Tefenkgi

Colorist

Lee Loughridge

Letterer

Jeff Powell

Publisher

Image Comics

You ever read a book, and then think ‘Wait, this can exist?! This is possible in this space?! Well why the hell haven’t I been getting it?!’? A book so striking that you feel like you’ve been robbed all along, because what the hell, if you knew you could get this? You’d never have settled for a zillion other lesser things. You would never have compromised. You would have asked for nothing less than this.

That’s The Good Asian, an Asian-American noir drama set in 1930s America. Following detective Edison Hark, inspired by real-life figures like Chang Apana, it’s an exploration of the first generation of immigrants to grow up under the weight of The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

It’s the kind of comic that makes you go ‘That’s what I want more of. This is the future right here’. That special comic that feels like a gift, but also a sort of ‘Well, why the hell didn’t this exist until now?’. It’s all of that at once, and it’s a hell of a thing. It is fury, it is sadness, it is beauty, and by god, does it really work. Alongside The Swamp Thing, this is the comic most representative of what I want moving forward, that I’ve deeply been craving in this Direct Market space, which I also have almost never gotten. This is the food you eat, which makes you tear up, as you suddenly realize how truly starved you were, and how bad it really was before you got to eat it. We need this. We need more people to read this. It’s bloody brilliant.

-Ritesh Babu

Home Sick Pilots

Writer

Dan Watters

Artist

Caspar Wijngaard

Letterer

Aditya Bidikar

Publisher

Image

As an old, a comic about 1990s garage punks forming depression-metaphor bonds with ghosts and using those bonds to power mechs speaks to my very soul. Watters writes teens stumbling and fumbling their way through trauma and grief, but with Kaiju-sized stakes, while Wijngaard swaps palettes from neon to pastel as the action rises and falls, excelling at all of it.

One minute, characters are dissecting the legacy of Joe Strummer, the next, a giant mech is careening Kong-like through downtown Seattle as it seeks out its nemesis, a haunted house that walks like a man. My favorite indie series of the year, and it’s not even close.

-Dan Grote

Hoops

Creator

Genie Espinosa

Publisher

Sapristi

An unexpected delight for me this year, Hoops is a tight graphic novel about three girls transported from their world (in which all men disappeared around a year ago) to a fantasy jungle, from which they must make their way home. Hoops does not dwell on its premise, however, sticking close to its three main characters. The girls have an easy, natural rapport that keeps the focus of the book close even as they fight against giant creatures from the other world. Hoops is also both funny and touching, lighthearted and full of visual gags that pull back in time for the more serious and thoughtful scenes, dealing mainly with the main characters’ concerns about body image and past with now-missing boys.

Where Hoops shines brightest is in its artwork. Espinosa’s spreads are evocative and delightful, filling her characters with life and charm. Her lettering fills the page, wobbly and hand-drawn when the action rises. Espinosa’s colors are muted and subdued in one world, all blues and whites and blacks, and in another full of deep greens and reds and yellows. But the moments of sublime beauty come in the sunrises and sunsets, filled with soft gradients and empty panels, a tranquil and lonely vision of another world.

-Ian Gregory

I Breathed A Body

Writer

Zac Thompson

Artist

Andy MacDonald

Colorist

Triona Farrell

Letterer

Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Publisher

Aftershock Comics

It was a good year for Magic in comics. For a medium whose modern era has been so defined by two wizards, I find it’s very rare for a book today to do anything at once serious, complex, and novel with narrative magic. But 2021 saw the Chaos Magic so important to Morrison’s work expanded and interrogated in The Department of Truth, and inverted or reshaped into something new in The Trial of Magneto. Esoteric, occult, and mystical traditions are being employed in interesting ways in stories ranging from superhero dramas to horrifying interrogations of our failing institutions.

I Breathed A Body begins as a dystopian, sci-fi critique of the business of social media and the resulting culture. Partway through, however, it becomes something wild, magical, fae. This twist in genre isn’t just intended to shock. We’re forced into an entirely different paradigm to engage with the material. This kind of book attempts to show us something about the corpse of our culture; as the story begins, it is grotesque in the way of a cadaver on the operating table, but as the narrative shifts, our experience becomes less cold and diagnostic. Reading this book is like stumbling upon something fetid in the woods. The rot and decay is so intense that its smell is almost something you can reach out and touch, even if the body is somewhere you cannot see. Writing about the book resulted in one of the most personal bodies of criticism I have produced in my short career. Both kinds of stories here— fantasy stories with other worlds, and dystopias that critique structures in our own— can be extremely removed from us, or clinical in their execution.

But you can’t stand back from I Breathed A Body, you can’t keep it separate. Anyone who, as a child, found such a thing somewhere out there knows: When the stench hits you, when you go on, when you turn the corner in the path, when you see the decaying flesh, when you glimpse mycelial stems emerging from the mound, when you turn around and run, that thing is with you now, forever.

-Robert Secundus

I Walk With Monsters

Writer

Paul Cornell

Artist

Sally Cantirino

Colorist

Dearbhla Kelly

Letterer

Andworld Design

Publisher

Vault Comics

Monsters grow from darkness and pain. They are around us and within us, but we choose how we interact with them. We can try to bury them and let them fester within. We can surrender and let them control us. But I Walk with Monsters teaches us that we can also transform them as a mode of healing.

Jacey had a dream to be an astronaut, but growing up in a world of abuse from her father, a world where her brother was sold to a monster, and she never saw him again. Her love and hope was stolen with only ruins of hurt and anger left in its place. That hurt and anger never subsided. Now she travels to punish the monsters out there who look to take the love and dreams from others.

David made a mistake. That’s not enough; David hurt other people and caused immense suffering. He did something inexcusable. Now he has a monster inside of him and it is hungry. He doesn’t want to be the person who committed those actions, who caused that pain. He has to live with that monster, so he might as well use it for good and take down other monsters in the world who don’t share David’s hope for repentance.

Monsters don’t just go away, and no matter how much we try to turn them outward, unless we reflect on their existence within us, they will only cause damage. Paul Cornell and Sally Cantirino take us through the internal reckonings Jacey and David have with monsters external and internal to show us that monsters may never go away, but they can transform into something healing.

-Ari Bard

The Joker

Writer

James Tynion IV

Artist

Guillem March

Colorist

Arif Prianto

Letterer

Tom Napolitano

Publisher

DC Comics

An ongoing starring the Joker is a dicey proposition to me, from a character standpoint. The Joker shouldn’t be a likable protagonist; he is, and always should be, the monster under your bed.

So James Tynion IV made the right decision in making the Joker the inciting incident of the ongoing under his name, and the quarry of the cast, while making Jim Gordon the lead of this story. Gordon, now retired, is on his one last case, having been hired by mysterious forces to track down and finally end the Joker, the man who has on numerous occasions made his life a living hell.

As the series has progressed over the year, we’ve seen the whole thing expand, including new factions hunting Joker and an international conspiracy that feels oddly real for something set in a superhero world. But at the heart, the series remains about one man trying to decide if he can bend his morals without breaking them, and if breaking them is worth it to prevent a monster from roaming free. That character work is what makes The Joker such an engaging read.

-Matt Lazorwitz

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr

Writer

Ram V

Artist

Felipe Andrade

Letterer

AndWorld Design

Publisher

BOOM! Studios

Comics can get you down. Not because of the corporate timidity (constant though it is), or the gross inequities of pay scales and creator representation (extreme though they are), or the exhausting online culture of fans and creators leaning toward their worst learned behaviors (be sure to follow me on twitter, ComicsXF fans!).

No, what gets you about comics is the fatiguingly unambitious roteness of it all: the unavoidable sense that creators and readers alike are going through the motions, churning out 10 pages of talking heads and 10 pages of swinging fists each month because that, my dear friends, is the club we signed up for. What gets you is the nagging, timid voice in the back of your head that periodically pipes out, “forgive me, really, I know this is all supposed to be exciting and fun but…are you absolutely sure that we still want to be here?”

And then you read a comic like The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, and you remember what comics can sometimes dream. This is a story about mortality and its limitations; about the bonds we make and lose with one another, and what humanity means to each of us; about the liminal separation between the divine and the prosaic.

Its central conceit – a god of death is punished by inhabiting a human form, and fated to live eternal life – is not new: a recurring motif in mythologies of many stripes, it also happens to feature as the premise of a couple of well-known prestige comic series. What writer Ram V brings to this project is a haunting, lyrical tone and a sensibility rooted in a sensibility outside the limiting confines of Western folktales. To this is married the clear sketchbook lines of Filipe Andrade’s art and, perhaps most memorably, the pink and teal pastels of Ines Amaro’s coloring, which turns everyday moments into something like a dream or a fable.

And if Ram V’s words can sometimes strain just a little too hard to be poetry? If the ending feels just a little too self-conscious in its moral lesson? Well, these are the failings of a series that reached far enough and high enough to fail at something. In a field of desultory commerce, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr had the courage to unabashedly try to be art. And that’s reason enough for comics to live another day.

-Zach Rabiroff

Maw

Writer

Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Artist

A.L. Kaplan

Colorist

Fabiana Mascolo

Letterer

Cardinal Rae

Publisher

BOOM! Studios

Maw is exactly what I had hoped it would be; scary, immersive, critical, and honestly down right realistic. This tale of two sisters tells of their journey to a feminist retreat and through the harms that they’ve experienced at the hands of men. One develops monstrous desires as she reluctantly joins her sister in this journey, while her sister confronts that maybe she hasn’t really been harmed by men in the world at all.

This comic takes a hard look at many uncomfortable things like sexual assault, broken justice systems, the patriarchy, and white feminism and the trauma each entails. Each issue sets the tone with Mascolo’s muted colors and Kaplan’s striking lines. Rae’s letters pace the story well, giving the reader time to take in the simultaneously disturbing and peaceful scenes of the retreat while Doyle dares us to question each character’s histories and our own perceptions of acts through our life. Although it’s not quite a pleasant read, it’s an engaging one and I highly recommend it!

-Cat Purcell

The Nice House on the Lake

Writer

James Tynion IV

Artist

Álvaro Martínez Bueno

Colorist

Jordie Bellaire

Letterer

Andworld Design

Publisher

DC Comics

How many deaths do we have? Other than the final, rather permanent one. We each live several lives, moving on from high school to a career, moving between states. The death isn’t physical, it’s more a death of a time, of a feeling, or of the closeness of a friendship. Sometimes we try to preserve this life, like during a visit to your hometown during the holidays. But even as you try to rekindle a relationship, you can’t rekindle an old life. An old life, a friendship, can’t be fully preserved unchanged. I thought a bit about this in June on my first flight since the pandemic started, hurtling through the midnight skies on a much delayed plane as I read the first issue of The Nice House on the Lake.

Walter gathers his group of friends for a nice trip to a gorgeous lakehouse. And by friends, I almost mean a collection. Some of them are close to each other, some are more tenuously connected. You know how some friend outings are. You go with your best friend, and they bring that girl they’ve been seeing, and she brings her friend, etc. Without going too deep, because this comic has a banger of an opening, this is the story of a bunch of people with varying degrees of familiarity navigating a very unfamiliar situation. Some of Walter’s guests are friends of his from high school, some are from college, some were people he met during his adult life. And like pins through a butterfly’s wings on a collection, Walter has forced this group together as he tries to force the distinct periods of his life together. Tynion is of course on fire this year, but Martínez Bueno’s art brings a scratchy, slightly difficult to parse tone to the art while Bellaire’s moody colors paint us an unsettling picture in what should be paradise. With fantastic use of epistolary materials, Nice House is an incredibly engaging story about the strange web of an expanded friend group, connected by someone who turns out to be a stranger..

But it’s really about how we internalize our relationships with people, and the ability (or lack thereof) to allow the people around you to grow and change. There’s something in us that wants to crystallize our friends and loved ones in a particular time. A prison of nostalgia. What if you COULD do that though? Would you? What if you could force your old friends together with your new friends? What if you could save them…what if you had to save them, from you?

-Chris Eddleman

The Other History of the DC Universe

Writer

John Ridley

Layouts

Giuseppe Camuncoli

Finishes

Andrea Cucchi

Colorist

José Villarrubia

Letterer

Steve Wands

Publisher

DC Comics

History matters. The stories of how today came to be matter. They add depth, they add weight, to the stories being told today, and how that story is told matters most of all. The problem is, superhero comics and history don’t mix together well. Heck, superhero comics barely manage to hold their own history up very well. Between sliding timescales, retcons, and multiversal reboots, most continuity falls apart the moment you think about it for too long. The Other History of the DC Universe does a magical job of giving the past a voice – and a voice to DC’s characters whose stories aren’t as widely told as they ought to be.

The comic blends the histories of the real world and DC’s fictional one into its own vision of a DC Universe where heroes age, and the timescale isn’t sliding. It takes the stories of five of DC’s most intriguing minority characters – Black Lightning, Katana, Bumblebee, The Question and Lightning – and grounding their stories in something personal. It places their impossible stories in a more real world context, an impossible task – but it FEELS like it works. The unique layouts and the prose that comes with make each page feel like its own self-contained window into a history, exposing the flaws of a superhero universe filled with superhumans who have very human failings.

Each story feels personal. Each story feels weighted. It’s not perfect, but it is impactful. Every issue is a long read that will drag you deep into DC’s complicated lore, seeing it through a perspective rarely explored in its regular comics. It’s as much a criticsm of DC’s past as it is an exploration of it, and as it moves through the decades, it does the same for America as a whole, too. It’s a spellbinding book, and just might be the most compelling thing DC’s put out all year.

-Armaan Babu

Static: Season One

Writer

Vita Ayala

Artist

Nikolas Draper-Ivey, ChrisCross

Colorist

Nikolas Draper-Ivey

Letterer

Andworld Design

Publisher

Milestone Media

It’s not hyperbole to say that Vita Ayala is one of the best writers in the game right now, and Static has been an absolutely amazing fit for them. Static’s a franchise with big shoes to fill, but Ayala more than does the job, bringing a feeling of love and sincerity to the book that makes every issue a delight. The characters have genuine weight to them, with clear motivations and emotional depth that makes the book stand out from its peers. It’s rare for any media, not just comics, to have interpersonal conflicts that aren’t mostly reliant on a lack of communication, so it’s legitimately refreshing to see the Hawkins family be open and honest with each other, and respectful of each other’s perspectives even when they don’t quite see eye to eye.

And, speaking of eyes, the book is an absolute visual delight. Nikolas Draper-Ivey and ChrisCross bring a manga-inspired artistic style that’s astoundingly dynamic. As Draper-Ivey takes the lead later on, it only becomes more refined, leading to some of the most badass sequences I’ve seen all year. The book’s not just beautiful, it flows, to the point where I can play it all out in my head. There’s never any unclear action, or question of what’s supposed to be going on, every single panel knows exactly what it needs to do, and hits it out of the park. The character design is an absolute blast as well, with Draper-Ivey’s sense of style coming to the forefront to make some of the most fashionable characters in comics.

As a Black nerd who grew up in the 90’s, I’ve got a lot of love for Virgil and his crew. Like Miles Morales is for a lot of kids now, Static was the dude for me and mine, from the show, to the original Milestone comics, to just running around on the playground, yelling “get zapped!” with our coats trailing behind us. It’d take a lot to make a comic that I love more than those nostalgic memories, but this book, this team, brings that energy without question. If you haven’t read it yet, you owe it to yourself.

-Corey Smith