The Best Comics of 2025

It’s been an OK year for comics? It hasn’t been the best, though — in December, I usually go through best-of lists like The Comics Journal’s to see everything I’ve missed, and there were like … five? … books there that I hadn’t read and sounded interesting (so I’ve ordered them now). That’s almost nothing — usually I find tons and tons of great stuff via those lists.

I.e., I’ve already read almost everything of interest that’s been published.

After Diamond went under, there’s apparently been a great contraction in the US comics “market”. Not only have many micro publishers been left without a distributor (so they’ve disappeared), but the majors (Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly) have cut back heavily on their schedules. Fantagraphics mostly repackages Disney and Marvel (!) comics these days, and NBM went bust recently (after having retreated into publishing Extruded Biography Comics for a while). And other previously reliable outfits (the ones still going, like Fieldmouse and Uncivilized) seem to have retreated into safer (i.e., more boring) territory. It’s a bit depressing.

Well, let’s see what I have here… when I read a comic and I’m totally impressed with it, the comic moves to a special shelf I have here in the living room, and these are the ones that landed there:

Froggie World by Alee Errico (Cram Books)

You can get this from here. It’s great.

Alive Outside edited by Cullen Beckhorn and Marc Bell

This anthology is amazing. It’s a classic. You can get it from here. And it’s on sale! When it’s gone it’s gone.

Life After Life by Joshua Barkman

Get it from here.

World Within The World by Julie Gförer (Fantagraphics)

Wrong by Skeleton Bones (TBC)

I guess this is really CF? And it’s old, but it was republished in 2025, so.

Jaywalk #5 (Domino Books)

Get it from here.

Fruit Salad by Cathon (Pow Pow Press)

Extremely funny book.

A Scientific Study of Transsexuality by Oscard Woodiwiss (Fieldmouse Press)

Get it from here.

Lava by Annika Lind Verdal Homme (Aschehoug)

Norwegian comics!

Cannon by Lee Lai (Drawn & Quarterly)

This is the only D&Q book here — they really scaled back, but they also went even more middlebrow this year, publishing “worthy” book after “worthy” book. This one is really good, though.

Salt Green Death by Katarina Thorsen (Conundrum Press)

This book is fantastic.

Laser Eye Surgery by Walker Tate (Fantagraphics)

Smoke Signal #44 by Gary Panter (Desert Island)

This is sold out, unfortunately.

Lost & Found by Mia Wolff (Fantagraphics)

Smoke Signal #45 by Tara Booth (Desert Island)

Lifehole by Mary Moore Dalton

Get it from here.

And that’s it for 2025, although I’ve got a stack of unread comics, so perhaps there’s more brilliance here:

Or here:

But I also read some older, noteworthy comics. These are mostly from 2024, I guess, but a couple older ones:

Bottlecaps & Breadcrumbs by Travis Head

Whispered Words by David Enos

Neeext! Volume II by Heather Loase

Brilliant.

Kaskelot by Sebastian Larsmo

Six Treasures of the Spiral by Matt Madden (Uncivilized Books)

Processing by Tara Booth (Drawn & Quarterly)

Mythologies and Apocrypha #2 by Tim Lane (Fantagraphics)

Yearly 2024 by Andrew White

I really enjoy these yearly anthologies from Andrew White… and I see now there’s a 2025 and a 2026 out?! *sounds of me ordering them*

Les Trembles by Thomas Merceron (Quintal éditions)

This is a French book, but it’s wordless, so you can read it.

And you totally, absolutely should.

The Retirement Party by Teddy Goldenberg (Floating World Comics)

This one is amazing.

And… that’s it. Another year dawns.

December Music

Music I’ve bought in December.

Hey, that’s a lot of albums (and singles)… However, this month I’ve been listening mostly to old music for some reason or other. That is, I’ve been listening chronologically to albums starting in 1967 and working my way to 1980. So I’ve barely listened to these new albums at all.

Do I even remember any of these albums at all? Let’s see…

I finally bought the Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges album, and it’s very good (duh).

Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo - Radioactive Dreams (Official Music Video)

The Chat Pile/Hayden Pegido album is good? I think?

Tonight I Heard The Dog Star Bark - Gwenifer Raymond

I like the Gwenifer Raymond album.

ganavya & Sam Amidon - Would Be Better (Official Audio)

Oh yeah! The ganavya & Sam Amidon single is great!

2hollis - all 2s (official video)

Er… Can’t remember whether I liked the 2hollis album, but I remember it being very crunchy.

OK, that’s all I can dredge up memories about! Sorry!

Book Club 2025: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

I’ve read this before, of course, and wasn’t there a movie? I had totally forgotten who the murderer was, though. While reading this, I was thinking of a different lots-of-people-dying movie… set in a castle or something? Where the first guy to “die” was the culprit. Hm… Yes! Murder By Death! Must be that one.

Anyway, this is pretty inspired. Christie writes in a brief preface that it took a long time to work out the logistics of this book, and you can see the sheer glee of having made it all work. And she gets to kill off ten miscreants in one book, and she doesn’t have to put in even a single sympathetic character.

And Then There Were None (1939) by Agatha Christie (buy used, 4.27 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Death and the Princess by Robert Barnard

After the fairly incompetent mystery I read last, I wanted something more reliable, and Barnard is usually reliable.

But this isn’t quite satisfactory. Barnard is quite varied in scenery and plot, but this is pretty unusual even for him. It’s like his agent told him to write a mystery set in royal circles, and he reluctantly agreed. So he spends quite a bit of the book bemoaning how little interest he has in royals, and this seems to affect the plot as well: It’s one of those books where it’s not even clear whether there’s been a crime… and then the resolution comes out of left field with twenty pages to go.

So even if this is a short novel, Barnard has to pad it with blather about Society These Days, and it all leads to a book that feels like it’s caught in a complete stasis — as if Barnard, usually a master plotter, didn’t really know where to go with it all.

But Barnard has the amusing patter down as always, so it’s not that bad, really.

Death and the Princess (1982) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)