The comics medium is a beautiful and interconnected ecosystem, and we do our best to showcase that in Polygon’s best comics of the year. From self-published works and foreign imports to Marvel and DC’s blockbuster series, if one thing is clear in 2023, comic book culture is inspiring the entire culture. But who cares if these are the movies, TV shows, and games of five years?
Here in 2023, they are incredible books.
Comics were eligible if they were graphic novels first published in 2023 or series first collected or publishing their final collection in 2023. Everything on this list is available in paperback or collected form for your eager hands – no trade waiters to worry.
Darlin’ and Her Other Names (Part 1: Marta)
Image: Olivia Stephens
by Olivia Stephens
The first installment of Olivia Stephens’ self-published werewolf western horror romance comic is one of the standout things I’ve read all year. Brought to life in stark black and white, Stephens creates a terrifying yet hopeful story about two strangers who meet in the wake of violence and come together to get the revenge they both so desperately desire.
This is the kind of comic that, despite being 88 pages long, immediately leaves you wanting more. It is soulful, touching, beautifully rendered and uniquely atmospheric. Stephens has already shown her talent with the beautiful graphic novel Artie and the wolf moonbut though that was a charming book for younger readers, Darling is unabashedly for adults, with emotional weight, deep thematic resonance, and brutal violence that will leave you thinking long after reading. — Rosie Knight
Shubeik Lubeik
Image: Deena Mohamed/Penguin Random House
by Deena Mohamed
Whenever Egypt appears in Western art, it tends to be flattened and caricatured under the Western gaze. But what happens if you reverse the perspective? The brilliant saga of Deena Mohamed – a work by an Egyptian creator originally serialized in Arabic for an Egyptian audience – does just that. Her groundbreaking comic is finally available in English, with Mohamed himself translating it, and with pages that can be read from right to left like any known manga, reflecting its origins.
Set in a modern day Cairo, the book draws the reader into an alternate history where humanity can make their dreams come true – for a price. Mohamed follows multiple characters from different class backgrounds and explores how a world shaped by Western colonialism and capitalist impulses systematizes even impossible powers such as wishes and dreams – and what that does to the Egyptian people living in such a society. This work of bold sci-fi/fantasy, with slick back-matter, infographic pages, charts, and transitions between color and black and white, reads like no other comic this year or any year.
There are talking donkeys, deadly dragons, clever world-building and best of all, heartbreaking characters that will stick with you. — Ritesh Babu
Do a Power Bomb!
Image: Daniel Warren Johnson/Image Comics
By Daniel Warren Johnson
The story of Do a Power Bomb is that Daniel Warren Johnson first came into professional wrestling during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this is his love letter to the form.
The story within Do a Power Bomb is that a necromancer offers a place in his supernatural wrestling tournament to a young wrestler from our world, where wrestling is achievement. If she wins, he resurrects her dead mother, but to do so she must tag a team with the masked wrestler who accidentally killed her during a fateful match. Twist! That masked wrestler is her father. Twist! They must fight against God! Like the Judeo-Christian God!
The joy of Do a Power Bomb is that not an inch of it is ashamed or sheepish: it’s all sincerity, all camp, all heart, and all spectacle. Its glory is how Johnson leads a Renaissance painter’s eye to his action. He can blow out a split second on the page so that its suspense and beauty lingers forever, and most of the time he does. —Susan Polo
Blood of the Virgin
Image: Sammy Harkam/Penguin Random House
by Sammy Harkham
Seymour, if we’re honest, is a bit of a schlub. The protagonist of Sammy Harkham’s cartoonist Blood of the Virgin lives in 1970s Los Angeles, where he performs solitary film montages of the worst kind of grindhouse movie. He dreams of becoming a screenwriter, but then it’s seedy: his magnum opus is called “Blood of the Virgin,” and its artistically deprived production unfolds over the course of Harkham’s strip. Seymour doesn’t have nearly as much to offer as he’d like, and he’s running out of ways to hide it from his parasitic boss, his wife Ida, and even himself.
All this entails risks Blood of the Virgin sounds like the kind of navel-gazing comic about narcissistic men that can be reliably found on highbrow reading lists, but that’s nowhere near what Harkham is doing here. Because beyond all that, Seymour is an Iraqi Jewish immigrant and the child of Holocaust victims, trying to place himself in a culture with which he can never quite identify.
So bad Boogie nights (a film with which this comic bears a general resemblance), Harkham’s work uses a small lens to illuminate vast themes: the history of Iraqi Jews; survivor’s guilt; Hollywood exploitation; the burning desire that we should all belong somewhere. Blood of the Virgin perhaps a masterpiece. —Zach Rabiroff
Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons
Image: Phil Jimenez/DC Comics
By Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, Nicola Scott, et al.
Wonder Woman History was one of the very first titles DC announced when it unveiled the scope and theme of its new Black Label imprint – a spot for the biggest names DC could attract to create canon-optional stories at high production value. The first collected edition of Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons is simply the most stunning artwork to come out of the Big Two comic houses in years.
Phil Jimenez filled every inch of the 62-page first issue with wildly detailed renderings of heavily researched character designs from the entire Greek pantheon and 30 original characters. It was an act that seemed impossible to follow until Gene Ha returned with an issue full of hidden goddesses. Nicola Scott rounded out the trilogy with some of the best layout and character work in comics today.
Not to mention Kelly Sue DeConnick’s expert prose, or her heartbreaking tale of Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons, as the Amazons tell it themselves. A primal cry in beautifully crafted gold. —SP