Comicon’s 5 Best Digital/Webcomics Of 2022

Welcome to Comicon.com’s Best of the Year Awards, gathering the best comics and comics talent of the strange year that was 2021. This year we will be awarding in the following categories: Best Original Graphic Novels, Best Comic Series, Best Single Comic Issues, Best Writers, Best Artists, Best Cover Artists, Best Colorists, Best Letterers, Best Digital/Webcomics, and Most Progressive Comics.

Contributors to Comicon’s Best of the Year Awards this year include: Oliver MacNamee, Rachel Bellwoar, Richard Bruton, Scott Redmond, Tito James, Tom Smithyman, and Tony Thornley.

The following are Comicon’s 5 Best Digital/Webcomics of 2022.

5. Zatanna & The Ripper by Sarah Dealy and Syro

Zatanna hasn’t headlined her own series for at least six years now, and she is not a major marquee draw (though she should be). By taking a few basics of her classic characterization and backstory, some mystical mishaps, and then add history’s most famous serial killer, you’ve got magic (yes, pun intended). Dealy and Syro  have thrust Zee into the nineteenth century, in a city and country she doesn’t know. Adding Jack the Ripper, and revealing the DCU’s ripper is not what he appears, they’ve created a fun mystery with a little bit of a twist. It makes it well worth reading, week in and week out. And with the revelations of the opening chapter, we’ve clearly got more to look forward to.

— Tony Thornley

4. Red Hood & The Outlaws by Patrick R. Young and Nico Bascunan

Of all the Robins, Jason Todd is the one that I’ve connected with the least. But one of the newest entries in the DC/ Webtoon partnership revealed an instantly charming adventure comic in which Jason finally felt human. Featuring the Rebirth incarnation of the Outlaws — Red Hood, Artemis, and Bizarro — the series chronicles the adventures of the titular team as they become treasure hunters for hire. Even better, Young and Bascunan pepper the story with personal vignettes that have humanized its leads much better than the years of Red Hood books we got from DC itself.

— Tony Thornley

3. Why Don’t You Love Me by Paul Rainey

Mind-Bogglingly Brilliant Mundanity is how I described it in the title of the review I did of this one in my Webcomic Weekly feature. It’s now set for release in print from Drawn & Quarterly in 2023 — and is essential reading for you all when it does. But the actual webcomic had first appeared in David Lloyd‘s excellent digital anthology Aces Weekly since 2018, with Rainey subsequently posting updates online until it ended in 2022. He regularly impressed me over many years with his works  — usually comedic, or at least humourous weirdness — but he’s also got the ability to turn the seemingly ordinary into something quite spellbinding and unusual, works that leave you intrigued and unsettled, and the 150-ish episodes of Why Don’t You Love Me? absolutely fulfill that definition of his work.

It is simply an excellent piece of fiction, brilliant in its execution, guaranteed to leave you wondering exactly what you’d just read … who are these people? What the hell is going on? What was that thing in the news? How come it all just switched? And so on and so on … intriguing, complex, fascinating, and absolutely spellbinding.

For something that begins in that brilliant mundanity I mentioned, where we’re introduced to Claire & Mark and their two kids and their nice little suburban existence, it almost immediately begins to subvert what you might think is happening, with the unexpected and strange increasingly transforming what it is you think you’re reading. The brilliance comes with how Rainey pulls this off, with no great revelation, just a slow realisation dawning on the reader’s part that everything’s completely off-kilter, a dash of the bizarre amongst the seemingly normal, absolutely mundane setting.

— Richard Bruton

2. Wayne Family Adventures by StarBite and CRC Payne

The most read comics in the United States don’t come from Marvel or DC. They come from Webtoon, and DC has jumped right on it, right alongside their fantastic YA offerings. This year, Batman: Wayne Family Adventures continues to be a highlight. The sweet story from StarBite and CRC Payne mixes light superheroics with an interpersonal dramedy. This past year of stories mixed family competitions with PTSD and heroes battling anxiety — and that’s just scratching the surface. It’s a thrill every week to see an update, and it’s clear that’s not over.

— Tony Thornley

1. X365 by Neill Cameron

It may have been recently funded on Kickstarter for print publication but Neill Cameron’s X365 began as a web and digital comic, one that’s still available to view online. Delivered online one panel a day, for 365 days of the year, it was a foolish thing, perhaps, but those 365 panels became so much more than an interesting experiment in the art of making comics. They became a fabulous story across multiple worlds, creative and inventive, eminently readable, completely involving.

Featuring three parallel lives and three very different iterations of the year 2020, it all comes together in a fantastical storyline  where Cameron makes every single twist and turn work so wonderfully well. And the artwork is simply sublime as well, subtly different styles to depict the different worlds, perfectly observed, the tonal shifts adding to the sense of the strange times these characters are living through. All in all, a stunning piece of experimental comics that does something quite rare in experimental comics – it actually ends up being innovative and entertaining, original and fun. Definitely recommended.

— Richard Bruton