Comicon’s Best OGNs Of 2023

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: Rachel Bellwoar, Richard Bruton, Scott Redmond, Tito James, Tom Smithyman, and Tony Thornley.

The following are Comicon’s Best Original Graphic Novels of 2023.

5. Where the Body Was, published by Image Comics; written by Ed Brubaker, drawn and lettered by Sean Phillips, colored by Jacob Phillips

When Eisner Award winners Brubaker and Phillips deliver a new graphic novel, the comics community pays attention. The two creators live up to their well-deserved reputation with Where the Body Was. The story deals with the residents of a small-town community and how their many stories are interrelated during the summer of 1984. Brubaker weaves them together like an intricate tapestry – even to the point where you forget that someone has died under mysterious circumstance. Despite the large number of characters, Phillips does a great job of distinguishing each of them, and his son Jacob Phillips provides some great color work.

— Tom Smithyman

4. Queenie: Godmother of Harlem, published by Abrams ComicArts Megascope; written by Aurélie Lévy, drawn, colored, and lettered by Elizabeth Colomba

Gangster movies and TV shows like to have big, splashy endings. After all, there’s only one way out for a gangster, right? They don’t get to retire … except Stephanie St. Clair did, and if that’s meant her story hasn’t been told as often as other 1930s gangsters, it’s the story that should be told. Anyone can get themselves killed. It takes talent to be a survivor, and while it’s only a matter of time before more people catch-on to Queenie’s story (especially in light of the success of the TV show, Godfather of Harlem, about Queenie’s ally, Bumpy Johnson), they’ll be hard pressed to tell it better than Lévy and Colomba. Instead of starting from the beginning, the creative team picks up with Queenie being released from jail and then use flashbacks to fill readers in on earlier points in her life. It’s an extremely effective structure and the deliberate pacing of Colomba’s panels make every gesture matter.

— Rachel Bellwoar

3. Why Don’t You Love Me, published by Drawn & Quarterly; written and drawn, colored, and lettered by Paul B. Rainey

Why Don’t You Love Me? is Rainey’s masterpiece, lauded up and down in best of year lists and a worthy entry in our own best OGN category. Although, we have to say, we loved it way back when it was merely a thing he was publishing online without a publisher!

The book is intriguing, complex, fascinating, spellbinding, and heartbreaking as Rainey takes us inside the relationship between a little suburban couple and their kids where Mark and Claire are just dealing with the everyday crap we all do. Except, in Rainey’s wonderful world here, everyday life is strange, something’s just not right, everything’s just that little off-kilter. And it’s the way this dash of the bizarre and the unsettling sense of things just not being right fills the first two-thirds of WDYLM whilst, at the same time, Rainey’s perfectly realised interactions between his couple perfectly nails all the everyday stuff that makes this book such a perfect thing.

It will draw you in, it will entrance you, it will bring you to the edge of your seat with the expectation of what Rainey’s doing and then, when the reveal happens, it’s a masterstroke that brings the everyday and the utterly unbelievable together so incredibly well.

— Richard Bruton

2. Mobilis: My Life With Captain Nemo, published by TKO Studios; written, drawn, colored, and lettered by Juni Ba

Ever since his debut work from TKO, Ba has been a creator to keep an eye on. With Mobilis: My Life With Captain Nemo, his best work is on full display. The size and format of the graphic novel furthers the feelings of the character’s isolation. The themes of perseverance and transience in the face of existential problems hit home now more than ever.

Mobilis excels where lesser graphic novels stumble and delivers a compelling narrative that’s accessible to readers of any age. We need more OGNs with this much attention to creative composition and design that’s in service of the story. We’re lucky to have a story this layered that’s this much fun.

— Tito James

1. Cosmic Detective, published by Image Comica ; written by Jeff Lemire & Matt Kindt, drawn, colored, and lettered by David Rubín

Kindt, Lemire and Rubin are names that should be known to any comics fan. When they collaborate though, it’s a special occasion. Cosmic Detective saw this incredible creative trio team up in a Kirby-esque cosmic noir. With equal parts hard boiled detective tale and trippy visuals, this OGN slipped past a lot of readers, but it should be on everyone’s list. Check out if you haven’t already.

— Tony Thornley

Honorable mention: Punycorn, published by HarperCollins; written, drawn, colored, and lettered by Andi Watson

Watson’s latest book for children simply enchants in its telling, not just for the youngsters lucky enough to read it but for their adults who get to experience the magic along with them. (And who, no doubt, will love it just as much when they inevitably read it for themselves.)

In a fantastical world, it’s big-hearted but somewhat diminutive and rather clumsy unicorn Punycorn, together with his pals — a fireless dragon and a gutsy dung beetle — will somehow be the ones destined to save the land of Carbuncle from the vile Sir Ogre and his evil army.

It’s cute, it’s whimsy at its best, it’s wonderfully playful and beautifully realised, with Watson’s seemingly effortless cartooning giving you beauty in every page.

Fast-paced and funny in the best silly fashion, Punycorn will be a book that readers of all ages will absolutely love.

— Richard Bruton