Comics 

Comicon’s Best OGNs And Collected Editions Of 2024

by Erik Amaya

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 Comic Series, Best Original Graphic Novels and Collected Editions, 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 and Collected Editions of 2024.

5. Search and Destroy Vol. 1, published by Fantagraphics; written and drawn by Atsushi Kaneko

Artist Atsushi Kaneko takes Osamu Tezuka’s demon-slaying story of Dororo and blasts it through his sci-fi punk rock filter. The result is a one-of-a-kind comic that employs the cinematic pacing of classic manga with the linework of American underground comix. The story is more than an edgy cyberpunk action thriller — it also acts as a poignant allegory about a young woman’s fight to reclaim her body. The action, avant garde fashion, and gothic atmosphere synthesize perfectly. Search and Destroy is an excellent gateway to alternative-manga that should be on everyone’s reading list.

— Tito James

4. Adrift on a Painted Sea, published by Avery Hill Publishing; written, drawn, colored, and lettered by Tim Bird

Bird’s latest work continues the themes of his always poignant and thoughtful comics, with this one taking a very personal approach; a beautiful thing that explores themes of family, loss, and the way art threads its way through our lives. Bird uses the pages of Adrift to examine his relationship with his artist mother in the wake of her death.
As with all of his books, Adrift on a Painted Sea has that sense of poetic drifting about it, gentle imagery that lingers long, a tale told in moments of calm, yet holding so much meaning in every one of those moments. His simple yet evocative art is full of gentle and evocative memory, stylised yet never anything less than beautiful in what it accomplishes.
Adrift is a quiet, delicate work whose themes are universal; of family, of relationships always cut short, and of those left behind to gather the pieces of a life. It’s quite the most gorgeous thing and something that will make you appreciate those you hold dear all the more.

— Richard Bruton

3. Navigating with You, published by Maverick; written by Jeremy Whitley, art by Cassio Ribeiro, and lettered by Nikki Fox with additional letters by Micah Meyers

First day at a new school – how many stories have sprung out of the trauma of that experience? In Navigating with You, it’s how Neesha and Gabby meet when they both end up starting Durham Western High School at the same time. That there’s will be a beautiful love story isn’t immediately clear, which is what makes their growing bond feel so organic instead of forced. Just because they’re young doesn’t mean they don’t both bring baggage into the relationship, too, though, and the power of Navigating with You comes from seeing both protagonists treated with respect and given fully realized lives as individuals and as a couple

— Rachel Bellwoar

2. Lucky Luke: Untamed, published by Cinebook; written, drawn, and lettered by Blutch, colored by Daniel Blancou, and translated by Jerome Saincatin

Cinebook’s done an excellent job of reprinting the classic Lucky Luke volumes, telling us tales of the cowboy who shoots faster than his own shadow, as created by the brilliance of writer/artist Morris, given added greatness when Rene Goscinny brought so much to the plots, and then passed on to various modern writers and artists after the passing of first Goscinny and then Morris. It’s a genuine classic, hilarious and clever, with Morris’s artistic genius the foundation of it all.
But Untamed is a different beast, part of a series of homages to the character by some very distinctive artists. This year we got to see what the incredibly talented Blutch had to add to this legendary character. And it’s just quite brilliant.
Sure, the basics of it never change, every Lucky Luke album runs the same way, the basic DNA works perfectly, but Blutch takes all that and gives it his unique spin, artistically brilliant, packed with perfect comedy timing, and full of the beauty and energy that Morris brought to things, but with some Kurtzman in there too, but most of all these unique stylings of Blutch.
This is just a brilliantly crafted, perfectly done, funny as hell, great Lucky Luke, one that keeps the purity of the character, one where the artist sticks doggedly to the template created by the comic greats before him yet still stamps his own style all over a classic.

— Richard Bruton

1. Sons of El Topo Omnibus, published by Boom! Studios; written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, drawn by colored by José Ladrönn (with Hugo Sebastian Facio also on colors for Vol. 1), translated by Edward Gauvin, and lettered by Deron Bennett and Andworld Design

Sons of El Topo Omnibus is a graphic novel series that acts as a sequel to Jodorowsky’s acid western cult film, El Topo. It’s fitting that one of the cult filmmaker’s final projects is a spiritual successor to one of his first. The collected tale is a marvelous achievement that not only bookends a unique creator’s career, but also elevates the medium of sequential art. Genre comics at their best are modernizations of mythological ideas. The team of Jodorowsky and artist Ladrönn have tapped into the deep subconscious roots of legends and spiritual traditions to transcend the arbitrary borders of genre. Sons of El Topo is best read in omnibus format and should be studied by literary scholars for years to come.

— Tito James

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