Comics 

Comicon’s Best Digital/Webcomics 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 Digital/Webcomics of 2024.

5. Batman: Wayne Family Adventures, published by Webtoon/DC Comics; written by CRC Payne, art by Starbite, and lettered by Kielamel Sibal

Payne and Starbite’s Wayne Family Adventures has taken on a life of its own. The loving family take on Gotham’s protectors and vigilantes has reshaped fans’ perception of these characters. Bruce Wayne’s exasperated dad is just as much a main character trait as his hyper-competence under the cowl. Dick Grayson is the kind and long-suffering big brother, Jason Todd the ultimate middle child, and so on. Even better than the humor and family antics that the fans have come to love, the Webtoon/DC Comics collaboration has humanized our favorite heroes in ways that fans seldom see elsewhere. Hopefully with the new Superman movie coming in the new year, the publishers will finally expand this kinder, softer DC universe.

— Tony Thornley

4. e-conomy by Boulet

More typically magnificent work in short and brilliantly comedic form from a master of the webcomic. If you don’t know Boulet’s name, you just don’t know webcomics — something Boulet’s been doing for two decades now, a true pioneer of the form.
e-conomy finds Boulet frustrated and annoyed, another victim of the modern problem so familiar to anyone who’s ever found themselves stymied by two-factor authentication and the difficulties of just trying to do anything online nowadays: remembering passwords, passcodes, your mother’s first pet, and everything else to make any of it function for the end user.
And all of it done with all the simple style that Boulet does so well, and has always done so well. Take a look at this, laugh along at one man’s venting at the world and then go and check out everything else he’s put online for so long. He’s been astonishing us for so long with the sheer variety of invention found in his online work, the variation in his style, the experimentation with the form — pretty much every experiment in webcomics that you can think of, Boulet was there first.

— Richard Bruton

3. War On Gaza by Joe Sacco

Of course, Sacco’s got a history of covering the tragedies of war, particularly the ongoing occupation and conflict in Palestine. But as the world stood by and wrung its hands while horrors unfolded in the continuing conflict in Gaza, Sacco found himself powerless to do anything but comment in the only way he knew: by making a comic about it.
Initially running on The Comics Journal, and now collected in print, Sacco brings his insightful and unflinching eye onto the war, his commentary taking in the genocide unfolding in Gaza, and the complicity of America in both funding and fueling the continuing tragedy.
It’s truly essential reading from the finest comics journalist working today.

— Richard Bruton

2. Gifted Young Artist by Noriz Mora

Mora’s Gifted Young Artist, all about a couple of clueless art teachers dealing with a summer school art class, is just ridiculous fun and more. Mora’s comedy mixes in very recognisable emotions of ennui faced by so many young people.
It’s all about that transition from being the high-flying top artistic talent as a kid in school and college to moving out into the big, wide world and finding out that the world really could care less and that no, you’re really not that special after all. That’s Rain’s life, as this unemployed, unmotivated animation grad moves sideways into teaching a summer art class. Should be simple, right? Nope, not a bit of it.
From that delightfully simple concept, Mora fills the episodes with fine comedy, wonderfully realised characters, some ridiculous moments, all to create that finest of things — a comedy of errors in an art class.
It’s another short and simple webcomic, but it’s another that’s done with such energy and joy.

— Richard Bruton

1. Lesbian Grief by Nes Lee

Webcomics can come in so many forms, but I’ve found that some of the very best come to us as short, perfect works of comics. And Nes Lee’s Lesbian Grief, with just 15 panels, is absolutely the epitome of that. It’s heartfelt, affecting, important, and powerfully emotional.

Simply described by its creator as ‘a short comic about my experience’, it is more than their experience, it’s a shared one, something that resonates so perfectly to so many. Now that’s truly something quite incredible.

Taking the idea that Lee’s understanding of their sexuality meant having to address a strange sense of grief at giving up a traditional idea of heterosexuality, of female purpose, it says something so profound and important to anyone struggling with their identity.

It’s a really fabulous short comic, one that you should read for the truth it tells and how things can and should change. It’s the proof that something true and profound needn’t be long, as these 15 panels do things that lesser talents couldn’t do in 15 pages or more.

This is a perfect example of the text and images working so perfectly together, the imagery establishing the feelings of the piece and doing so much with so little on each panel, serving the text where the ideas are developed. It’s pure comics absolutely, text and image working in harmony to show us something in a way that only comics can.

— Richard Bruton

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