Comicon Holiday Gift Guide 2025: Comics & Graphic Novels
by Tony Thornley
Greetings and happy holidays, no matter what seasonal holiday you celebrate! Welcome to Comicon.com’s annual holiday gift guide, 2025 edition. It’s been a hell of a year, and we’re glad to finally be considering the holidays. Whether you’re here looking for ideas for a geeky family member, for a few ideas for your personal wish list, or just to do a little shopping for yourself, you’ve come to the right place.
Welcome to our first entry, covering comics and graphic novels! So let’s just jump in!
Superman: Brainiac New Edition (DC Comics)
The Man of Steel had a good year. Fans of DC Comics’ greatest hero were able to see the best adaptation of the hero since Superman: The Movie and the comics have matched. However, the most exciting part of the equation is the announcement of Superman’s sequel, Man of Tomorrow, which seems to be pointing towards a war with Brainiac, Superman’s greatest foe that’s yet to have gotten a film adaptation. One of his greatest stories is this late 2000’s Action Comics epic from Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Jon Sibal, and Brad Anderson, a story that showed how terrifying Brainiac can really be. (Tony Thornley)
X-Men: The Manga Remastered (Viz Media)
You might look at this two volume set from Viz Media and think “wait, another adaptation of an adaptation?!” But these two books are a fantastic glimpse at not just the Mutant Mania of the 1990s, but a fascinating glimpse into one of the most unique X-Men adaptations of all time. Yes, they are adaptations and reinterpretations of early episodes of X-Men The Animated Series but they’re done by a group of ’90s manga superstars like by Rei Nakahara, Reiji Hagiwara, Miyako Kojima, Hirofumi Ichikawa, Koji Yasue, Hiroshi Higuchi, and Miyako Cojima. They’re two of my favorite purchases of the past year or so, and I can’t recommend them enough. (Tony Thornley)
Jim Aparo’s DC Classics Artist’s Edition by Jim Aparo, Bob Haney, and Michael Fleisher
Batman artists come and go. But few were better than Jim Aparo. For a decade he penciled The Brave and the Bold, featuring the Caped Crusader and a special guest. After that series was cancelled in 1983, he co-founded Batman and the Outsiders and then worked on some memorable Batman runs, including Ten Nights of The Beast, A Death in the Family, and A Lonely Place of Dying. In those last two stories, Aparo drew the murder of Jason Todd’s Robin at the hands of the Joker as well as Tim Drake’s introduction. This oversized artist’s edition features more than 175 of those black and white pages as well as some of Aparo’s Spectre stories. This is a can’t-miss for classic Batman fans. (Tom Smithyman)
Transformers Compendiums from Skybound Comics
If you missed out on Skybound’s Kickstarter for the complete Transformers Compendiums, collecting every issue of the original Marvel (and Marvel UK) series, never fear: Skybound is publishing standalone paperback editions, available wherever collected editions are sold. The first two volumes, collecting the entirety of the (US) Marvel run, including the three issue movie adaptation and 12 issue Generation 2 series, are out now, with the first volume of the Marvel UK material slated for release in February 2026. While the series starts off a bit rough, heavy on exposition with somewhat cramped art, by the end it becomes a visually-engaging, multi-layered series balancing page time between both fan favorite Transformers and less well known characters. Was Ratbat, the Soundwave cassette who transformed into a bat aka Lazerbeak 2.0, the best leader of the Decepticons? Read these books and decide for yourself! (Austin Gorton)
The Essential Peanuts from Abram Books
While Fantagraphics bi-annual collections of the complete Peanuts strips set the gold standard for completist reprints, this new volume celebrating the 75th anniversary of Charles Schulz‘ beloved comic strip takes a more high-level and targeted approach to the strip. Curated by comics scholar Mark Evanier and featuring contributions from past Peanuts creatives from all over the world, it also comes packed with extras, including a deluxe slipcase, prints, stickers and more. (Austin Gorton)
For the Peanuts fan in your life, who perhaps already has all those beautiful Fantagraphics reprints, there’s the perfect gift idea from Abrams — a stunningly put together deluxe edition to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the greatest comic strip of all time.
The whole thing comes packaged in a perfect to gift slipcase, containing a 336-page full-colour hardback with Mark Evanier, along with contributors from around the world, taking you through the history and cultural impact of Charles Schulz’s cartoon creation, with over 700 images that include plenty of the most beloved Peanuts strips and so much more.
And if that wasn’t enough, the gift package comes with a host of goodies that any Peanuts fan will absolutely love — 8 ready-to-frame prints, 5 vinyl stickers, 8 postcards, an iron-on patch, and a full-color comic book. (Richard Bruton)
Here’s another true story about me: the original TMNT movie from 1990 still holds the record for the movie I’ve seen in theaters the most times (14, thanks to me being nine at the time and there being a small second-run theater near my house that my mom would drop me and my best friend off at a couple times a week the summer after it came out). And even though my love of the movie predated me getting into comics, I thoroughly enjoyed this adaptation of the movie, which as an adult, I recognize as a fun exercise in the original creators doing an adaptation of a thing which was itself an adaption of their work. Whether you’re a younger TMNT fan or an oldie like me looking to tickle the ol’ nostalgia feels, this new edition — which includes updated colors, page layouts, and deleted scenes — is worth picking up. (Austin Gorton)
A relic of a different time, when newsstand distribution made self-contained stories all the rage, Marvel Team-Up paired one consistent popular hero (usually Spider-Man, occasionally Human Torch) with a guest star du jour, giving readers more bang for their hero buck and ensuring they’d find plenty of enjoyment even if they couldn’t find the next issue at their local pharmacy or grocery store. While it lacks the well-regarded issue-spanning sagas found in other titles of the late Bronze Age, Marvel Team-Up nevertheless is an entertaining snapshot of its time, with half the fun coming in the oft-outlandish circumstances which enable the titular team-ups. A series long-requested by diehard collected edition fans, this marks the first time the series has been reprinted in omnibus format. Its done-in-one stories make it perhaps the perfect series for the format: you can easily read it one issue at a time, sparing the strain on your wrists that can come when powering through long, multi-part epics. (Austin Gorton)
Originally published in 2009 but long out of print, this new 2025 edition of Wednesday Comics is a must for the DC heroes fan!
This was and is a spectacular collection of strips of all the great DC heroes, a lavish thing capturing the nostalgia of Sunday newspaper comics of yesteryear, all packaged in a coffee table busting 11×17 inch hardback collection.
Inside, there’s tales from the great and the good of comics, featuring incredible tales of DC’s biggest heroes — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Teen Titans, Supergirl — plus, some of the less-well-known characters done by some of comics biggest creators: Kamandi by Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook, Metal Men by Dan Didio, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Kevin Nowlan, Sgt Rock by Adam and Joe Kubert, Hawkman by Kyle Baker, and so many more. Plus, exclusive to the collected edition, Plastic Man by Evan Dorkin and Stephen DeStefano, and Beware the Creeper by Keith Giffen and Eric Canete. So much to love, in such a magnificently oversized and suitably gift impressive package! (Richard Bruton)
PEANUTS EVERY SUNDAY 1996-2000 (Fantagraphics)
Over the past decade or so, Fantagraphics have done a magnificent job of republishing every single Peanuts cartoon in a lavish series of hardbacks, beautifully designed and restored, just the perfect bookshelf friendly way to show your love of all those classic Schulz characters.
They’ve also done an incredible job of collecting together every last one of the full-colour Sunday pages, taking us all back to the perfect linework of Schulz and the delicate pastel colours that made Sundays a joy. As befits the Sundays, these books come bigger than the daily Peanuts collections, 10×13 inches, all the better to allow us all to fall back under the spell of Schulz.
So, for the Peanuts fan in your life, have a look through the many, many volumes available – you just can’t go wrong with Charlie Brown, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, Snoopy, and all the gang. (Richard Bruton)
2000 AD / BEANO / THE PHOENIX Subscriptions
Being comics fans, we all want to spread the word, we all want to see comics getting into the hands of lapsed or non-comics readers. And this festive season, there’s no better way to do that than to gift a comics subscription.
Being a huge fan of Brit comics, I have a go-to trio of subscriptions I love to gift — 2000 AD for the teens and adults and The Phoenix Comic and Beano for the kids.
Seriously, this is just a gift that keeps on giving, filling kids and adults lives with the joy of comics – you can’t ask for a better gift than that.
Prices vary depending on where you are in the world, obviously. But there’s a couple of great deals for you with Phoenix and Beano. The Phoenix does a ‘Get 6 issues for £1/$1’ offer, whilst Beano has a UK-only £5 for the first 5 issues. A perfect introduction to a world of comics right there!
(Richard Bruton)
GILES ANNUAL 2026 By Carl Giles (CASSELL)
Carl Giles chronicled the daytoday life of Britain from 1946 to 1991, Giles’s cartoons gave us a unique insight into the world around us, beautifully done things that captured life on the large and the small scale. His Giles family has passed into British comics legend, his ability to capture the essence of a moment in time does so much more than any number of social history books. And he was damn funny to boot.
It was a highlight of Christmas Day in our household, the one present my Dad always loved. He’d settle down and read it before the turkey and, once he’d done, it would be my turn, and it’s a tradition I’ve kept going to this day. Honestly, if you want a perfect distillation of four decades of post-war Britain, delivered by a master cartoonist, do buy the Giles Annual. (Richard Bruton)
CINDY AND BISCUIT By Dan White (ONI PRESS/ SIMON & SCHUSTER)
I always like to share what I’ve loved in comics through my presents. And Cindy And Biscuit‘s second volume, Wild, Wild Life, has been one of my absolute favourites for 2026. I reckon it’s a modern classic, and perfect as an unexpected gift for the comic-lover in your family.
Dan White’s Cindy And Biscuit is that rarest of things in comics, a truly perfect book for adults and kids alike. I mean, who wouldn’t love the idea of a scruffy little outsider kid facing down monsters, aliens, demonically possessed dolls, and all kinds of creepy weirdness?
All this done with Dan White’s seemingly effortless storytelling and perfectly composed artwork. But there’s more, so much more, to Cindy’s tale, and you’ll be able to see just some of that here in the second collection published by Oni Press. Because Cindy’s life, that life away from saving us from everything nasty in this world, is no picnic. And it’s that dichotomy, the incredible adventures followed by the absolute heartbreak of watching a possibly neglected, rather lonely and different kid navigate everyday life, that adds such a heartbreaking extra dimension to this one.
If you want to read more about how good Cindy and Biscuit is, take a look at my preview/review of Cindy and Biscuit Volume One: We Love Trouble here.
A gift certificate to your favorite comic book store
You may have a comic book store in your area. You may prefer doing mail order from another area. You might be a lapsed physical comics reader who wants to get back into the hobby. Any way it goes, it’s always worth supporting small businesses this time of year. Go to your local comic store, who’s probably having some sort of sale this time of year, and buy a gift certificate. I know that’s my plan (shout out to my local store, Black Cat Comics, in Sugarhouse, Utah, for the image above). (Tony Thornley)
