Comicon’s Most Progressive Comics Of 2025

Welcome to Comicon.com’s Best of the Year Awards, gathering the best comics and comics talent of the long-yet-short year that was 2025. 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 Digital/Webcomics, and Most Progressive Comics.

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

Hello Sunshine, published by Little Brown Ink; written and drawn by Keezy Young

Horror has a checkered past when it comes to portraying mental health issues, creating some very damaging ideas of what it means to struggle with mental health and picking-and-choosing symptoms while avoiding an actual diagnosis, because being vague allows for inaccuracies. At the same time, genre stories have been some of the only ones to tackle mental health at all instead of contributing to the isolation that often comes part-and-parcel with being diagnosed or knowing someone with a diagnosis. Then there’s the way a lot of these stories end, often leaving it up to readers to decide between the supernatural explanation or the real world explanation for everything that’s gone on. That the answer could be both is almost never contended, yet it’s what Young’s extraordinary graphic novel, Hello Sunshine, proposes. The story of a teenager who goes missing after suffering a mental health break in public and becoming the subject of malicious town gossip, it’s now up to Alex’s friends to join forces to find him. If you haven’t picked up Hello Sunshine, please, please use your holiday gift cards to order a copy today.

— Rachel Bellwoar

Hey Mary!, published by Oni Press; written by Andrew Wheeler; drawn by Rye Hickman; colored by Hank Jones and lettered by Frank Cvetkovic

Afraid to admit to himself, let alone others, that he might be gay, many of Mark’s concerns stem from what he’s been told by his religion. Unable to see a path forward in the church as a gay man, Mark tries to repress his feelings and act like they don’t exist. There are multiple ways to interpret The Bible, however, and with the help of both friends and visits from saints like Sebastian, Mark begins to imagine a world where he can practice his faith and not have to hide anything.

The Bible has been misused numerous times, but that doesn’t mean hate was the intent behind these stories. Hey Mary! shows how religion and being gay aren’t diametrically opposed. No young person or adult should be made to feel bad for who they love. Hey Mary! takes Mark’s struggles seriously. It also doesn’t make the solution that Mark has to choose between the two; neither being gay or being Catholic is a choice for Mark.

— Rachel Bellwoar

Ancestral Recall, published by Ahoy Comics; written by Jordan Clark; drawn by Atagun Ilhan; colored by Pippa Bowland; lettered by Rob Steen

If history weren’t important then the first act of so many fascist regimes wouldn’t be to censor books and bury (or burn) information, yet the messaging remains: history’s not important. History’s old. There’s no value in studying the past, and maybe there’s no money in studying the past at the moment (given the way journalists and public media have been mercilessly cut this year) but that’s not the same thing as value. Take Clark and Ilhan’s incredible series, Ancestral Recall, about an artist with generalized anxiety disorder whose wife goes missing. In order to find her, Melvin uses his superpower: he can communicate with Black figures from history. These ancestors, in turn, are able to impart their special skills like swordfighting (Jean-Louis Michel) and driving (Cheryl Linn Glass) onto him so he can defeat an evil AI corporation. Hearing so many of these names for the first time is a stark reminder of what gets lost (and what’s achieved) when history isn’t remembered for being as diverse as it actually was. Did you know the real detective believed to have inspired Raymond Chandler‘s Philip Marlowe was Black? Probably not if you’ve seen The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart, but that’s why series like Ancestral Recall are so integral — besides being extremely entertaining, they set the record straight and inspire further research.

— Rachel Bellwoar

How To Make Your Life Better When It Feels Like It’s Getting Worse, published by Penguin Books; written and drawn by Simone Lia

I knew How To Make Your Life Better was going to be good. Hell, I knew it was going to be great. After all, it’s Lia’s nearly-two-decades-in-the-making follow-up to the absolutely adorable and utterly heartbreaking Fluffy, initially published in four comics from 2003-2005 and collected by Jonathan Cape in 2007.

But I wasn’t prepared for just how affecting it is, with Lia taking up the story of Fluffy Pulcino once more, the cute talking rabbit we saw as a child, the one desperate for Michael Pulcino to be his daddy. Now though, Fluffy’s a twenty-something attempting that most difficult thing: to find his place in the world. And if being a twenty-something is hard, imagine going through it all when you’re a bunny.

Just as with Fluffy, there were tears frequently in my eyes all the way through How To Make Your Life Better, watching him wend his way through success and failure, looking for a purpose in his life, looking for a job, a reason for being. It’s beautiful. The art is sublime and it tugs hard at the heartstrings. But more than anything else, the thing that made me declare this one as a Comicon Progressive Book of the Year is the way it deals with the transitional years from adolescent to adult. It is a time often overlooked, but beset by emotions the young just aren’t equipped to cope with. These confusing, difficult years make or break our youngsters, and Lia never shies away from the dark times, dealing with failure, despair, obsession, and so much more. It’s a book of truths —  many of them uncomfortable and troubling — but they’re ones that need addressing, and Lia does so wonderfully well, all through the medium of a cute little Fluffy bunny. Quite the achievement.

— Richard Bruton

And the Most Progressive Comic (Nonfiction) of 2025.

Trans History: A Graphic Novel, published by Candlewick Press; written and drawn by Alex L. Combs and Andrew Eakett; lettered by Tif Bucknor

From pharaohs to emperors, history is full of examples of gender nonconfirmity. The language and terms used have changed, but trans people have always existed and in Trans History: The Graphic Novel,  Combs and Eakett are able to give specific examples and show just how far back the records go. Interrogating their sources all the while and taking care to be transparent with their research, the importance of a book like this — one backed by scholarly efforts, but made more accessible through the choice to package this information in a visual medium — is pure genius and an act of public service in a political climate that’s grown more emboldened with its hate but will not — cannot — be allowed to get the last word.

— Rachel Bellowar