Ten Top Graphic Novels Of 2024

This year’s list of top non-manga graphic novels, memoirs and nonfiction for adult readers represents a broad range of styles, visions and narrative perspectives. If you’re looking for quick reads, you won’t find many on this list, as many 2024’s biggest works sport heavy page counts, representing an incredible commitment of time and effort by the creators.

The list includes personal narratives like the staggering Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls, which encapsulates eighty years of Chinese history, immigrant stories and the struggles of three generations of women, alongside Rick Parker’s recollections of his experiences as a teenage draftee in the Vietnam War, just as our cultural memory of that era is fading into the past.

There are literary and fictional works that recontextualize history, such as David Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson’s Big Jim and the White Boy, and ones that create their own mythology, like Dave Baker’s nearly indescribable Mary Tyler Moorehawk. Art styles range from the minimalist storytelling of Ken Krimstein or Dash Shaw, to the dense and elaborate imagery of Emil Ferris and Tula Lotay, to the stark and gorgeously-crafted lines of Charles Burns and Manu Larcenet.

It’s impossible for one list (or one reader!) to capture the range of quality material produced in this medium, even when leaving out manga and graphic work for younger readers). There were dozens of other amazing books that deserve mention (and received it in other publications). These were the ten that stood out to me, alphabetically by title.

Big Jim and the White Boy by David Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson (Ten Speed Press/PRH). This retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim radically reimagines and recontextualizes the story, adding new layers of character depth, history and context. There’s a lot going on in Walker’s story, but artist Anderson provides lively, readable storytelling full of warmth and humor. An instant classic that works at every level.

Blurry by Dash Shaw (NYRB). Dash Shaw is a consummate minimalist, rendering domestic scenes and small, poignant character moments with just enough lines and splotches of tone to evoke the sense and setting. Blurry is maximal minimalism: nearly 500 pages of characters discovering themselves and their (blurry) connections to each other and the world. The stories build, blossom and intertwine, moving forward or laterally at their own pace. Truly an example of the journey itself being the designation.

Drafted by Rick Parker (Abrams). Longtime comics industry veteran Rick Parker (Beavis and Butthead) worked for years on this personal memoir of his experiences as a young draftee in the Vietnam War. The result is a work of remarkable depth, personality and experience, punctuated by Parker’s lively cartooning. A real revelation from an overlooked talent.

Einstein in Kafkaland by Ken Krimstein (Bloomsbury). Ken Krimstein has staked out territory as comics’ foremost chronicler of the intellectual history of the 20^th century, and his latest tackles two heavyweights in an unlikely, but historically probable, team-up. Einstein spends a year in Prague trying to shake out the problems in his theory of relativity and finds inspiration in the insurance bureaucrat Kafka, who is also finding his literary voice. Great back-to-basics cartooning set against great cityscapes of Prague.

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (Macmillan). Tessa Hulls’s monumental graphic memoir is a multi-layered journey of discovery back through her mother and grandmother’s troubled personal stories, against the backdrop of China’s 20^th century history of revolution and repression. If Feeding Ghosts only presented the historical detail, or just the raw emotional honesty of the personal struggles, it would still be a masterpiece, but it brings all this and more together in a compulsively readable narrative spanning more than 400 pages, rendered in stark, evocative black and white imagery.

Final Cut by Charles Burns (Pantheon). Charles Burns returns to his favorite subject matter: the hidden world of adolescence, the iconography of 1950s and 60s horror, and the majestic beauty of the Pacific Northwest, but this time he tones down the overtly creepy gore and focuses on character relationships. The subtleties and silences perfectly capture teenage angst and the young artist’s painful disconnection from his peers. Burns’s distinctive, sharp-edge illustrative style places a smooth surface between the reader and the emotional turbulence below. A mature work from one of the reigning masters of the graphic novel form.

Mary Tyler Moorehawk by Dave Baker (Top Shelf/IDW). Mary Tyler Moorehawk seduces readers with an extended lighthearted adventure sequence in the spirit of Jonny Quest or Indiana Jones, before revealing itself as a fascinating meta-narrative about its own (fictional) creation and history. Baker brings formidable skills in both illustration and design to a work that gets a lot of mileage simulating vintage styles of comics, animation and magazines. The spiraling hall-of-mirrors approach can sometime be disorienting but Baker’s sheer conviction carries it across.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book 2 by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics). After eight years and many struggles, award-winning graphic novelist Emil Ferris finally concludes the story that electrified readers in her 2017 debut. The thick sequel does not disappoint, with Ferris’s glorious and versatile colored crosshatched style leading the reader through a labyrinth of characters, relationships and late 1960s Chicago neighborhoods.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: A Graphic Adaptation by Cormac McCarthy, adapted by Manu Larcenet (Abrams). McCarthy’s harrowing post apocalyptic tale of a boy and his father making their way through a wasteland populated by the degraded remains of human civilization is brilliantly adapted by Larcenet. The exquisite linework and deliberate pacing helps bring out the loneliness and horror of the slow-burn story.

Somna: A Bedtime Story by Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay (DSTLRY). Becky Cloonan’s story of erotic awakening set against the backdrop of the Salem witch trials is a fine historical supernatural thriller (if a bit predictable), but it’s really a vehicle for the lush, gorgeous artwork of Tula Lotay, colored by Lee Loughridge. Cloonan and Lotay, better known for their superhero and genre work, seem to relish the chance to craft a steamy, sexy, uncompromisingly adult story. There’s more atmosphere here than plot but it’s one of the most visually appealing works to appear this year in the visual medium of comics, and for that reason deserves a spot on the list.