Many of 2025’s best graphic novels looked to the past with mixed emotions. Growing up in 1970s California, Mimi Pond found the aristocratic Mitfords, born in the early years of the 20th century, compellingly exotic. She shares her lifelong fascination in Do Admit! (Jonathan Cape), a splendid book of geopolitics, jolly hockey sticks and gossipy asides, as the sisters choose between fascism and socialism and help shape attitudes to everything from class to funeral rites.
Pioneering photographer William Henry Jackson captured the old west for posterity, yet the popularity of his images speeded its destruction. Veteran cartoonist Bill Griffith recounts his great-grandfather’s life in Photographic Memory (Abrams), which takes in the civil war, slavery, the obliteration of the Great Plains peoples and the inauguration of the United States national parks, as well as the brutal legwork and dangerous alchemy of 19th-century photography. The narrative sometimes clunks, but the story is so good it’s hard to care.
Gareth Brookes’s inspiration goes even further back. His adaptation of Izaak Walton’s 1653 fishing manual The Compleat Angler (SelfMadeHero) sets linocut prints and inky drawings alongside Walton’s poetic prose, conjuring a landscape of cruelty and plenty in a meditative book of subtle carp, malicious frogs and dainty eels.
Several big names returned this year. Alison Bechdel’s fictionalised memoir Spent is an enjoyable portrait of ageing radicals, while Joe Sacco’s The Once and Future Riot (both Cape) digs with careful persistence into communal violence in northern India. But perhaps the most entertaining return came in Ginseng Roots (Faber), in which Craig Thompson revisits his Wisconsin childhood home (first described in 2003’s Blankets) to explore the ginseng that sprouts in its mineral-rich soil. The tuber’s knobbly roots connect Asian health food, American independence, the Vietnam war and Chinese myths; this is a charming account of the threads that bind us to each other and the earth.
Kayla E’s memoir Precious Rubbish (Fantagraphics) has a very different mood. Her powerful debut tells of the abuse, neglect and alcoholism she suffered while growing up via glossy pages that mimic adverts and board games, while its vintage-style panels are flecked with blood and booze. It’s a traumatic read, told with bracing, creative boldness.
Lee Lai’s 2021 debut Stone Fruit gained deserved plaudits, and Cannon (Drawn & Quarterly) confirms the Montreal-based cartoonist as a serious talent. Protagonist Cannon looks after her grandad, works a chaotic restaurant job and sees her relationship with her bestie Trish fall apart as the city swelters in a heatwave. Lai builds a tender and very natural drama from kitchen catastrophes, awkward conversations, self-help podcasts and imaginary magpies.
The rain never stops in Dry Cleaned (Cape), a study of work, crime and consequences from Belgian graphic novelist Joris Mertens (translated by Julia Blackburn and Sandra van Beek). François is a driver for a laundry who takes on an incompetent understudy before finding a bag of banknotes in a mansion. The drama is second to the atmosphere: damply glistening cobbles, rosily lit bistros, terse words and cigarette fumes.
Looking for something more maximalist? The grandly inventive panels and gatefolds of Anders Nilsen’s myth- and drama-packed Tongues I (Cape) feature gods, a young girl, a talking chicken, masked gunmen and a penitent tourist. The Titan Prometheus tries to break his clifftop bonds before his brother destroys the troublesome human race, while different factions chase a magical tesseract across central Asia; a sequel is promised.
Indeed, if epic strangeness is your thing, this year’s comics have your back. In Big Pool (Breakdown), Chris Harnan lets rip with a mostly wordless and abstract portrait of civilisation’s rise and fall, from rays of light and flashing synapses to domes, skyscrapers, death and decay. Jarring stylistic shifts and glorious colours make the work as compelling as it is mysterious.
Donya Todd’s garishly eerie The Witch’s Egg (Avery Hill), meanwhile, tells of a witch who falls in love with an angel, and must fight to protect the children that result. With its toads, worms and dark corners, this wild yarn of motherhood, danger and defiance reads like The Egyptian Book of the Dead crossed with a ripe compost heap.
There is more fantastical storytelling from Birmingham-based illustrator Michael D Kennedy, whose debut collection Milk White Steed (Drawn & Quarterly) stars blues musicians, strange spirits and young cowboys. Kennedy explores the creative process and the experience of growing up black in the Black Country in surreal fables packed with energy and imagination.
The Weight (Drawn & Quarterly) collects Melissa Mendes’s webcomics about a girl growing up in a remote farming community where horizons stretch wide but options are few. It’s a vivid and lyrical epic of long, hard days, domestic violence and moments of heartbreaking joy: a graphic novel you will gallop through, your emotions rattling along the way.
Few accounts of youth ring as true as Briana Loewinsohn’s semi-autobiographical Raised By Ghosts (Fantagraphics). Handwritten notes and diary entries sit alongside observant scenes of the young Briana staring hopefully at her family’s empty fridge, laughing with her friends or bathed in the light of her TV as she negotiates her teenage years with mostly absent parents. It’s a touching portrait of juddering feelings and 90s nostalgia.
In Misery of Love (New York Review of Books, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith), celebrated French artist Yvan Alagbé uses watercolour washes and spare dialogue to tell the story of an ageing white couple, their daughter and the black man she falls in love with. Fleeting glimpses of intimacy, conflict and reflection succeed each other in a work whose achingly allusive charge grows stronger with repeat readings.
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