Eisners 2026 Roundup pt 2: Album Order
Part 1 (Teen, Humor, Nonfiction, Memoir)
Part 3 (Series)
The albums are the books I look forward to most during an Eisners read because the weird good stuff is all in here. And that was true this year too!
ALBUM (NEW)
Cannon - Lee Lai
Lee Lai has done it again!!! This book about two childhood friends navigating friendship growing pains, the hell of food service, caring for an aging relative, and scooping your friend's story for your graphic novel, is simply very good. Feels very real emotionally and the art is clean and lovely.
Drome - Jesse Lonergan (also nominated for best writer/artist)
I already made a bunch of posts about Drome being very very good. It's very good! The art and paneling made me go "oh my god" aloud several times - extremely clever uses of gutters and negative space to convey divinity. Also I always like a Big story, and this is a big mythical-scale tale done well.
The Fable of Erlking Woods - Juni Ba (also nominated for best writer/artist)
Oh this was delightful. If you enjoyed The Boy Wonder then this is a very similar sort of fairy tale tone, right down to the recontextualization of various monsters. There's a bit where you have to turn the book sideways to follow the panels which was: extremely fun.
A Garden of Spheres - Linnea Sterte (also nominated for best writer/artist and best painter/multimedia)
I've been a Linnea Sterte fan since picking up Stages of Rot years ago. She has a lovely, illustrative style that feels like a mix between storybook and old-school scientific illustration and really suits this big lush fantasy full of winged people and gods of destruction and crumbling temples.
(sorry for the picture quality - this book I actually own courtesy of the always lovely @suedeuxnim ! but it is massive so I had to take photos with my phone)
More Weight: A Salem Story - Ben Wickey (also nominated for best lettering)
I was kind of middling on this. The art is well-suited to the story - very sketchy, Gorey-esque dark inks for the Salem portions, more naturalistic drawings for the Hawthorne and modern bits - but I found myself underwhelmed by the narrative focal choices. This is a really long book with substantial digressions about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne that somehow manages to mostly sidestep gender? When discussing the Salem witch trials? You had 532 pages (which is too many pages.) I appreciate that it does discuss class and race more than a lot of Salem stories do, and it is very focused on the internal experience of the trials and then their later legacy, but there's very very little space given to the girls doing the accusations in comparison to basically everyone else involved. And that's a big hole! Also it was nominated for best lettering but the lettering was often quite difficult to read. Which is naturalistic if we're trying to mimic the cramped 17th century hand of the documents Wickey was working from but doesn't work if you're trying to convey information to your audience of modern readers.
Shadows of the Sea - Cathy Malkasian (also nominated for best painter/multimedia)
This is a quiet little story following a dog and a little woman as they journey through an empty city to the ocean. The art is lovely, very dreamy big wet foggy swathes of landscape. I was unfortunately completely turned off by Malkasian's choice to transliterate the dialect she has the woman speak in.
ALBUM (REPRINT)
Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Storybook Edition - Patrick Horvath
I read this last year and discussed it a bit in the previous post but it just wasn't for me. A real edgy animal comic if there ever was one.
Ginseng Roots: A Memoir - Craig Thompson
I dropped this after three issues. It has the bones of something interesting - following Thompson's childhood summers as a farm laborer harvesting ginseng. Unfortunately, this is Craig Thompson of Habibi fame, and so I was spending every issue waiting for the Orientalism shoe to drop and I didn't really find that a pleasant reading experience so I quit.
Goes Like This - Jordan Crane
These have the feel of New Yorker short stories but in comic form. I mean that as a compliment! But they are also mostly domestic stories about men, with various twists that occasionally flip into violence. They're well-written but as a collection this does grow a bit wearing.
Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen: The Deluxe Edition - Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber
I think I would have enjoyed this significantly less if I hadn't read a collection of the original Silver Age Jimmy Olsen stories last year. And I'm not sure how many people have actually read those stories and how well this deconstruction works if you haven't! So perhaps a limited audience. But this nailed the sort of zany fourth-wall-skimming tone you'd expect from any kind of deconstruction and I had fun with it.
Tongues - Anders Nilsen
I found this book so frustrating. It's beautifully drawn, the story is interesting, the writing is well-done, and all of this is completely undercut by the completely baffling choice to set your story with themes of language and storytelling in loosely reskinned central Asia and then not engage with any of the rich histories of storytelling and language from the region! Instead we have transported over the Greek gods and down in the world of men we have the aesthetic trappings of Unidentified Middle Eastern Nation (desert, blue-domed mosque, US troops in humvees, hijab-wearing character we are told is speaking Dari.) I mean, it's not a baffling choice. I know why it was made. But it's a bad choice that weakens the work. I liked d'Aulaire's as a kid too, but you're on top of the birthplace of civilization and you can't even namedrop Gilgamesh? No Shahnameh? No graveyard of empires? It really soured me on the whole book, which I otherwise might have liked- there's a weird little girl protagonist! The stakes are high! I like stories about stories!
ADAPTATION
Alanna: The First Adventure (Song of the Lioness, Book 1) - Tamora Pierce, adapted by Vita Ayala and Sama Beck
Alanna! My favorite babysitter got me these books in fourth grade (she was a LARPer and I had a huge crush on her) and I read them to pieces. This is a good adaptation! It sticks to what makes the story fun, though there's definitely some changes (George Cooper is younger, Alanna no longer gets her magic contraception necklace (boo!)) Probably the biggest change is a more explicit grappling with the Bazhir, the desert-dwelling tribesmen who were always going to be an adaptational challenge because they're. um. kind of an Orientalist minefield. The adaptation... mostly does a decent job given the source material. There's more explicit acknowledgement that the Bazhir are not necessarily big fans of King Roald but also are not a unified group, and I liked that we get to actually see more Bazhir visual culture, which I don't remember from the book (although it's been almost two decades since I last read them.) I AM curious what the hell they're going to do with The Woman Who Rides Like a Man but I guess we'll find out in 2-5 years.
Dead Man Walking: Graphic Edition - Sister Helen Prejean, adapted by Rose Vines and Catherine Anyango Grünewald
Just really, really well done. This adaptation is as bleak and scathing a portrait of the death penalty and the prison system and as empathetic to the people caught in its gears as the original book was. Does a good job of explaining legal particulars clearly as well without being dry, which is a challenge in graphic format.
Ghost Boys: The Graphic Novel - Jewell Parker Rhodes and Setor Fiadzigbey
This one also made me cry, but it would be kind of hard for a graphic novel about a Black boy murdered by police to not make me cry. I think it perhaps leans a little too hard on "white policeman feels guilty" but it is also a book for children.
Lord of the Flies: The Graphic Novel - William Golding, adapted by Aimée De Jongh
Not nearly horrible enough. I had the same complaint about the Watership Down adaptation last year, but the art here is very lush and pretty and I need it to be uglier.
A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel - Ursula K. Le Guin, adapted by Fred Fordham
The art here is really stunning - lots of big, quiet, meditative watercolors. It feels maybe a little too quiet for Earthsea, which after all does have its exciting moments! Ged and the Shadow should feel tense and exciting, and I think that angle did get a little lost. (I recognize we couldn't have a whole book of the little linocut-style illustrations I remember from the beginning of each chapter when I first read this in seventh grade but I would have liked it.)
Unread: The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation - Izaak Walton, adapted by Gareth Brookes. I'm bummed I couldn't get my hands on a copy of this because I spent a lot of time with many different permutations of The Compleat Angler in an old job at a rare books library. So I would like to see how my old enemy is doing.
INTERNATIONAL
Ah the "entire world" category. After several years with at least some entries from outside Europe, we've returned to Angouleme Part 2 But It's The Eisners, which is a bummer because there's so many really talented cartoonists who aren't from western Europe. The notable exception here is Yudori's fantastic Raging Clouds, although I'm really not sure why that is in this category at all because Yudori is a manhwa artist originally from South Korea but partially trained in the US and currently working in the UK, and stuff published in English doesn't usually end up in the international category. Maybe they didn't know what to do with it. ANYWAY. The comics!
Buff Soul - Moa Romanova, translated by Melissa Bowers
The art here is so fluid and fun and interesting. I got kind of exhausted by the story, which follows a group of Swedish musicians and their artist friend on a drug-fueled bacchanalian tour around the US. There were parts I really loved - some introspective moments, a throughline following a former member of the group's teen suicide, but they got lost in the sort of endless litany of losing your friends at the club.
Cornelius: The Merry Life of a Wretched Dog - Marc Torices, translated by Andrea Rosenberg
The opening scene of this was so beautiful art-wise I screen capped four pages and then I immediately hated the next 380 pages, which are a thoroughly miserable example of the Edgy Animal Comics genre. Cornelius is a sad sack dog who fails at his job, his friendships, his relationship, and also his attempts to save his boss's niece from kidnappers and then to untangle the mess he causes by trying to hide his own failure. This could have been a fun farcical kind of Cohen Brothers situation, but everything about Cornelius' life is so pathetic that it ended up just being a slog. "Can we get Alspacka out of the box and me out of this book" was my note around page 250, and I still had another 130 pages to go. Which is a shame because the art is super interesting, careening between styles with wild abandon.
The last page I really enjoyed.
Nocturnos - Laura Perez, translated by Andrea Rosenberg
This was sparse and gorgeous. The vignettes circle around night and what it brings (death, romance, dreams, ghosts) in interlocking and lovely ways. There isn't a lot of prose here but you don't really need it.
Raging Clouds - Yudori
MESSY!!! WOMEN!!! I'd heard a lot of buzz around this story set in the Netherlands in the 1600s and was not disappointed. Raging Clouds follows a thwarted Dutch inventor in a deeply unhappy marriage and her husband's enslaved mistress and takes a lot of very big swings. What does it mean to own a person, or an idea? What does consent mean when you rely on your sexual partner for food, or for livelihood? Also does not shy away from depicting ugliness and bigotry in any of our characters including our protagonist. It's genuinely so so refreshing to read historical characters who think and feel like historical characters - not just in their faults but also in their worldviews and how they approach life and decision-making.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Anaïs Flogny, translated by Dan Christensen
The art in this is elegant and fluid - like a series of 1930s male fashion plates come to life. The story is a pretty standard gay historical mafia romance, and I've read this fic before. Flogny mostly skims over the actual violence and impacts of organized crime, which means that I have a hard time feeling the impact of Jules' descent from wide-eyed delivery boy to hardened mafioso, because the main difference is that he wears nicer suits and makes phone calls now. Sometimes he stands threateningly in front of a bloody guy tied to a chair, I guess? I don't need to see teeth flying or victim impact statements but it was jarring to have a whole heroin-selling subplot without. You know. Even a panel of the impacts of heroin.
Unread: In the End We All Die - Tobias Aeschbacher, translated by Andrew Shields (couldn't get a copy)
INTERNATIONAL (ASIA)
This used to be the manga category and functionally still is, with the addition of manhwa/manhua. I do think it's worth separating those works out the way that floppies are separated from albums, since it's a different tradition with different conventions and publication structures, but I don't know if just lumping everything from Asia in here is the way to do it. (The Eisners categories, as you may have noticed from my previous notes, are kind of a mess.)
Hirayasumi, vols. 4–7 - Keigo Shinzo, translated by Jan Mitsuko Cash
This was so sweet and I enjoyed it so much I read all seven volumes. Just really lovely slice of life following a former actor-turned-fishing-pond-attendant and his art student cousin as they settle into the house he inherited from an older woman he befriended.
Land, vol. 1, by Kazumi Yamashita - translated by Kevin Gifford
Land is sooooo good I'm planning to finish the rest of it now that I've finished the Eisners gauntlet. Set in a pastoral society that lives under the eye of four vengeful gods and following a set of twins separated at birth (one raised in the village with her herbalist/priest father and one semi-feral abandoned in the woods), Land has really fantastic child peril and a really good depiction of Society. It is often difficult to do a very young protagonist in a way that feels honest to what childhood actually feels like but Land nails it. And the art is gorgeous.
Purgatory Funeral Cakes - Sanho, translated by Danny Lim
This manhwa is in the genre that often gets called magical realism but I would call magical mundane. The NYT called similar books "healing fiction" which I hate as a genre name but this is in the vein of books like What You Are Looking for Is in the Library or The Dallergut Dream Department Store. It's very sweet and very feel-good for a book that fundamentally deals with death and grief - we follow a series of grieving loved ones as the bakery makes cakes for each of their dead to take to purgatory based on what they loved in life. Did make me cry, which is what it was supposed to do.
Tokyo Alien Bros., vols. 1–3 - Keigo Shinzo, translated by Casey Loe
This is the same mangaka as Hirayasumi, so I was excited, but unfortunately I really disliked it and dropped it after volume 1. Follows two aliens posing as Tokyo college students while they try to gather intelligence on Earth. Obviously there's lots of potential for comedy in that premise, but Shinzo leans into sex comedy really hard in a way that felt gross. And also there's one panel that was so egregiously, unbelievably racist in its depiction of Africans that I briefly thought I had misseen what was on the page.
Yan, vols. 1–2 - Chang Sheng, translated by Vanessa Liu
I feel like I have nothing to say about this one despite the fact that it's probably the closest to superhero comics. The main character is a woman who, as a teen, was framed for the murder of her family and opera troupe and now goes around seeking vengeance for them. There's time travel! There's a military robot conspiracy! There's a grizzled detective and a charming teen with future vision! Unfortunately these were great parts that didn't come together for me. Chang Sheng's art is really detailed and naturalistic but I think that actually ends up hindering him somewhat because you sacrifice expressiveness when you go for realism so hard.
next and final part: the floppies gauntlet (aka all the series.)
