#library haint

part 2 (albums, adaptations, international)

part 3 (series)

so I said I wasn't doing an eisners read this year and I was: lying. I'm breaking this into parts because I'm still finishing up a few categories, but I have a lot of thoughts about the many many very good things I read and I want to post them! so here is part one of probably three. as usual bolded titles were my favorites. would love to hear your thoughts if you read any of these!!

TEENS

I didn't read for either kids or middle grade this year because I don't have as much experience with those age groups and I also tend not to have as much fun with them. But I do enjoy the teen graphic novels, and once again this year there was nothing bad in the category! maybe it's for the best that I couldn't actually vote this year because I would have been hard-pressed to pick something here.

Angelica and the Bear Prince - Trung Le Nguyen

This adaptation of East of the Sun West of the Moon set in a small town theater reads a bit younger and lighter than the rest of the noms for this category but is completely charming. Nguyen's art is always beautiful and really suits the sort of fairy tale vibes of the story. (It's also really nice to see several fat secondary characters whose plots have nothing to do with their fatness.)

Everyone Sux But You - K. Wroten

man this was a real period piece! I'm curious how today's teens read a story that (at least to me, who was also a teenager at the time) relies heavily on the trappings of the mid-00s. like, there's a Brand New lyric in one of the chapter titles. are today's teens listening to Brand New??

however this is a really good story about messy toxic teen girls in all-consuming friendships that straddle the line of romance. the art is sketchy with heavy dark lines that feel very "teen drawing in their notebook" and the characters are flawed and bitey and emotionally raw. feels very honest to the experience of being that age and everything being the end of the world.

Hello Sunshine - Keezy Young

I was not really a fan of Young's mental illness memoir Sunflowers, which was nominated last year, and while obviously very personal and meaningful to them, felt like a thesis project that maybe should have stayed a thesis project. So I was pleasantly surprised to really enjoy this horror story that is the only time I've ever seen someone successfully thread the needle of "what if you were experiencing escalating paranoid delusions, and also they were real." That's an oversimplification- the book portrays Alex's delusions and his friends' and boyfriend's attempts to help him out of the mirror world he's fled to with lot of sensitivity. The colors in particular are also really lush and moody and well done.

This Place Kills Me - Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux (also nominated for best writer)

A year for messy teen girls! Mariko Tamaki writes great messy teen girls, and this murder mystery set at an all-girls boarding school was gripping and sad and thorny in all the right places. The art was well done - I love a limited color palette and it's used really well.

Trumpets of Death - Simon Bournel-Bosson, translated by Edward Gauvin

This is a very quick read because it's light on text but one that sort of lingers. I love how ambiguous the ending is - a lot of works for teens do heavy handholding, and this story about a boy's stay on his grandparents' rural farm absolutely does not. Lovely scenes of animal transformation in particular and the paneling for Antoine's violent and intimidating grandfather is great. (The book is also somewhat ambiguous about what level of violence Antoine's grandfather is capable of, which makes him more frightening, not less.)

Unread: Clementine, book 3 - Tillie Walden. Someday the Walking Dead franchise will release Walden from their foul clutches and I'll be able to read something she's done again.

HUMOR

This year I was so pleased that there were several books in here that were actually funny. The bar is truly so so low for the Eisners humor category.

And to Think We Started as a Book Club - Tom Toro

These are very New Yorker New Yorker cartoons.

Ew, It’s Beautiful: A False Knees Comics Collection - Joshua Barkman

You know these. The bird comics. They get a little one-note as a collection, and I find myself wishing I had just reread Michael Deforge's weird and wonderful Birds of Maine instead. But they're fun and occasionally you get flashes of poignancy.

The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt - John Allison and Max Sarin

I used to read Bad Machinery and Giant Days religiously during my many folders of ongoing webcomics period and Allison has not lost his touch. This is just a very fun cozy mystery romp.

Physics for Cats - Tom Gauld

My note for these is "fine." I sent a few of them to my dad. I do think these kinds of little strips do suffer when put into a collection - ideally you should be reading them at most once a day or as a footnote to something else. They're completely successful at what they're trying to accomplish! They just suffer when compared to like, a full graphic novel with a plot, or even a more narrative collection of strips.

Spent: A Comic Novel - Alison Bechdel

Bechdel returns to the type of semi-autobiographical self-lampooning that made Dykes to Watch Out For so successful, and she hasn't lost her touch. This follows a flailing cartoonist, her goat farming wife, and their Vermont aging hippie friends as they struggle through polyamory, parenting, and the pandemic. It's very funny, and very fun to read, and yet I still don't know if I'd put it in the humor category.

Unread: Jeff the Land Shark - Kelly Thompson and Tokitokoro. Listen, I love Kelly Thompson as a writer, but when I saw this as a nom again my first reaction was dread. Which is a completely outsized reaction to a perfectly harmless series of cute little comics about a shark with legs. I just don't like them and so I am releasing myself from the burden of reading and reviewing something I already know I find grating in its cuteness. Sorry, Jeff.

ANTHOLOGY

I could only get my hands on two of the anthologies nominated this year, which is probably fine because I tend to find anthologies extremely hit or miss.

Come Out and Play: The Queer Sports Project, edited by Meghan Kemp-Gee and Megan Praz

And this one was no different. Some of the stuff in here was great, and some of it was decidedly amateur. I'm not sure if it was space constraints, but SO many of these comics ended a page or two before they needed to. Which is not a common complaint from me, lover of ambiguous and open endings! But also in a world that really does not want queer and especially trans people to play or love sports it is nice to see a lot of stories about us playing and loving many beautiful games.

DC Pride 2025, edited by Andrea Shea and Jillian Grant

Ah, DC Pride. Every year I open you with carefully restrained hopes and every year you are sort of mediocre. This year was actually way more successful for me than past years due to actually having a frame narrative (even if it was a frame narrative based on a comic I hated) and thus feeling way less like a disparate anthology. Some nice parts in here, I liked Jo and Nubia and Bunker's stories in particular. We have to get Connor Hawke out of Pride purgatory and also free Midnighter and Apollo. And if you read this you don't need me to tell you the Blue Snowman thing sucked. But! Also every year there is a really heartfelt and lovely memoir comic from a queer DC creator and Jenny Blake's was so sweet. I continue to wish that we would get meaty queer stories in the main comics (the way we have in the past! Anita and Grace were making out on page in 2006 😭) But maybe DC Pride is actually the perfect representation of the queer community in that it is: a real mixed bag.

Unread: Noir Is the New Black Season 2, Stardust the Super Wizard Anthology, edited by Van Jensen, 2000AD 2026 Annual Featuring Judge Dredd, edited by Oliver Pickles

NONFICTION

Last year this category got renamed to "reality-based work" which I think is so silly. But some real bangers this year!

Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance - Ben Passmore

Absolute firecracker of a book with an excellent frame narrative. The main character finds himself falling through various episodes of Black history, following his father. Just a really good and timely exploration of what it means to resist state violence with violence of your own, and what the consequences for that- or failing to do that- can look like. Passmore is a really sharp cartoonist! Also it's got five pages of footnotes, which I of course love.

Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me - Mimi Pond

I think I would have liked this more if I had had any connection to or knowledge of the Mitfords. But unlike the author I did not, and so this was just sort of... fine. I found the lettering frustratingly hard to read at points - if you're going to use cursive you need to make it really clean and there were points where Pond sacrifices legibility for aesthetics. But also I was reading this on a small screen which may not be entirely fair as a judgement.

Fela: Music Is the Weapon - Jibola Fagbamiye and Conor McCreery

This ruled. Absolutely stunning art on a topic I knew nothing about (Fela Kuti, Nigerian musician and activist and one of the creators of Afrobeat.) It's hard to do art that really captures the sensation of music - an entirely different medium! - but this did a great job. Did not shy away from Fela's flaws either, which I think can be difficult to do in a memoir about a very famous guy who gets held up as an inspiration a lot. This was maybe my favorite book of this year's Eisners. Also, if you like me of a month ago haven't listened to Zombie before, and you have 12 minutes to jam out to a scathing but deeply danceable critique of the military government of 1970s Nigeria, you should.

Globetrotters: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s World Tour - Julian Voloj and Julie Rocheleau

This was pretty breezy - maybe fitting, since the book is about Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's 1889 race around the world - but the art was lovely and fluid.

Muybridge - Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Daschert and Rob Aspinal

This was just fine. I'm not sure if this was due to loss in translation or just Delisle's fairly crisp art style but it felt dry. Like I learned things, but I didn't feel much in the way of emotion from or about Muybridge - even when we're watching him shoot his wife's lover!

Surrounded: America’s First School for Black Girls, 1832 - Wilfrid Lupano and Stéphane Fert

Man I really wanted to love this, but the art style of very dreamy children's book-style watercolors ended up making this feel more like an allegory than a real story. Perhaps also because a lot of our characters had historical fiction disease, aka they're presenting their views in ways that are entirely palatable and understandable to a modern audience. Did make me want to look up more about the particular people involved, though.

MEMOIR

I always feel bad writing memoir reviews because you can't really review the plot of someone's life. But also some books are more successful in their recounting than others!

The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief - Carol Tyler

I ended up dropping this about 30 pages on. The art was lovely - very evocative ink drawings - but the writing was just utterly losing me in the thicket of belabored metaphor. This is one of three Fantagraphics books in the category (Precious Rubbish and Raised by Ghosts being the other two.) And half the time when I read a Fantagraphics book I have an amazing time. And the other half I have a lot of questions about their editorial process.

My Life in 24 Frames Per Second - Rintaro

This is a memoir from the director of, among other things, Metropolis. It was totally fine as a memoir of the early days of the anime industry, but some of the time skips were pretty jarring (including a sudden appearance of a woman who we learn is his wife?? This book spent so much time on his dad and maybe a page on the woman he spent his life with?? Which didn't leave a great taste in my mouth.)

It Rhymes with Takei - George Takei, Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, and Justin Eisinger

This is, as you might expect from a memoir by George Takei, almost painfully earnest. It's well done and quite sweet and not really my cup of tea as memoirs go but an enjoyable read.

Precious Rubbish, by Kayla E.

God I really struggled with what to write about this. This is a harrowing chronicle of child abuse of every flavor that's told in a mix of almost Disney-esque cartoons complete with back matter-style games and paper dolls, and visceral gore. It did not at all work for me; despite (or maybe because of?) the very graphic treatment of the subject matter I felt pretty divorced from the emotional reality of Kayla's experience. But also I don't really feel qualified to go "I didn't like this" about the comics equivalent of someone walking up to you with their guts in a bucket, because I wasn't supposed to like it! So I don't know. I think this probably works really well for the people it works for; I just happened not to be one of those people.

Raised by Ghosts, by Briana Loewinsohn

This is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum of memoirs of your bad childhood. Very dreamy watercolors about Loewinsohn's neglectful family. The art is doing some interesting things, but it's also very separate from the words in ways that made this feel less like a comic and more like an illustrated work of prose.

Talking to My Father’s Ghost: An Almost True Story - Alex Krokus

I am not generally a fan of Edgy Talking Animal comics but this is less edgy than just very funny and poignant and well-observed portraits of what happens to your weird family when your dad dies. Shockingly to me because I almost skipped this one, this was my favorite book in the category.

oooooh! you know I don't think there are any format questions in those asks which feels like an oversight. usually I'm pretty judicious in whether I do audio or written form for a book, because audio really highlights weaknesses in pacing and structure. and if I bounce off the audio I often don't bother to return to a book in written form because I'm already kind of fed up with it! I also usually don't do theory or more academic nonfiction in audio because academic stuff doesn't often get an audio release, I'm an audiobook multitasker, and I can't flip back or refer back to things in audio.

book I would recommend reading instead of listening to:

Alice Wong's Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life - I actually started reading this last year and gave up on the audio early this spring. I'll get back to it! Most of Year of the Tiger is great as an audiobook - Wong has an engaging, conversational narrative style (not always true of authors reading their own work!) But there's a few sections that are transcripts of interviews or podcasts, and hearing those read aloud is just awkward. I wish it had been possible to edit in the original podcast!

book I would recommend listening to instead of reading:

this is also from last year, but I recently learned that apparently Wolf Hall does really wild things with how it punctuates quotation marks?? which I had no idea about because I listened to the series in the (extremely excellent) audio. I think that would have driven me completely bonkers. Also since Wolf Hall is such a close and unreliable POV hearing Thomas Cromwell talk in your ear really enhances Hilary Mantel's meowmeowification beams.

if we're sticking only to books I did this year, I really enjoyed the audio for Master Slave Husband Wife, which is the story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery via her passing as a wealthy white man and him as her slave. Both narrators are great, and since some of the later parts of the book can get a little dry it helps to have engaging narration to speed things along.

(I'm not sure what will happen to my audiobook listening habits in the future.... right now I can't really listen to anything for very long and reading is easier. but maybe that'll change.)

I mention this apropos of not very much except that I think it is almost always more useful to learn a skill than a tool. I can teach myself photoshop a lot more easily than I can teach myself composition or color theory or like, how to draw. (obviously sometimes you do need to learn a tool to learn the skill. I needed to be taught to use a mig welder specifically, not left to derive how to avoid seriously burning myself and my fellow students from general principles of welding!)

Part 1 (Teens, Humor, Nonfiction, Memoir)

Part 2 (Albums, Adaptations, International)

SHORT STORY

"Blood Harvest" and "The Curse Room" - Shintaro Kago, in Brain Damage

I probably should not have read these! Kago is a guro artist and I often can't handle visual body horror. But I love horror. Endless struggle. Anyway, as is common for the Eisners, neither of these were my favorite story from the collection, which was the opening "Labyrinth Quartet," a slasher story about four similar-looking women trapped in a maze with a serial killer where the weird fun twist at the end actually worked for me. The rest of the stories really revel in grossness, which is the point of guro, but also gets repetitive after a while. (Also it wasn't nominated, but I would feel bad not mentioning it and having someone else get surprised - the third story in the collection has an extremely graphic scene of incestuous rape that's played for comedy in a way that was so off-putting I almost noped out of the book.)

"Football Is Not War" - R. K. Russell and Wilfred Santiago, in Come Out and Play: The Queer Sports Project (nominated for best anthology)

I could tell what this was saying about football, but I really could not decipher what it wanted to say about war. Very poetic narration that did not really work for me.

“trAPPed” - Anand RK, Suparna Sharma, and Natalie Obiko Pearson (link is directly to the story)

Excellent graphic journalism about a really devastating digital scam in India. I'm not always a huge fan of infinite scroll format because it really limits what you can do with paneling and layouts, but given the digital subject matter this worked very well.

Also nominated but I couldn't get my hands on it: “Red Snapper in the Rea,” - Michael D. Kennedy, in Milk White Steed

SINGLE ISSUE

Absolute Batman 2025 Annual #1 - Daniel Warren Johnson, James Harren, and Meredith McClaren (also nominated for best continuing series)

DWJ ABSBATS!!!! this is great. it is of course deeply satisfying to watch Batman kick the shit out of a bunch of neonazis. while I wish we'd gotten the "so what does violence mean for you and is it actually good" conversation in a different story I think it was overall well-handled for something from a Big 2 publisher and generally avoided both-sidesisms. the art, of course, rules.

Absolute Martian Manhunter #1 - Deniz Camp and Javier Rodriguez (also nominated for best limited series, best writer, best pencils/inks, best colors (Jordie Bellaire), and best letters (Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou). plus two best cover noms. whew!)

when I first read this issue I had to put my phone down and go AHHHHHH!!! into my hands. it made me SO excited about comics and what you can do with them. Rodriguez's art is transcendent and doing things I do not see in cape comics! remains one of the best comics of the year. AMM feels very Of Its Time but never heavy-handed. Also a real love letter to cities and the things that make them wonderful, which, as someone who reads a lot of Batman comics that often act like cities are the scourge of the world, is really refreshing.

Assorted Crisis Events #4 - Deniz Camp and Eric Zawadski (also nominated for best new series, best writer, and best pencils/inks)

this is Deniz Camp's year! Assorted Crisis Events is an anthology series in which each issue follows a different character whose life has become unspooled from time. Like AMM it's very of-the-moment and concerned with the repercussions of Big Events on little people. #4, which follows a man whose life is falling away in front of him very rapidly, is really well done, but it's not actually the best issue in the nomination period imo. I enjoyed #1 (woman navigating the multiple ends of the world that are being filmed outside her apartment) and #3 (two parallel towns collide with each other) even more.

Ice Cream Man #43: “One Page Horror Stories"

This is, as it says on the tin, 22 one-page horror stories. The lineup is kind of a who's who - Zoe Thorogood! Grant Morrison! Kelly Sue DeConnick! Patton Oswalt, who I did not realize was writing comics! - but like basically every anthology ever done, it's hit or miss for me. But the stories are only one page, so if you don't like it, you can just flip to the next.

Something Is Killing the Children: A Monster Hunter Walks into a Bar #1 - James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera (also nominated for best writer)

This was perfectly good horror! It feels a little disingenuous to nominate this for best issue, since it was originally published in six parts in an anthology magazine. It is kind of fun to see Tynion playing with the themes of "what is a monster"/ideas made real that make Department of Truth work so well.

Also nominated but couldn't get: Coin-Op no. 10: Wet Cement - Peter and Maria Hoey

CONTINUING SERIES

We enter the floppies gauntlet. Last year this is the category I burnt out on because I tried to read EVERYTHING leading up to the nomination period. I did not do that this year and also a lot of the stuff nominated I had thankfully already been keeping up with or is new enough that it doesn't already have 40 issues out. DC is really dominating the issue categories, which is certainly helpful for me as a DC reader, but I'm not sure whether it actually reflects the best of what's coming out right now or just Big 2 dominance in a financially precarious industry.

Absolute Batman - Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta (also nominated for best writer and best letters (Clayton Cowles))

I was pretty low on AbsBats last year - I didn't keep up with it after reading for the Eisners because I didn't really feel sold by this particular vision of Bruce Wayne. However when they teased the robins I did catch up and ended up really enjoying myself. It helps to read this as a Bruce who is still actively having everything torn away from him and hasn't yet settled into the isolation (and then all the people he meets) as Batman. Art is great, Dragotta does fantastic yucky monsters and his character designs are really fun.

Absolute Wonder Woman - Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, and Mattia De Iulis (also nominated for best writer, best pencils/inks, and best colors (Jordie Bellaire))

AWW remains one of the best things coming out of DC for years. Thompson has such a clear love for Diana and her lore. It is a real feat to take a character and give her a backstory that should have rendered her grim and isolated and have her still retain her essential core of courage and justice and goodness. It's really nice to read a story where that is true and core to the story. Agh! I really have not read much Wonder Woman aside from most of Rucka's run and this comic makes me want to read more of her stuff.

The Department of Truth - James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds (also nominated for best writer, best painter/multimedia, and best colors - yes it's Jordie Bellaire again.)

Last year I felt the conceit of this comic (government has a secret department dedicated to propaganda because if enough people believe a conspiracy theory it becomes true) was reaching its limits. I'm glad to say that by pulling out into a side story about a bunch of teens being haunted by the internet it managed to recapture my interest. Martin Simmonds remains an incredible artist for this particular comic - his work is so dreamy and unsettling and scary.

FML - Kelly Sue DeConnick and David Lopez

Calling FML a continuing series vs a limited feels a little weird, since the first arc has concluded and I don't think we have a release date for the next (Matt Fraction - who I learned in the back matter is DeConnick's husband! cute! - is taking over writing for the next chunk.) But the 8 issues we have were completely delightful - DeConnick is such a snappy writer, Lopez's art is full of character, and this is a funny and ultimately very sweet story about family, the perils of true crime, and a group of teen punks. The mom is a real standout character I loved her. Also all of the issues have very fun back matter with letters pages and games and zine-type stuff.

The Power Fantasy - Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard

My writeup last year was that "What if superheroes were TOO powerful is not a story you can usually sell me on, but if you write it compellingly and philosophically enough, well!" and this continues to be incredibly apt thoughtful well-done writing about the limits and burdens and interpersonal pitfalls of power. All of the characters are really well-realized (Kieron Gillen has kind of made "extremely powerful people with gigantic flaws" his wheelhouse) and Wijngaard's art is still absolutely stunning.

Storm - Murewa Ayodele, Lucas Werneck, and others

This took a turn into big cosmic stuff and also crossover-land which isn't my favorite but I did enjoy it! I am not really up on Marvel anymore but Ayodele's writing for Storm feels like it's from a much older comic, and I mean that as a compliment. It's fairly flowery and we get lots of explication which I think suits the character pretty well! Also there were letters pages :D I love to see letters pages!

LIMITED SERIES

Bronze Faces - Shobo, Shof, and Alexandre Tefenkgi

I should have absolutely loved this and I'm bummed that I only liked it because "art heist to steal back their father's art and also the Benin bronzes" is so completely up my alley. Unfortunately the way it was told was a little chaotic - when there's only 6 issues, I should not be getting key character backstory that explains everyone's relationships in issue 6 during the denouement. Still, Tefenkgi's art is really dynamic and graphic and the heist parts DID feel exciting, and the parallels to Yoruba legend at the tail end of every issue were great. Making Sango a mean queer woman who we're meant to root for and also continues to be mean the whole way through is a stroke of genius 🙏

Crownsville - Rodney Barnes and Elia Bonetti

I thought Barnes' take on vampires and the legacy of American history in Killadelphia was great, so I was kind of surprised that this one pulls its punches. Granted, he only had 5 issues, but the ending of this felt pretty pat for a story about racist child experimentation at a mental hospital. Would have liked to see more threads left unresolved, given how much this is... a story about the unresolved trauma of racism.

Everything Dead and Dying - Tate Brombal and Jacob Phillips

Made it one issue in before realizing this is zombies. Whoops! So I can't speak to the rest of the comic, but it is a farmer trying to keep his zombified husband and daughter and their small town going despite. The zombification.

Out of Alcatraz - Christopher Cantwell & Tyler Crook

Fairly standard 50s-era crime comic. It's well-written, but the art did not really sell me on the tension I was supposed to be feeling. Also every blond guy in this looks identical, and there were too many blond guys.

Also nominated: Absolute Martian Manhunter, Beneath the Trees where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring. I read the original Beneath the Trees last year and deeply disliked its take on "what if Ted Bundy lived in Richard Scarry's Busytown" so decided to spare myself more of it.

NEW SERIES

Batman Vol. 4 - Matt Fraction and Jorge Jiménez

I wrote every other writeup in this post before circling back to this one and I'm still not sure I'm very happy with it because usually for these things I have like. two paragraphs max of thoughts and not "all of my problems with DC editorial atm." Here's the thing. I think Fraction is doing exactly what DC hired him to do. Unfortunately the "take a character and do your own reinvention accessible for new readers" maybe works better for Hawkeye, who at the time the Fraction run came out had never had a solo that ran for more than eight issues, than it does for Batman, who is a character with enormous amounts of history and surrounded by characters who have things like current or recently wrapped ongoings. I don't have the math on me right now, but a crazy high percentage of DC's ongoings atm are Bat titles. The landscape for Batman is pretty constrictive if we're ostensibly not doing an elseworld or a Black Label title, and that's a different writing challenge than the creator-owned stuff Fraction has been doing for the last 10 years. (It's also a challenge that requires editorial buy-in and maybe even a functional archives but that's a whole separate can of worms.)

But if I was reading this in a vacuum, or as a new reader, or if this was a movie or an animated series, I think I probably would really enjoy most of it! I like the police brutality storyline so far, I think it's actually a more realistic depiction of how those things work than anything I've seen in comics for a while. Fraction has always done good side characters and this is the most lived-in Gotham I've read since Ram V's Tec run. The art is stunning - Jimenez is such a dynamic artist and his panels and pages are full of character. And I'm actually - setting aside issue 11 for a second - not as down on the depiction of Damian as I expected to be. I don't think we're meant to be rooting for Bruce's parenting here! Damian comes off as a slightly prickly, sarcastic teen who's being let down by most of the people in his life right now, and that's not only from Jiminez's art.

Unfortunately issue 11 was bad on like, just a lot of levels: obviously that spread of wildly inaccurate al Ghul backstory was awful, and also did not really make sense in the story (I actually had to go back and make sure I hadn't missed part of the issue because we jumped into it so abruptly.) I don't think we need another butler, especially since hallucination-Alfred functions basically like regular Alfred, although she's been on one page so far and also she could always turn out to be evil or something ig?

And then there's the issue of Bruce's characterization, which - I'm enough paragraphs in that I should probably make a separate post about how Bruce is written, in general and in particular with his relationship with Damian, at this point.

But basically this is not terribly surprising to me as a flagship title from DC right now. I think it's the kind of thing a lot of people want to read - I've certainly read plenty of fic that takes a similar outlook to the Bats. I never know what sales are like or what the buzz is outside of my echo chamber #myechochamber but I imagine it's probably pretty popular! It's just a bummer because what I like about comics is their interconnectedness and sense of history and legacy. I like when you can tell creators are working together behind the scenes, I like little callouts to other issues, I like an editorial landscape that facilitates that. I like when we have comics that flip previous poorly written stuff on their head, too! And it's a shame that instead we have something that reinforces and sometimes exacerbates racism from previous work, and that fundamentally contradicts some pretty key decades-long characterization for its central character. Whew.

Black Cat - G. Willow Wilson and Gleb Melnikov

This is.... fine. Wilson's writing is fun, but this is just way too much cheesecake for me, and I'm learning that the colorist is really determining how much I like Melnikov's art (I enjoyed his run with Luis Guerrero's colors on Robin (2021)! Alas.) Mostly it made me want to go back and read some Catwoman comics 😔

Exquisite Corpses - James Tynion IV, Michael Walsh, Pornsak Pichetshote, and others

This death game slasher was so fun - I only read through the nomination period but I need to catch up since there's a bunch more issues out. Great art, great conceit (once a year, representatives from each of the original thirteen colonies take over a small town and have their respective hired killers try to take each other out) and great characters. Tynion is just really good at suspense!

Ghost Pepper - Ludo Lullabi

This mecha comic following a food truck owner who runs into a mysterious fighter who may or may not have previously saved the world has really strong anime energy (positive/negative.) Lot of boob shots. All of the action scenes take WAY too long. The concept has potential but honestly maybe just go watch Gurren Lagann.

Temporal - Stephanie Williams and Asiah Fulmore

The story here is solid (woman who got out of the time thievery gets sucked back in for one last job to get her son a birthday present, fucks up the time stream completely) and Williams writes a charming family and enjoyable characters. The art is very very webtoony (there's a lot of weird blur effects on backgrounds?) which is kind of a bummer because in the right hands this could have been GREAT.

Also nominated: Assorted Crisis Events

Okay that's it! After saying I wouldn't do a full Eisners read I.... ended up reading all but 12 of the 99 entries in the big book/issue categories (granted there were some duplicates, but not a ton this year.) Maybe at some point I'll pick at the stuff I didn't get to (the creator categories, which are a much bigger undertaking because there'll be like four runs listed for each nomination; and the webcomics/digital which can also be really sprawling and also are sometimes hard for me to access depending on how they were released. Also there's all the academic and archival collections but I am not yet so recovered I can be churning through a bunch of academic writing atm.)

hi soph!! 🥰🥰

14. What books do you want to finish before the year is over?

Reading actual books is still such a "when the stars align" activity for me (can't happen on a day I have a doctor's appointment, or that I shower, or if the weather is bad, or if I slept badly, etc etc etc) that I don't really have any goals, just trying to enjoy it when I can! Next up for me is to try to reread some Heyers and see how that goes.

24. Did you DNF anything? Why?

Yesss I love to DNF things. Life is too short to read a bad book. This was my motto before getting sick and it's even more true now. I got 20 pages into Mary Robinette Kowal's The Spare Man (space mystery! how fun!) before I ragequit. If I had known the main character was a literal billionaire and this would be a plot point in a "woe is me" way I probably would not have picked it up! I was also excited because I'd heard the main character had chronic pain and that would be a plot point, except.... she has a hideously expensive neuroimplant that turns off the pain for her, and at least from reviews her pain doesn't seem to actually like. Cause problems for her. That might be wish fulfillment for some people but it ain't for me!

Also in all honesty people misgender me constantly and yet I find sci fi where people introduce themselves with their pronouns a little exhausting. You're telling me we have space cruises but no one's thought of a better way to advertise their gender than the same imperfect way we do in 2025? At least give the characters Betan-style ear cuffs or something.

Another dishonorable mention, this time a graphic novel from my Eisners read: The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix. I mean I knew this probably wasn't gonna be for me as soon as I opened the book and saw it was narrated by a wizard and a talking lion - I got about halfway through which I felt like was enough to make an informed voting decision (ended up not mattering because I fell asleep the day votes were due and missed the ballot.) Just major tonal whiplash all the way through - the book can't tell if it wants to be a fun graphic nonfiction aimed at young readers or a serious scholarly work. Also this paragraph made me feel crazy:

A major segment of the population in Ireland was Catholic, but Lewis's family was Protestant in their religious tradition. As Protestants, Lewis's family identified culturally more with the British mainland than with Ireland. There were deep cultural and political prejudices between Catholics and Protestants across the United Kingdom, but especially in Ireland. When Lewis was young, there was a growing movement to liberate Ireland from Britain to bring her under "home rule." Many Protestants in Ireland felt that this meant they would be marginalized and so supported the "Unionist" pro-British cause (which meant keeping Ireland a part of the United Kingdom). Jack's boyhood was marinated in these tensions, which touched nearly every corner of Irish life. These tensions would eventually erupt into the Anglo-Irish War, from 1919 to 1921. This guerrilla-style revolution lead to the creation of Ireland as an independent country in 1921. This partition also allowed a portion of Ireland called Northern Ireland to remain as a part of the United Kingdom.

what an unbelievably mealy-mouthed way to describe the Irish revolution. "tensions would eventually erupt" "there were deep cultural and political prejudices" YEAH FROM THE COLONIALISM!

also sort of drops jrr tolkien's birth in South Africa and then never discusses it again (the family left when he was three but quick discussion question: if we think his being bitten by a baboon spider led to Shelob, how do we think Tolkien's early life in colonial South Africa might have affected his depictions of black/brown people in the Easterlings? not of course a question Hendrix is interested in but we can't get even a sentence about it??)

this was especially annoying to me because I had just come off of the really excellent adaptation of Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology by Clare Alot and Benjamin Adam, which I highly highly recommend. graphic adaptations of theory can be really tricky but this one gives us the very accessible frame narrative of a French family through history whose descendants have to wrestle with their culpability in the slave trade. it's extremely accessible and really well done. so going from that to this was like oh okay we can't wrangle with history even a little bit. even in a graphic bio that's not About its subject's complicity in empire Flung Out of Space, which was nominated two years ago and is about Patricia Highsmith, does a great job of portraying its subject without shying away from her antisemitism and misogyny. it's possible!

hi miriam! 💗

11. What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

okay so in January I read the entirety of the Vorkosigan series which is, for those unfamiliar, 15 novels and 4 novellas. miles vorkosigan gave me rabies. the bulk of these were written in the 80s-90s. as you can guess by the fact that I read them in under 30 days, they're really good! bujold is a masterful plotter and does an excellent job of letting characterization drive the plot - miles is your classic quick-talking disaster man who gets into a hole, climbs out of the hole, buys a backhoe, and drives right back in. they're also books that are really interested in bodies. mostly this is really good, except for when it's cringe-inducingly bad. but never once do I feel like the books are afraid of me as a reader, which is refreshing when so much contemporary sff feels like it's tiptoeing around me.

17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

yes! I read Ella Dawson's But How Are You, Really? fully expecting it to be sort of a nothingburger romance to cleanse the palate after a string of heavy memoirs and theory. and i found it a lot more compelling than expected! the protagonist is returning to her college reunion with none of the boxes ticked off, and I found the writing of her terrible ex, her best friend, and the romance with the guy who got away way stronger than I thought I would. the protag is a bit of a sad sack millennial so if that bothers you you WON'T enjoy this but as contemporary m/f romances (mc is bi) go I found myself looking forward to it which does not.... often happen for me lol

If you mostly follow me for DC stuff I highly recommend trying out something else on this list or one of my past Eisners roundups! (2023, 2024 pt 1, pt 2) Comics are so varied and diverse and as deep as the capes comic rabbit hole goes there are a lot of animals that aren't rabbits.

JAN

Harvey Pekar's Cleveland - Joseph Remnant

Comics on comics. This was on my weeding list and I did end up weeding it, although I enjoyed it mostly because I know very very little about the history of Cleveland, a city I spend a lot of time visiting. It's not a super cohesive biography of its subject.

FEB

A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman - Sharon Rudahl

Unfortunately suffers from verbosity disease. This is incredibly dense and mostly makes me want to read Emma Goldman's own memoir.

MAY-JUNE: The Eisners Gauntlet

Despite being in the beginning stages of long COVID I still tried to do the crazy thing I do every year where I read 60-70 comics in three weeks. This was a bad idea and I ended up sleeping through the voting deadline anyway. But I did read a lot of comics! I'm separating out the DC comics into their own post, even if I read them for the Eisners, because I kept reading a lot of the ongoings after June. If I'd included all the DC stuff this post would be even more unwieldy than it already is.

what's a book whose prose you were really impressed by? a book whose prose you were disappointed by? a book that made you feel hopeful? and a book that made you feel negative emotions but that you really enjoyed?

no pressure to answer :)

why anon of COURSE you can!! these are lovely questions also, thank you :)

a book whose prose I was really impressed by:

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson. I mean, it's Shirley Jackson. Hangsaman isn't a horror novel except in that it's about being a girl in your last year of high school/first year of college, in the late 40s/early 1950s, so it's full of creeping, claustrophobic unease but no actual hauntings. if you are not a Shirley-head here are two extremely deft sentences from the first few pages of the book:

Natalie Waite, who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen, lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions. For the past two years—since, in fact, she had turned around suddenly one bright morning and seen from the corner of her eye a person called Natalie, existing, charted, inescapably located on a spot of ground, favored with sense and feet and a bright-red sweater, and most obscurely alive—she had lived completely by herself, allowing not even her father access to the farther places of her mind.

what a description of being that age! also there's one description of a dinner party that made me so uncomfortable I had to stop listening because I was on the bus. highly recommend, it's only about 200 pages.

a book whose prose I was disappointed by:

this was partly a prose problem and partly a structural problem, but I picked up PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire by John Wigger because I was interested in the topic and the book was a weeding candidate. unfortunately upon reading it I see why it didn't circulate: the prose was incredibly dry and what should have been an extremely juicy and relevant topic (embezzlement! televangelism! a highly publicized fall from grace including a sexual assault coverup!) was an almost impressively muddled parade of dates and figures. it's clearly exhaustively researched with a lot of original interviews but part of good nonfiction writing is presenting the research! Wigger also intentionally shies away from drawing any larger conclusions until the very end of the epilogue. even then his conclusions are quite mild- but what's interesting about PTL and the Bakkers is what they meant to people then and today, and what that says about American atitudes about faith, grift, and money. bummer!

a book that made me feel hopeful?

I started out the year with Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which deserves every ounce of its praise. she also reads the audiobook and is a lovely narrator with an incredibly soothing presence. really lovely writing about living in community with people and the natural world.

a book that made me feel negative emotions but that I really enjoyed:

I talked about the Vorkosigans earlier, but one thing that often happens when you embark upon a Vorkosigans read is people will say okay do you want content warnings for Mirror Dance. and I said sure I would love that. and I made it through the gauntlet of Mirror Dance (which is a fantastic book and also pretty grueling at times) and also Memory (they're all about disability but Memory is really about disability, and also grief) and then said phew! now it's time for the romance arc. and then i promptly got whacked Looney Tunes style by Komarr's intricately observed portrait of emotional abuse. which I don't think anyone would think to warn for (it's not even THAT major) especially after the like, onscreen torture and sexual violence earlier. limitations of content warnings! anyway Komarr IS really great and I adore Ekaterin.