The Ten Best Graphic Novels and Comics I Read in 2015

Around this time of year, for the past six years, I've posted a top ten of the best books I read that calendar year. Given that the vast majority of the books I read in any given year were first published decades prior to that year – I am, after all, a collector of old books – it's a supremely pointless and arbitrary exercise, of no use to anyone in discerning which books actually published that year were any cop; but it's become something of a tradition, and so I persist with it even in the face of widespread indifference. (2015's iteration will be along shortly, as if anyone gives two hoots.) However, this year I wound up reading more graphic novels than is usually the case; and since a lot of those graphic novels were published in the last year or two, and I continue to read a reasonable number of comic book series as well, it struck me that this year I was in a position to proffer an additional top ten, one with slightly more relevance to at least one sector of contemporary publishing.

Hence this top ten of the best graphic novels and comics I read in 2015 (drawn from these big long lists of everything I read in 2015). I make no great claims for it being representative of the general thrust of comics and graphic novels in 2015; apart from anything else, half of the graphic novels I've picked were published in 2014. But it is at least in touch with prevailing trends and tastes in comics (unlike my best books top tens, which tend to be in touch with little other than my whims), and so might prove diverting for anyone with an interest in such things.

10. Ruins by Peter Kuper (SelfMadeHero, 2015)

Laced with autobiographical elements, Kuper's handsome travelogue is revealing on the subject of Mexico – its recent past and history, its culture, cuisine and, yes, invertebrates – and wise on the joys, revelations and tragedies that can either strengthen a relationship or rend it asunder.

9. Black River by Josh Simmons (Fantagraphics, 2015)

I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic dystopias, but Jesus this was bleak, even by the standards of the sub-genre. A band of women and a lone man roam the eviscerated wastelands of North America, their destination hazy, their only certainty that violence and death awaits them. "I'm scared all the time," mutters the lone bloke at one point. Reading this, I knew exactly how he felt.

8. Megahex by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics, 2014)

I wondered back in February whether Megahex was perhaps one of the best graphic novels of 2014 – but since I didn't get round to reading it until this year, it's now one of my best graphic novels of 2015.

7. Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoet (D&Q, 2014)

Another one from 2014, and another one that for many folk – including J. Caleb Mozzocco and Brian K. Vaughan – was among the very best graphic novels of last year. I liked it a lot too when I read it earlier this year. As gorgeous and unsettling as its title suggests.

6. Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark (Image, 2015)

What was that about being a sucker for dystopias...? Rucka and Lark's vision of a world suffering under the tyrannical yoke of untrammelled capitalism remains to my mind the sharpest – and most terrifyingly plausible – vision of the future currently being published in comics form.

5. East of West by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta (Image, 2015)

Mind you, Lazarus has stiff competition in the serialised dystopia stakes in the shape of East of West. Month by month it's a toss-up as to which is my favourite of the two, but on balance Hickman and Dragotta's machiavellian, ravishing, deeply depressing take on the end times just about edges it. I think.

4. Sky in Stereo by Mardou (Revival House, 2015)

I wrote about Sky in Stereo, Mardou's quietly magnificent fictionalised memoir, in 2012 and 2014 when bits of it were published as minicomix, but its publication this year as a graphic novel – in expanded form – affords me the opportunity to include it in my ten best of 2015 too. Hurrah.

3. Avengers / New Avengers / Secret Wars by Jonathan Hickman, Stefano Caselli, Mike Deodato, Kev Walker and Esad Ribic (Marvel, 2015)

Hickman and co.'s sprawling, enthralling, befuddling Avengers/New Avengers epic culminated in nothing less than the demise of the entire Marvel multiverse, with Secret Wars acting as a by-turns brilliant and maddening extended coda. The perfect jumping off point for weary Marvel fanboys.

2. It Never Happened Again / Haunter / New Construction by Sam Alden (Uncivilized / Study Group, 2014–2015)

A bit of a cheat, I suppose, picking three books by Sam Alden instead of one; but I bought and read all three of these this year and they're all, in their own idiosyncratic ways, superb, especially the extraordinary and troubling pair of stories in Alden's latest offering, New Construction.

1. Beauty by Kerascoet and Hubert​ (NBM, 2014)

Rich, rewarding, arresting: those were the kinds of words I used to describe Beauty when I wrote about it back in April, and my opinion hasn't altered since. In fact fuck it: I might as well go the whole hog and quote myself: "The story of a peasant girl who gets more than she bargained for when she's granted exceptional beauty, and set against a backdrop of grandeur, squalor and the changing seasons, [Beauty] shows how man's basest desires cause wars to be fought and kingdoms to fall. So it goes."

Best Graphic Novels of 2014? Ant Colony by Michael DeForge, Megahex by Simon Hanselmann and It Never Happened Again by Sam Alden

For some reason – possibly to do with the life and work upheavals of the past few months; a retreat to the familiar, perhaps? – I've been on something of a graphic novels kick of late: catching up on books which were published last year but which I missed; rediscovering ones I've owned for, in some cases, a decade or more but which have been sitting in the loft, unread. My vague plan is to group some of them together in various configurations for blog posts over the coming weeks and – most likely – months in – even more likely, I imagine – intermittent fashion, beginning with three graphic novels that have little in common other than they were all published in 2014 and they're the three best graphic novels published in 2014 that I've read:

Ant Colony by Michael DeForge (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014), Megahex by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics, 2014), and It Never Happened Again by Sam Alden (Uncivilized Books, 2014). Ant Colony I've already mentioned on Existential Ennui; it took the number eight spot in my year-end top ten of the best books I read in 2014, the only graphic novel to make it into that top ten, although if I'd read Hanselmann's or Alden's books before the end of last year it's entirely possible one or the other of those would have made it in too. But anyway: Ant Colony is extraordinary, a mad and trippy meditation on the nature of society, the role of the individual within that society, and how that society might explode and eventually reintegrate in new forms in the wake of an apocalyptic event, all enacted by ants (and spiders, and centipedes, and sundry cameoing insects).

Just as philosophical in their own ways are Megahex and It Never Happened Again. The former is initially deceptive in that it starts out like a (very) low key Furry Freak Brothers, detailing the everyday lives of a pair of stoners – Megg and her kind-of lover Mogg (respectively a witch and a cat; Hanselmann took inspiration from the Meg and Mog children's books) – and their housemate Owl; but as the short stories within this collection progress (like Ant Colony, large parts of Megahex originally appeared in serial form online), Hanselmann invests his characters with a surprising depth, suggesting that their slacker antics are merely a facade and that underneath they're as lost and at sea as, well, some of the insect stars of DeForge's book.

Actually, on reflection, maybe these three graphic novels have more in common than I figured, because the two stories in It Never Happened Again also deal with loss, alienation and estrangement (and at least one of them originally appeared online too) – the first, "Hawaii 1997", in the form of a joyful encounter on a beach between a young boy and girl which ends with a devastating parting shot, the second, "Anime", by examining a wannabe Otaku's futile search for meaning and belonging in places and things rather than in real life. Alden's loose pencil approach helps to lend the enterprise its naturalistic feel, but the flow of the storytelling is just as important; there's a serious talent at work here, as a glance at Alden's Tumblr and website will confirm, one that in the scope of the artist's extant comics and the potential of those still to come brings to my mind at least the great David Mazzucchelli.