Best Graphic Novels of May 2026!
My new favorite 2026 graphic novel, Eisner Awards votes, and what's next in My Marvelous Year!
This month I’ve got a new favorite graphic novel of 2026, and I share how I voted in the 2026 Eisner Awards! Then, My Marvelous Year is charging head first into Secret Wars (2015)!
You can see what’s up next in My Marvelous Year before reading all about the best comics of May 2026, and checking out the most anticipated releases of next month.
What’s Next in My Marvelous Year
My Marvelous Year - 2014 Pt. 8
My Marvelous Year -- 2014 pt. 9
Dave’s Faves
I've had a vote in the Eisners since last year, and many people are saying the awards have never been better! I'm listing my winners below, with some commentary on the decision where applicable. There are a few categories where I didn't have enough familiarity to cast a vote, and those are omitted.
Best Short Story
“trAPPed” by Anand RK, Suparna Sharma, and Natalie Obiko Pearson (Bloomberg News)
Best One-Shot/Single Issue
Ice Cream Man #43: “One Page Horror Stories,” by W. Maxwell Prince and others (Image)
This could have easily gone to Absolute Batman 2025 Annual #1, but I reward Absolute Batman other places. You know I've got to stand up for Ice Cream Man whenever possible!
Best Continuing Series
Absolute Batman, by Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta, and others (DC)
Speak of the Bat and he shall appear. The wildest thing about Absolute Batman right now is that I honeestly didn't even think twice about picking it for my favorite continuing series (and I really like Absolute Wonder Woman, The Department of Truth, The Power Fantasy, and Storm! Haven't read FML yet...).
Best Limited Series
Out of Alcatraz, by Christopher Cantwell & Tyler Crook (Oni Press)
Everything Dead & Dying just hit my picks for best new graphic novels of May 2026, but I have to hand it to Cantwell and Crook's crime-noir gem.
Best New Series
Assorted Crisis Events, by Deniz Camp and Eric Zawadzki (Image)
Deniz Camp is up for so many awards you could call him Kendrick. Guy had to win at least one, and this feels like the right spot.
Best Publication for Early Readers
All the Hulk Feels, by Dan Santat (Abrams Fanfare/Marvel)
The key priority here is whether or not my kids wore out a copy. Hulk Feels it is!
Best Publication for Kids
The Cartoonists Club, by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud (Scholastic Graphix)
Feels a little chalk, but yeah, combining two of the biggest creators in all of comics leads to a good graphic novel!
Best Publication for Teens
Hello Sunshine, by Keezy Young (Little, Brown Ink)
This is probably the category I feel most strongly about (Hello Sunshine was one of my 10 favorite graphic novels of 2025) where I'm confident my pick won't win (the quite good This Place Kills Me is the odds on favorite).
Best Humor Publication
Physics for Cats, by Tom Gauld (Drawn & Quarterly)
Honestly, I think this was the hardest category in the entire Eisners. Alison Bechdel's Spent is my top rated selection among the group, but I felt the nomination was out of place here. I also really love The False Knees collection "Ew, It's Beautiful." But Tom Gauld is so damn good, y'all.
Best Reality-Based Work
Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me, by Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly)
I shorted Pond on my 2025 best of list, so glad I get to make up for it here with an Eisner vote.
Best Graphic Memoir
Precious Rubbish, by Kayla E. (Fantagraphics)
With respect to the underrated Talking to My Father’s Ghost: An Almost True Story, by Alex Krokus.
Best Graphic Album–New
Drome, by Jesse Lonergan (23rd St. Books)
This was the hardest heavy-weight battle in this year's Eisners. Drome was my third favorite graphic novel of the year and Cannon was fourth. I stuck to my guns here, but it easily could have been Cannon.
Best Graphic Album–Reprint
Tongues, by Anders Nilsen (Pantheon)
My favorite book of 2025.
Best U.S. Edition of International Material
Cornelius: The Merry Life of a Wretched Dog, by Marc Torices, translated by Andrea Rosenberg (Drawn & Quarterly)
Best U.S. Edition of International Material–Asia
Hirayasumi, vols. 4–7, by Keigo Shinzo, translated by Jan Mitsuko Cash (VIZ Media)
Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism
SKTCHD, by David Harper, www.sktchd.com
I'm still confused why My Marvelous Year wasn't nominated (is it because our podcast is neither of these things? That can't be it!).
Best Comics-Related Book
How Comics Are Made, by Glenn Fleishman (Andrews McMeel)
Best Webcomic
Terran Omega: The Ghosts of War, by PJ Holden (pauljholden.com)
Best Writer
Deniz Camp, Absolute Martian Manhunter (DC); Assorted Crisis Events (Image); The Ultimates (Marvel)
This could be the first of many for Camp.
Best Writer/Artist
Juni Ba, The Boy Wonder (DC); The Fable of Erkling Woods (Goats Flying Press); Monkey Meat Summer Batch (Image)
I probably would have gone Lonergan here with a gun to my head, but since I already got a vote in for Drome, I like to share the love!
Best Penciller/Inker
Hayden Sherman, Absolute Wonder Woman, Batman: Dark Patterns (DC)
This category is STACKED, where any of the 6 nominees could rightfully win. But Sherman brings such a unique energy to every project right now, to me they're the top of the class.
Best Painter/Multimedia Artist
Martin Simmonds, The Department of Truth (Image)
Best Cover Artist
Hayden Sherman, Absolute Wonder Woman, Batman: Dark Patterns #3-12 (DC)
Best Coloring
Javier Rodriguez, Absolute Martian Manhunter (DC)
I had to get Rodriguez involved somehow after narrowly losing out to Sherman in the two previous categories.
Best Lettering
Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Ill Vacation, Stillman (Comixology Originals); Absolute Martian Manhunter, Challengers of the Unknown, DC K.O., The Flash, Green Arrow, Poison Ivy (DC); Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, The Exorcism at 1600 Penn, Starship Godzilla, (IDW); Author Immortal (Image); Our-Soot-Stained Heart (Mad Cave)
This is the only category in the Eisners where the deciding factor is inevitably: "Have I enjoyed having them on the podcast?" Fortunately, Hass is also lettering an absurd percentage of the best books in comics (which is no coincidence!).
Robots, Demons and Day Jobs: A Collection of Silly and Strange Comics
This short collection of David Kantrowitz's self-published comics is a delightful display of some casually virtuosic cartooning. Mike Mignola's inks meet Juni Ba's Monkey Meat for some goofy fast-paced gag strips. There's a meta-comics joke in here that rivals anything this side of Mister Invincible, and that's some of the highest praise I can even think of!
In this month's edition of most ridiculous reason Dave almost didn't read a very good comic, I submit to you: I associated author Frank J. Barbiere with Marvel's unethical practice of printing an issue of Avengers World with Thanos on the cover that did not include a single relevant Thanos sighting in the actual content therein. Was this Barbiere's fault? Almost certainly not. And yet, a nerd never forgets, and certainly never forgives. Ridiculous? Yes! Clearly! But it honestly presented an uphill climb for Author Immortal, Barbiere's new Image Comics series with Morgan Beem. Just know that this inclusion of a recommended comic had to be good enough to overcome Bait-And-Thanos practices. What an achievement!
The Author Immortal doesn't reinvent the wheel - a revolting professor obsessed with a series of fantasy novels discovers the fantasy may well be real! - but Barbiere and Beem inject the familiar narrative with new, modernized life. It operates on a similar playing field as Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans' Die, but with an added focus on a non-binary teen's relationship with their (again, revolting) father, and a deliberate JK Rowling stand-in communing with some dark shadowy pact. Beem sells both "real world" relationship struggles and emerging fantasy lands, in a quietly gorgeous start to a very strong new comic.
Flore Vesco and Kerascoët's The Court Charade is a preposterously charming new graphic novel about a young "common" lady sneaking her way into court to become one of the Queen's ladymaids. It's a royal fairy tale full of whimsy and spunk, like Bandette merging with The Great into a gorgeous and funny Bandes dessinées. The wit and style make this feel like an easy recommendation for all ages, but there are occasional moments of nudity (sacré bleu!) that keep it clearly adult.
While it was originally published in native French in 2022, The Court Charade is the kind of everlasting fairy tale that feels like it must have been in the world for centuries.
Names and Faces: A Graphic Memoir
Leise Hook's memoir "Names and Faces" is a collection of 9 integrated stories that reflect on Hook's experiences as a mixed-race Chinese-American. Hook offers a pristine looking glass into her world of confused identity, feeling not quite Chinese enough but also never entirely "white." The graphic memoir space has exploded with questions of identity in recent years, and Hook finds intriguing metaphors to help expand the conversation, looking at invasive species of bugs in America and American Girl Dolls to offer perspectives you wouldn't necessarily expect.
Hook's an extremely gifted graphic novelist, with a clear sense of using the page's space effectively as she navigates internal struggle. This is another strong entry in a growing field of AAPI memoirs, and graphic novel memoirs in general.
Faith Erin Hicks is a superstar YA cartoonist, so I fully expected to think highly of Inbetweens. What I did not expect was a world so fully realized that I started looking at the fictional twin sisters with the same parental care that I typically reserve for my actual children overcoming the challenges of their own worlds. Hicks captures a depth of feeling and emerging youthful creativity to such a successful degree that I actually saw and felt for my own children. After completion I immediately placed the graphic novel on my 9 year old's pillow (the secret: you don't ever suggest a kid read something you like; you just lay it somewhere where they'll fall into it themselves!).
Inbetweens is about twin sisters Sloane and Ash, both gifted artists who enter a summer school animation program with dreams of professional careers as animators for Disney (Yes, this means the work is set in the late 90s, and no we will not be wallowing in the present day reality that such jobs for humans are endangered!). Hicks nails the energy of young artists, the pressure of trying to live up to ideals and your heroes (even if it turns out your heroes are JERKS), and the power of supportive family and friends. It's sweet, funny, and allows for some gorgeous rendering of raw animation on the comics page. This might just be my favorite graphic novel from Hicks yet.
Tate Brombal, Jacob Phillips, Pip Martin and Aditya Bidikar craft a melancholic, post Walking Dead zombie masterclass, recently nominated for a 2026 Eisner for best limited series. Phillips has rapidly entered John Romita Jr territory as the son of a comics legend (Sean Phillips) ascending into his own superstardom. Phillips' resume (That Texas Blood, Newburn, coloring his father across Reckless) is critically adored and near-flawless, and for my money, Everything Dead and Dying is his best work yet, oscillating between the aching romance of the past and violent pain of the present.
Brombal largely avoids zombie fiction tropes by focusing on Jack Chandler, a farmer and gay man, tending to a whole community taken by a zombie virus (that he's mysteriously immune to). The narrative inversion is that our hero wants to keep the zombies "alive" as they include his husband and their daughter. While this might seem, uh, mentally unwell, the creative team completely sells the emotional conviction of Chandler protecting and surviving despite the encroaching decay. Brombal has proven exceptionally gifted at depicting the experience of being gay in hostile communities (Black Hammer: Barbalien), and that's the secret here, where Chandler becomes the caretaker for a community that showed him no shortage of bigotry. It's a gripping, emotionally powerful zombie graphic novel, and great work from everyone involved.
Jared Sarnie's debut graphic novel (via Fieldmouse Press) is an ice cold bucket of water dropped over your head from the 2nd floor while an aeroplane trails the message "YOU CAN JUST BREAK THE RULES" in the sky above you. Narratively the center here is a young woman, her sister and her mom traveling to Zurich so she can use a "euthanasia pod" aka the "exit shell" via assisted suicide. This sounds much heavier than it is. While there is some emotional resonance and care there, Sarnie's primarily playing at satirical humor - spoilers: the shell breaks a valve and it doesn't work!
The real force of The Machine is Broken is style. Sarnie airdrops in and out of cartooning styles like his pen might stop working if he sticks with one mode too long. The end result is a gloriously manic graphic novella that oscillates between Schulz, Clowes, Olivier Schrauwen, Emil Ferris, and honestly I could do this all day. It's a controlled chaos (mostly), and as the residual cherry coke flavored gases hit our protagonist fully, I'm dead-on David Lynching trying to make heads or tails of what's real and what's not.
Easily the coolest graphic novel I've read so far in 2026, just oozing with style, for miles and miles (so much style that it's waaaaasted!). Bérénice Motais de Narbonne's Metadoggoz (originally published in French in 2023, and translated by Montana Kane for Drawn & Quarterly here) is a surreal cyberpunk explosion of cartooning excellence, channeling Taiyo Matsomoto's Tekkonkinkreet and the anything-goes black-and-white ethos of Jim Woodring's Frank. Narbonne's metastation cities and gap-world creature designs are ferociously pure, rendered with a fearless density. Honestly, trying to color the work would send you straight to a therapist.
While I coasted on vibes for the book's middle-act, Narbonne brings the work together in a satisfying conclusion of queer-punk outsiders finding their place, whether it was their intention or not. Found family can feel like an overused descriptor, but the purity of that goal is never diminished when it's weaved this tightly in a genuinely fresh design. This is the graphic novel for anyone who loves shouting "Hell yeah, comics!," for anyone who thought the third Matrix movie was really onto something, and for anyone who wants to see the future of the medium.
Criminal: Five Gears in Reverse
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are first ballot comics hall-of-famers, probably the surest bet creative team of the entire 2000s, and Five Gears in Reverse, the newest graphic novel set in the Criminal Universe, is the hardest fastball they've thrown since Criminal's return in 2019. These guys have the right to tell their stories however they damn well please, but hey, I'm pleased that heading into Criminal's adaptation debut on Amazon Prime, they opted for hard, fast, Ricky Lawless crime, where you know every decision is going to be the wrong one, and if you've read the second volume of Criminal ("Lawless") you know exactly what that means for Ricky. Brubaker and Phillip's greatest trick here is I'm still half-wondering how the hell he walks away.
Five Gears in Reverse is classically tragic and violent noir, but it's also richly humorous, particularly in the early going as Ricky botches his first job in ways that only "he has a heroin-whoopsie" can quite suggest. This is a prequel 20 years in the making (chronologically, the story is set 2 years before the Criminal Universe launched in 2006), and it's truly unprecedented how consistent Brubaker and Phillips have been with all things Criminal during that stretch. Let's be honest, most comics creators don't return to their hits because things are going great, but with Brubaker and Phillips it always feels like the comics they were put on this earth to make. They can detour in all kinds of truly excellent ways (Fatale, Pulp, Reckless) but it's Criminal where they've announced to the comics world for 20 years and counting that this is the creator-owned bar you should all aspire to.
Five Gears in Reverse is my favorite Criminal graphic novel of the 2020s. Long live Criminal!
And now, a very special presentation of the most exciting thing in comics this year:
Camera pans in slowly on bearded, rapidly aging man sitting softly on couch. He is holding an ice pack on a recently separated shoulder that occurred while playing basketball, this upon his return from a strained calf that put him in a walking boot. He considers whether he is too old to play competitive basketball, but then remembers, "I'm the same age as Steph and KD, and much younger than Lebron," and is clear in his foolhardy pursuit of hoops nirvana. In his offhand he holds the new graphic novel from Michael Deforge, and opens the front cover.
"What," he exclaims masculinely to no one, as he finds a pocket inside the front cover that reads "The Spins," with an arrow pointing up to a minicomic placed inside.
"WHAT!" he exclaims more shrilly now, as he pulls out the minicomic, which is inside a larger comic.
"LET'S GOOOOOOOOO!!!!" he screams, waking up the baby, as he begins to read Michael Deforge's minicomic, "The Spins," which is - and this cannot be emphasized enough - a small comic within a larger comic.
Camera zooms all the way in on the man's immaculate eyes and beard, both immaculate, the eyes and the beard, though it would seem excessive to label them both as such in the same sentence. One would not want to seem arrogant. The look on his face is pure, pure joy. The baby wails. His wife is saying something like, "Seriously, Dave?" Pure joy.
This has been a very special presentation of the most exciting thing in comics this year.
I'll also note that last year's Holy Lacrimony was the push I needed to say I'll read anything by Michael Deforge (it wound up inside my 15 favorite comics of the year). For my money, All the Cameras In My Room is even better, 14 short stories that range from weird, hilarious and insightful to hilariously weird yet insightful. This is my favorite graphic novel from Deforge to date, and it offers the fullest glimpse of the cartoonist's unfettered vision.
Most Anticipated Comics (Next Month!)
Here are all the comics I can’t wait to read coming out this month!
Upcoming Releases: Jun 2, 2026
Chainsaw Man Vol. 21 TP (VIZ Media)
Billy Bat Vol. 1 TP (Abrams Books)
InvestiGators Vol. 9: Weather or Not HC (First Second Books)
Batman Vol. 1: Daylight TP (DC Comics)
Supergirl: The World HC (DC Comics)
The Heavy HC (Abrams ComicArts – Megascope)
Upcoming Releases: Jun 3, 2026
Sleep HC (Image Comics)
Upcoming Releases: Jun 9, 2026
Absolute Green Lantern Vol. 2: Sojourner TP (DC Comics)
Orphan and the Five Beasts: Bath of Blood TP (Dark Horse Comics)
Moebius Library: The Depressed Hunter HC (Dark Horse Books)
Upcoming Releases: Jun 10, 2026
Betas TP (Drawn & Quarterly)
Good as Dead TP (Image Comics)
Upcoming Releases: Jun 16, 2026
Adabana Vol. 3 TP (Dark Horse Manga)
Upcoming Releases: Jun 17, 2026
Rogue Trooper: Ghost Patrol TP (Rebellion)
Upcoming Releases: Jun 23, 2026
Absolute Flash Vol. 2: Still Point TP (DC Comics)
Starship Godzilla: First Wars TP (IDW Publishing)
Moomin Adventures Book Three TP (Drawn & Quarterly)
Aurora and the Orc TP (First Second)
Fish and Water HC (Pantheon Books)
Dogs on Dates TP (Drawn & Quarterly)
Upcoming Releases: Jun 24, 2026
The Department of Truth Vol. 7: Another National Anthem TP (Image Comics)
Chiisakobee Vol. 1 TP (Abrams ComicArts – Kana)
