Cozy Comics Cavalcade
As much as I want to, I just can’t get into cozy games. Something about the tendency of Stardew Valley to replicate the feeling of household tasks I already have to do irritates me. Keeping up my island in Animal Crossing is inevitably a chore, one that I feel I might as well just do in real life. No, if I’m looking for the kind of cozy escapism that genre promises I turn, of course, to comics. Below I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite “cozy comics” as I understand them to be. There are a few criteria that I paid attention to when curating this list that approach a definition of cozy comics. Generally speaking, open illustration styles like Mike Allred, early Michael Lark, and any ligne clair artist is one. Generally “feel good” stories is another, though I stretch that definition quite a bit. More than anything though, this list is deeply personal to me and my memories of reading comics growing up, mixed with my own contemporary tastes. Rather than fight this, I decided to lean into it, reasoning that the idiosyncrasies that emerge will be interesting to some.
As always, links in the newsletter lead to my online shop where these books and many more are available. I’ll be updating that site off and on throughout the end of the year. Thanks for reading and joining me on the lilypad (should I make this more frog related? Or explain the whole frog thing? Stay tuned in 2025 to find out!)
See you next year,
Ry
P.S. use discount code COZY (all caps) for ten percent off anything in the cozy collection
I grew up as a Marvel kid, so it’s only fitting that I start this list by honoring my early avenue into the medium.
Recently, I have been working my way through a box of Bronze Age Marvel— mostly reprints of old monster comics, but some newer work, minor keys etc. And within the stack there’s a few of those King-Size Specials that reprint a number of stories by one character. Some of these were printed only a few years after the original comic came out making them one of the best ways to see these stories in as close to their original form as possible without breaking the bank. Case in point:
This reprints the first Sinister Six story as illustrated by Steve Ditko and also includes a Jack Kirby drawn, Ditko inked, expansion of the story where Spider-Man met the FF AND another Kirby/Ditko teenage story where Spider-Man meets the Human Torch. That Sinister Six story is really cool— It’s an excuse for Ditko to draw a bunch of cool Ditko villain splash pages (I never realized how much the Vulture’s design is so classically Ditko, just a weird old man in a jumpsuit defined by different mark making techniques) and it’s an excuse for Lee to shoehorn in guest appearances from every other Marvel hero. So in a way both men got to be happy. I suspect they had just gotten some publicity that Lee wanted to capitalize on as soon as possible.
I read Spider-Man as a kid, but The Hulk missed me somehow, so I rectified some of that with the next King-Size Special I found.
This Giant-Size Hulk issue reprints a 5 part Leader story from back when the Hulk was running in ten page installments in Tales to Astonish. Kirby is credited with pencils for the first three parts before being credited just with layouts as Bob Powell took over pencils. Mickey Demeo inks everything here.
Not having read The Hulk growing up, or really knowing much about him at all, the main villain of the piece, The Leader in his introductory story was a revelation. Can I just say, I love this little green pervert so much. His weirdo Abelard Snazz meets John Waters design is perfect and all the little details are too clever to have been written by Lee. Was Kirby just having a fun time? Case in point, The Leader is basically a peeping tom flying his camera around the desert until he spots The Hulk and abducts him to steal something from The Watcher’s home planet, which he knows about because (again) The Leader was just flying a space telescope around a bunch. Incredible stuff.
Two more detail notes: First, The Leader appears to be raising sea monkeys as a private army…
…and The Leader is canonically an art dealer in Rome!
I literally cannot think of a cozier comic than 32 pages of Harvey Pekar diatribes about his favorite jazz musicians as illustrated by Joe Sacco. One of the all time great single issues.
Oh you thought I was done with Marvel? Ha! You’re never really done with Marvel as I am learning with every year.
Anyway, Damage Control is legitimately great. Dwayne McDuffie sets the perfect tone with his writing that would form the basis for the “MCU Voice” 20 years later. It works way better here though. Ernie Colón is a legend. Proving here that he can draw in any genre or multiple ones at once while maintaining his own unique style. Across the two volumes he must draw almost every Marvel character at least once.
This book really gets the humor of comics in a way that few others do and actually made me laugh out loud. It seems obvious the the JLI series must have been an influence, but I don’t feel like Damage Control gets its due. If like me you hadn’t given it a chance for one reason or another consider yourself notified: Damage Control rules.
In the 1990s and early 2000s Dean Motter, the creator of Mister X, returned to that world if not the same exact setting. You see, in Motter’s cosmology there are three neighboring retro-futurist cities, Radiant City (where Mister X takes place), Terminal City (titular series with Michael Lark on art) and Electra City (setting for Electropolis, Motter’s series with Image that he drew himself.).
I have gathered together the complete Terminal City (the original nine issue series + the five issue followup), and Electropolis. Both have been well loved over the years, but Terminal City in particular is still an absolute joy to read. Lark’s style is clearly his, but a little more open helped in no small part by the Rick Taylor’s vibrant colors. This is a series that evokes the feeling of wanting to live with these characters in this place.
But wait, there’s more! Oni Press Madman collections!
These are from a time in the early 2000s after Allred had bounced around a few publishers already before landing with Oni for his signature creation Madman. I have been reading Madman almost as long as I have read comics so beyond the regular trappings that would make this a cozy comic there is of course the added bite of nostalgia for me.
Madman Adventures is a collection of the first three color issues of the regular series. Madman: The Oddity Odyssey came before this technically, but it has never felt like the true starting point for the series, this does instead.
What strikes me most upon this reread is how (frankly) unremarkable the art is. I do not mean that it is bad, far from it I think it’s very good. But at this stage in his career, Allred had not found his own style quite yet. This actually makes the book more interesting for me, because the influence of his peers much more readily apparent here. I see shades of Paul Chadwick alongside Geof Darrow alongside Bernie Mireault (a frequent collaborator of Allred’s greatly missed around here), and Michael Lark’s work in the above Terminal City.
The Atomics collection brings together some disparate one shots Allred was involved with throughout the 90s. Some, like his collaborations with J. Bone and Chynna Clugston Flores feature side characters from Allred’s main book while the other collaborations in the book don’t appear to have any relation (right before publication it of course hit me that Spaceman is in the early issues of Madman! My bad nerds!). Don’t let that keep you away though, the other collaborations are actually my favorite! With Martin Ontiveros, Allred released the Crash Metro book— an homage to Buck Rogers style stories. My favorite work in the whole book though is the Spaceman story, made cel animation style with artist Lawrence Marvit providing the painted backgrounds for Allred to draw characters on top of.
Finally, we have The Last One by J.M. DeMatteis and Dan Sweetman. DeMatteis is a fascinating figure in comics to me. Never one of my favorite writers, yet clearly a very important part of the equation that matured comics in the 80s and 90s and someone who I respect more and more. His Moonshadow is a high watermark that I have covered before, though I must admit I prefer his series Blood which came out at the same time as the former. The Last One puts both of those books to shame while continuing to explore DeMatteis’ primary thematic material. That is, the loss of childhood and coming to terms with that; the nature of God as filtered through DeMatteis’ worldview that borrows liberally from many world religions; and the relationship between the divine and creativity.
The titular “Last One” is a primordial agendered being known as Myrwann, who throughout the centuries of human existence has saved certain souls, in this case, they all live in a house in New York City (DeMatteis remember). If this were a Grant Morrison comic I would say without a doubt that Myrwann is modeled after Genesis P-Orridge the greatly missed artist who formed (most notably) Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. I’m unsure of DeMatteis is a fan, somehow I just don’t see it, so perhaps the design is the influence of Sweetman. Regardless, the characterization of Myrwann is bracingly refreshing. It can be hard to remember in 2024 that 30 years ago mainstream comics came out with trans leads that were not pathologized.
Ultimately I think this book is about sacrifice and what we owe one another. DeMatteis packs a lot of feeling into the book that is quite touching. Myrwann is characterized as perpetually taking care of social outcasts throughout history, something that s/he (I’ll be using P-Orridge’s pronouns for Myrwann) does selflessly and with no small amount of pain. When s/he seemingly gives up on life, the rest of the cast has to learn how to take care of themselves and Myrwann.
Sweetman is one of the true unsung masters of comics. His work on Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children is probably what he is best known for, but that series is out of print and can be pretty hard to collect. His work here was made around the same time and in a very similar style. Apparently each issue was supposed to be painted in a different style, but that mostly fell away. Instead, Sweetman varies his media on instinct to match the subject matter. This works much better than the programmatic approach would have. Sweetman’s style is distinguished from the other big names in multimedia comics by his frequent use of (I think) conté crayon—the white and gray grainy textures seen in a lot of his work. Overall Sweetman seems to prefer a lot more dry media—there is a memorable sequence rendered in graphite in issue one—compared to his peers. Highly recommended.
That’s it for this month’s newsletter, but like I said at the top, there are a ton more updates in the webshop that I didn’t have time to talk about here, please click through and consider purchasing if you are so inclined. I’ll be back mid-January with another issue, thank you all so much for reading.
to purchase these books and more, visit me online at https://mostlyfrogs.bigcartel.com/