Category: Pantheon

Since October 2025 there have been many, many websites with “Best of 2025” lists concerning comic books, manga, webcomics and graphic novels. If you’ve looked at a few, you may have noticed some of the same books on different lists and seen some unique to only that list.

I went through 284 different URLs with “Best of” Lists regarding comics and combined them into a spreadsheet. There are over 4,500 different listings of books from these websites. I should note that I’ve included books that were given honourable mentions. In short, if somebody thought it was a good book that you should check out, it’s on here.

I found a lot more lists by Librarians this year. Like last year I included a lot of lists made by youtube content creators. I found more of them this year than I did last, but it’s possible I missed some. I did not include all of them as I am using the description and transcription features to get the lists without having to listen to the whole video. In some videos there are multiple people talking back and forth and no clear way of seeing what books are being picked by which person. I skipped including that list as I do not have the time to listen those videos as they can stretch multiple hours. I also skipped a lot of lists that were the best thing they read that year, which included a lot of stuff that was not published in 2025.

The Top 10 books were:

1. Absolute Martian Manhunter by Deniz Camp & Javier Rodríguez (DC Comics)
2. Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Matias Bergara, Mattia De Iulis, Dustin Nguyen, Jordie Bellaire (DC Comics)
3. Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta, Gabriel Walta (DC Comics)
4. Tongues by Anders Nilsen (Pantheon)
5. Assorted Crisis Events by Deniz Camp, Eric Zawadzki, Jordie Bellaire (Image Comics)
6. Drome by Jesse Lonergan (23rd St.)
7. The Power Fantasy by Kieron Gillen, Casper Wijngaard (Image Comics)
8. Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner)
9. Cannon by Lee Lai (Drawn & Quarterly)
10. Batman: Dark Patterns by Dan Watters, Hayden Sherman, Triona Farrell (DC Comics)

Congratulations are in order to:
DC Comics for capturing the top 3 and 4 of the top 10.
Deniz Camp for getting 1^st & 5^th place.
Hayden Sherman for 2^nd & 10^th place.
Jordie Bellaire for 2^nd & 5^th place.

Below are all the books with 5 mentions or more.

The full spreadsheet with pivot tables for books, writers, artists, publishers and more is available here.

Regarding Publishers:

Image Comics had 105 different books picked this year, followed by DC Comics (100), Marvel Comics (89), 4^th was Self-published books (75) and 5th was Fantagraphics (69). Out of the Self-published books Pleasure Beach by Josh Pettinger was the most popular with 4 reviewers picking it.

The most popular Webcomics were The Keluarga Cable Ship Company by Mereida Fajardo, Scorpio Venus Rising by Corinne Halbert and Nap Comix by Rachel Smith which all tied at 3 picks each.

Caveats:

Where a reviewer/writer wrote ‘best of’ lists for multiple websites, I’ve cross referenced their lists and removed books that were named twice. I did not think it would be fair if those writers could tip the popularity scale by naming the same book(s) over and over again on multiple websites. Sadly, there was an increase of websites publishing lists with no credit to who (or whom) created the list. In those cases, I marked them as n/a but the practice of not crediting writers is a shameful one. Although for libraries I understand fully if the Librarians picking the books want to remain anonymous due to the threatening, targeted climate in the United States.

Youtubers! Introduce yourselves when your start your videos! Many of your lists I put under n/a because I couldn’t find your name anywhere.

If a writer wrote for multiple sites, but one of those sites picks was a group effort, I did not remove books that are listed twice. There were also sites that did fan voting and picked the same book for various categories, I kept them in that case as well.

I generally did not include lists that were a mixed of prose books and graphic novels unless there were a significant number of graphic novels on the list, or they had a list of GNs only and put a GN on a otherwise list of prose books. I’ve come to really appreciate publishers that put : A Novel in the books title as it helps identify prose books when they have a GN looking cover. I also noticed this year that publishers are putting in : A Graphic Novel in the title and that helps too.

With inkers and colourists I often, but not always included them within the Artist section. Where there were multiple (usually more than 5) involved in a book, or in the title’s run over the course of the year, various was used instead of listing them all. In some cases, I combined those involved even if they worked on the title for different issues. Where the translators were credited (without me having to really dig for it) are mentioned on column G of the data. The same goes for the editors of anthologies.

To simply things, if a list named a specific comic book issue or specific volume of a graphic novel, I removed those specifics and just listed the series title, with rare exceptions. The same goes with issue #s when reviewers were picking best single issues. My apologies to the reviewers of those books.

Some reviewers included books that were published in 2024 or earlier. Normally the number of times these books were mentioned is not significant to the overall list. Often (but not always) the work was published again in a new collected edition and that is what the reviewer picked.

Most of the lists were general ‘best/favourite books’ of 2025, but I also included lists dedicated to young readers, manga, 2SLGBTQI+, etc… What type list is noted on column B in the spreadsheet.

Some lists also had rankings and those are included in Column C. I’ve also included age groups or other identifiers in that column.

As a final note, I’m sorry this is later than I normally have this done. There are a variety of reasons for that and among them is the Google of 2025 is not the Google of 2024. There was a serious downgrade in quality results from my Google Alerts and I had to go to Yahoo to manually search for lists. That’s not because Yahoo got any better, it’s just Google has gotten so much worse that old Yahoo is now the best search engine.

This list of websites this list is compiled from: