Tag: Molly Knox Ostertag

Since October 2024 there have been many, many websites with “Best of 2024” 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 268 different URLs with “Best of” Lists regarding comics and combined them into a spreadsheet. There are over 4,000 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.

One thing I did differently this year was I included lists from various youtube videos. I did this via Youtubes transcribe feature that is available on most videos. I am pretty sure I did not find all the videos that gave a top comics/GN list, as I can only incorporate what youtubes search algorithms show me. I found most of these videos to be very Marvel/DC heavy so you will see more of those books on the higher end of this years list. I am not sure if I’m going to include youtube videos next year, I mainly did it to fill in some time while waiting for some significant lists that I include every year.

The Top 10 books were:

1. Ultimate Spider-Man by Jonathan Hickman, Marco Checchetto & David Messina (Marvel Comics)
2. Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath (IDW Publishing)
3. Transformers by Daniel Warren Johnson, Jorge Corona & Mike Spicer (Image Comics)
4. Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta & Frank Martin (DC Comics)
5. Final Cut by Charles Burns (Pantheon)
6. Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman & Jordie Bellaire (DC Comics)
7. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book 2 by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)
8. The Ultimates by Deniz Camp, Juan Frigeri, Chris Allen, Phil Noto & Federico Blee (Marvel Comics)
9. The Power Fantasy by Kieron Gillen & Caspar Wijngaard (Image Comics)
10. Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics)

Congratulations to Jonathan Hickman, Marco Checchetto & David Messina.
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 109 different books picked this year, followed by DC Comics (91), VIZ Meda (72), Marvel Comics (71) trying for 5^th was Fantagraphics (61) and Self Published (61). Out of the Self-Published books Chrysanthemum Under The Waves by Maggie Umber was the most popular with 9 reviewers picking it.

Webcomics did not do that well this year, with the most popular being Batman: Wayne Family Adventures by CRC Payne & Starbite with 3 picks. This is the 4^th year in a row that webcomic has appeared on this list. I should note that books that were also web comics like Joe Sacco’s War on Gaza (4 picks) are listed as books. The only webcomic with 2 picks was Lesbian Grief by Nes Lee (posted on X/Twitter). All other web comics got 1 pick.

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.

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.

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.

For simplicity sake, 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 2023 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 2024, but I also included lists dedicated to young readers, manga, LGBTQ+, 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.

This list of websites this list is compiled from: