Best Comics of 2025, part 1 of 2

I used to read every artistically significant comic published every year, but it’s been a long time since I was plugged into the world of comics enough to accomplish that. Besides, the quantity of interesting comics published every year has exploded in recent decades. It’s impossible for me to read it all, so the most notable feature of my list of the comics of 2025 list will be what I excluded. When I looked at the Guardian’s “The Best Graphic Novels of 2025” or the New York Times’ graphic novels list, only one item from their lists also appears on mine, Allison Bechdel’s Spent. But most shameful for me—a guy who has spent most of his adult life thinking very hard about comics—was how few of the comics on The Guardian’s and the Times’ lists I had read at all.

Spent by Alison Bechdel was a gift for every reader who was a fan of her first comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which began in 1983. That strip was a little like Doonesbury but set in among a group a lesbian friends in a New England college town. The setting permitted Bechdel to comment on the world and its politics while delving deeply into the interpersonal interactions of a small group of characters. While drawing Dykes to Watch Out For, Bechdel completed her first graphic novel Fun Home. She wrapped up Dykes to Watch Out For in 2008, and produced two subsequent autobiographical graphic novels, Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength. The lovable lesbians of Dykes to Watch Out For were consigned to Bechdel’s past. Her primary subject now seemed to be herself. But in Spent, Bechdel combined these two worlds—her Dykes to Watch Out For cast met Alison. For Spent, Bechdel created a fictional self, one famous for an autobiographical graphic novel called Death and Taxidermy. (Fun Home was Bechdel’s Pulizter-Prize winning graphic novel that made her reputation.) This not only alerts us that the Alison in the graphic novel is a slightly off version of the real thing, but also alerts a careful reader that we are back in DTWOF-land. Slight alterations of a real thing’s name to produce a satirical counterpart were a hallmark of Dykes to Watch Out For. This hinted to us in-the-know readers that we were about to be reintroduced to the Dykes to Watch Out For cast as characters who live in the same community as the fictional Bechdel. It’s a postmodern bit of playfulness that feels like Bechdel rewarding her oldest fans with a treat—a chance for us all to catch up with Lois, Sparrow, Ginger, and Stuart. But fans of Dykes to Watch Out For will miss the presence of Mo, the main character of the strip. Bechdel’s Spent alter-ego Alison is her stand-in for Mo. All of us who read the original Dykes to Watch Out For always assumed that Mo was a fictionalized stand-in for the author, but by this point in her own life, Alison Bechdel is a very different character than Mo.

Spent is broadly built around Karl Marx’s Capital as an organizing principle, which sounds forbiddingly brainy. I wonder if Bechdel, an aging radical, was having mixed feelings about now being a prosperous member of the bourgeoisie.

In 1992, I worked as an editor for Fantagraphics Books, the publisher of a magazine about comics called The Comics Journal. In 1992, the editor of The Comics Journal abruptly quit and Fantagraphics’ publishers had to scramble to put together the next issue. I worked as an editorial assistant on The Comics Journal, so they handed the next issue off to me. One of the articles I ran in my issue was “I Don’t Fuck My Dog” about recently deceased underground cartoonist, Dori Seda. With that article, Bob Levin became my favorite writer on comics.

Levin is an 82-year-old attorney from San Francisco who grew up reading EC Comics (EC published such titles as Tales from the Crypt and Mad before being put out of the comic book business by the Comics Code). In 1988, he wrote an article about his childhood enthusiasm called “Remembrances of a Fan-Addict Past.” That article initiated a second career for him as a writer about comics, concentrating on EC and underground comics. What makes him appealing (beyond his jazzy prose) is his willingness to point out that these comic he loved when he was 10 were in fact pretty problematic. He is quite willing to point out fatal flaws in the art of some beloved cartoonists like Johnny Craig, Alex Toth, and Harvey Kurtzman. His identification of the inherit anti-black racism in the work of Texas underground cartoonist Jack Jackson was eye-opening.

The Comics Code was an industry-managed censorship code that was instituted after the publication of a book called Seduction of the Innocent, which blamed comics for rising juvenile delinquency. A senate hearing followed, and the Comics Code was soon put in place by the comics publishing industry. This is seen by a certain class of comic book fans as the greatest crime in the history of comics. Levin writes:

Another conceit of EC defenders was that their horror stories were so over-the-top that readers were drawn to them for their “tongue-in-cheek” quality. (“Black humor,” EC’s publisher Bill Gaines called it.) Well, hey, I was there; and if we had wanted laughs, we had Little Lulu.

The Senate had that much right. We had come to EC for SEX and VIOLENCE.

Levin is a good magazine feature writer who allows the story he’s reporting to take him wherever it needs to go. This is illustrated in the longest piece in the book, an article called “Albert & Robert” which details the relationship between underground comics legend Robert Crumb and his lawyer in the early 70s, an eccentric named Albert Morse. The urban legend that many of us had heard and accepted as truth was that because of Morse’s legal maneuvers, Crumb had lost the copyright to “Keep on Truckin’.” Levin realized this couldn’t be the whole story when he read that in 2005 Crumb had sued Amazon for infringement of his copyright to “Keep on Truckin’.” So Crumb had not lost the copyright after all.

Levin examined Morse and Crumb’s relationship in detail, making excellent use of his legal background. The story of the lost copyright arose in the mid-70s when the IRS went after Crumb for non-payment of his taxes. Morse had been responsible for most of Crumb’s income in the early 70s, which was primarily obtained by threatening copyright pirates using Crumb’s “Keep on Truckin’” on T-shirts, patches, and other hippie merchandise. When Morse would send Crumb a royalty check obtained from a copyright pirate, he would remind Crumb that he was responsible for paying income tax. Crumb with stoned indifference never did until the IRS came after him.

The legend goes that Crumb lost the copyright to “Keep on Truckin’” because he hadn’t vigorously enforced it. A Seattle manufacturer A.A. Sales got a cease-and-desist letter from Morse for publishing a “Keep on Truckin’” poster and jigsaw puzzle. They refused to pay. Morse filed suit and A.A. Sales fought back. They produced an example of Crumb not enforcing his copyright for the owner of the Print Mint, a funky Bay Area publisher. The case went on so long that the cultural currency of “Keep on Truckin’”passed and pursuing the case not really worth either party’s time and Crumb dropped it—A.A. Sales never had to pay Crumb, and he never forfeited the copyright to “Keep on Truckin’.” In short, the myth of Crumb losing the copyright to his own work was disproven.

“Albert & Robert” is the longest piece in the book, and one gets the idea that Levin thought there was a book in the story of this highly eccentric San Francisco attorney. He had access to Morse’s voluminous personal papers and did the legwork to talk to many principals as possible, including A.A. Sales’s attorney in the lawsuit. But apparently after “Albert & Robert” appeared in The Comics Journal, Morse’s widow was so displeased with the result that she refused Levin further access to Morse’s papers. Morse was the scion of a family that got rich patenting a donut-making machine in the 1920s who became an intellectual property attorney in San Francisco where he became fascinated with nudism, tattoo art, and the pursuit of erotic pleasure, and Levin clearly enjoyed exploring this weirdo’s world for a while.

Morse had acted as the attorney for a bunch of underground cartoonists, and they paid tribute to him with a comic book called Morse Funnies that Morse published in small print runs for his office. One of the pages from is by Justin Green, and it popped up on auction a few years ago. So I bought it.

I’m pretty sure that Morse was the guy who taught all those underground cartoonists to put a © on their artwork.

For over a decade I followed Sammy Harkham as he worked to complete his epic of B-movie 60s Hollywood, Blood of the Virgin, one of the greatest comics produced in recent years. It was a low-key artistic triumph—I called it an epic, but it is really closer to contemporary literary fiction in its scope and ambition. Those of us who follow Harkham’s artistic career were eager to see where he went next. Crickets issue 9 is the first work I’ve seen by Harkham since the book collection of Blood of the Virgin was published in 2022. Crickets is Harkham’s self-published one-person anthology comic. This issue has two stories and a couple of one-page comics. The first story is set in 1860s Los Angeles (Harkham is an Angeleno) and combines a rough-and-tumble old West crime story and a story of the complex racial politics of early Los Angeles. The second story tells the horrible true story of how Frederick the Great’s monstrous father, Frederick William I, beheaded young Frederick’s teenage lover before his very eyes. Two pages before this gruesome execution, Harkham portrays a playful scene of teenage love frolics that is a visual quotation of the rococo erotic masterpiece, The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Harkham is an extremely skilled and sensitive cartoonist, but he doesn’t show off with a lot of flashy technique or baroque detail. A panel like this with flat, mostly un-modulated colors and minimal detail, mostly impresses by virtue of its art history quotation. What will stick with me about Harkham’s art in Crickets issue 9 is his subtle color palette. The cover image showing early Los Angeles at twilight is a glowing masterpiece. As I write this sentence, I am looking simultaneously at the image I scanned on my printer this morning and the physical comic book. The process of scanning the image leeched a lot of the glowing depth of the deep blue sky on the comic. Harkham on this cover achieves a Maxfield Parrish-esque magic.

And if you buy a copy of Crickets 9 from Harkham’s Big Cartel store, you will also get a supplementary minicomic, Hayseed 1 with your order. Hayseed 1 mostly consists of mostly of preliminary sketches for Crickets 9, and in it we get to see how much Harkham thinks about the history of his chosen medium. One page is covered with tiny drawings of classic comic book covers, and on other pages there are quotations from classic comic strip panels. But he also pays the same attention to the cover of Discipline by Dash Shaw, which suggest that Harkham is just as interested in his contemporaries as in the classic older comics he pays homage to.

Furthermore, I am of the opinion that for the good of America, Trump must release everything related to the Epstein case (unredacted) and resign.

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