Eisners 2026 Roundup pt 1: Book Grab-Bag
so I said I wasn't doing an eisners read this year and I was: lying. I'm breaking this into parts because I'm still finishing up a few categories, but I have a lot of thoughts about the many many very good things I read and I want to post them! so here is part one of probably three. as usual bolded titles were my favorites. would love to hear your thoughts if you read any of these!!
TEENS
I didn't read for either kids or middle grade this year because I don't have as much experience with those age groups and I also tend not to have as much fun with them. But I do enjoy the teen graphic novels, and once again this year there was nothing bad in the category! maybe it's for the best that I couldn't actually vote this year because I would have been hard-pressed to pick something here.
Angelica and the Bear Prince - Trung Le Nguyen
This adaptation of East of the Sun West of the Moon set in a small town theater reads a bit younger and lighter than the rest of the noms for this category but is completely charming. Nguyen's art is always beautiful and really suits the sort of fairy tale vibes of the story. (It's also really nice to see several fat secondary characters whose plots have nothing to do with their fatness.)
Everyone Sux But You - K. Wroten
man this was a real period piece! I'm curious how today's teens read a story that (at least to me, who was also a teenager at the time) relies heavily on the trappings of the mid-00s. like, there's a Brand New lyric in one of the chapter titles. are today's teens listening to Brand New??
however this is a really good story about messy toxic teen girls in all-consuming friendships that straddle the line of romance. the art is sketchy with heavy dark lines that feel very "teen drawing in their notebook" and the characters are flawed and bitey and emotionally raw. feels very honest to the experience of being that age and everything being the end of the world.
Hello Sunshine - Keezy Young
I was not really a fan of Young's mental illness memoir Sunflowers, which was nominated last year, and while obviously very personal and meaningful to them, felt like a thesis project that maybe should have stayed a thesis project. So I was pleasantly surprised to really enjoy this horror story that is the only time I've ever seen someone successfully thread the needle of "what if you were experiencing escalating paranoid delusions, and also they were real." That's an oversimplification- the book portrays Alex's delusions and his friends' and boyfriend's attempts to help him out of the mirror world he's fled to with lot of sensitivity. The colors in particular are also really lush and moody and well done.
This Place Kills Me - Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux (also nominated for best writer)
A year for messy teen girls! Mariko Tamaki writes great messy teen girls, and this murder mystery set at an all-girls boarding school was gripping and sad and thorny in all the right places. The art was well done - I love a limited color palette and it's used really well.
Trumpets of Death - Simon Bournel-Bosson, translated by Edward Gauvin
This is a very quick read because it's light on text but one that sort of lingers. I love how ambiguous the ending is - a lot of works for teens do heavy handholding, and this story about a boy's stay on his grandparents' rural farm absolutely does not. Lovely scenes of animal transformation in particular and the paneling for Antoine's violent and intimidating grandfather is great. (The book is also somewhat ambiguous about what level of violence Antoine's grandfather is capable of, which makes him more frightening, not less.)
Unread: Clementine, book 3 - Tillie Walden. Someday the Walking Dead franchise will release Walden from their foul clutches and I'll be able to read something she's done again.
HUMOR
This year I was so pleased that there were several books in here that were actually funny. The bar is truly so so low for the Eisners humor category.
And to Think We Started as a Book Club - Tom Toro
These are very New Yorker New Yorker cartoons.
Ew, It’s Beautiful: A False Knees Comics Collection - Joshua Barkman
You know these. The bird comics. They get a little one-note as a collection, and I find myself wishing I had just reread Michael Deforge's weird and wonderful Birds of Maine instead. But they're fun and occasionally you get flashes of poignancy.
The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt - John Allison and Max Sarin
I used to read Bad Machinery and Giant Days religiously during my many folders of ongoing webcomics period and Allison has not lost his touch. This is just a very fun cozy mystery romp.
Physics for Cats - Tom Gauld
My note for these is "fine." I sent a few of them to my dad. I do think these kinds of little strips do suffer when put into a collection - ideally you should be reading them at most once a day or as a footnote to something else. They're completely successful at what they're trying to accomplish! They just suffer when compared to like, a full graphic novel with a plot, or even a more narrative collection of strips.
Spent: A Comic Novel - Alison Bechdel
Bechdel returns to the type of semi-autobiographical self-lampooning that made Dykes to Watch Out For so successful, and she hasn't lost her touch. This follows a flailing cartoonist, her goat farming wife, and their Vermont aging hippie friends as they struggle through polyamory, parenting, and the pandemic. It's very funny, and very fun to read, and yet I still don't know if I'd put it in the humor category.
Unread: Jeff the Land Shark - Kelly Thompson and Tokitokoro. Listen, I love Kelly Thompson as a writer, but when I saw this as a nom again my first reaction was dread. Which is a completely outsized reaction to a perfectly harmless series of cute little comics about a shark with legs. I just don't like them and so I am releasing myself from the burden of reading and reviewing something I already know I find grating in its cuteness. Sorry, Jeff.
ANTHOLOGY
I could only get my hands on two of the anthologies nominated this year, which is probably fine because I tend to find anthologies extremely hit or miss.
Come Out and Play: The Queer Sports Project, edited by Meghan Kemp-Gee and Megan Praz
And this one was no different. Some of the stuff in here was great, and some of it was decidedly amateur. I'm not sure if it was space constraints, but SO many of these comics ended a page or two before they needed to. Which is not a common complaint from me, lover of ambiguous and open endings! But also in a world that really does not want queer and especially trans people to play or love sports it is nice to see a lot of stories about us playing and loving many beautiful games.
DC Pride 2025, edited by Andrea Shea and Jillian Grant
Ah, DC Pride. Every year I open you with carefully restrained hopes and every year you are sort of mediocre. This year was actually way more successful for me than past years due to actually having a frame narrative (even if it was a frame narrative based on a comic I hated) and thus feeling way less like a disparate anthology. Some nice parts in here, I liked Jo and Nubia and Bunker's stories in particular. We have to get Connor Hawke out of Pride purgatory and also free Midnighter and Apollo. And if you read this you don't need me to tell you the Blue Snowman thing sucked. But! Also every year there is a really heartfelt and lovely memoir comic from a queer DC creator and Jenny Blake's was so sweet. I continue to wish that we would get meaty queer stories in the main comics (the way we have in the past! Anita and Grace were making out on page in 2006 😭) But maybe DC Pride is actually the perfect representation of the queer community in that it is: a real mixed bag.
Unread: Noir Is the New Black Season 2, Stardust the Super Wizard Anthology, edited by Van Jensen, 2000AD 2026 Annual Featuring Judge Dredd, edited by Oliver Pickles
NONFICTION
Last year this category got renamed to "reality-based work" which I think is so silly. But some real bangers this year!
Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance - Ben Passmore
Absolute firecracker of a book with an excellent frame narrative. The main character finds himself falling through various episodes of Black history, following his father. Just a really good and timely exploration of what it means to resist state violence with violence of your own, and what the consequences for that- or failing to do that- can look like. Passmore is a really sharp cartoonist! Also it's got five pages of footnotes, which I of course love.
Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me - Mimi Pond
I think I would have liked this more if I had had any connection to or knowledge of the Mitfords. But unlike the author I did not, and so this was just sort of... fine. I found the lettering frustratingly hard to read at points - if you're going to use cursive you need to make it really clean and there were points where Pond sacrifices legibility for aesthetics. But also I was reading this on a small screen which may not be entirely fair as a judgement.
Fela: Music Is the Weapon - Jibola Fagbamiye and Conor McCreery
This ruled. Absolutely stunning art on a topic I knew nothing about (Fela Kuti, Nigerian musician and activist and one of the creators of Afrobeat.) It's hard to do art that really captures the sensation of music - an entirely different medium! - but this did a great job. Did not shy away from Fela's flaws either, which I think can be difficult to do in a memoir about a very famous guy who gets held up as an inspiration a lot. This was maybe my favorite book of this year's Eisners. Also, if you like me of a month ago haven't listened to Zombie before, and you have 12 minutes to jam out to a scathing but deeply danceable critique of the military government of 1970s Nigeria, you should.
Globetrotters: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s World Tour - Julian Voloj and Julie Rocheleau
This was pretty breezy - maybe fitting, since the book is about Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's 1889 race around the world - but the art was lovely and fluid.
Muybridge - Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Daschert and Rob Aspinal
This was just fine. I'm not sure if this was due to loss in translation or just Delisle's fairly crisp art style but it felt dry. Like I learned things, but I didn't feel much in the way of emotion from or about Muybridge - even when we're watching him shoot his wife's lover!
Surrounded: America’s First School for Black Girls, 1832 - Wilfrid Lupano and Stéphane Fert
Man I really wanted to love this, but the art style of very dreamy children's book-style watercolors ended up making this feel more like an allegory than a real story. Perhaps also because a lot of our characters had historical fiction disease, aka they're presenting their views in ways that are entirely palatable and understandable to a modern audience. Did make me want to look up more about the particular people involved, though.
MEMOIR
I always feel bad writing memoir reviews because you can't really review the plot of someone's life. But also some books are more successful in their recounting than others!
The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief - Carol Tyler
I ended up dropping this about 30 pages on. The art was lovely - very evocative ink drawings - but the writing was just utterly losing me in the thicket of belabored metaphor. This is one of three Fantagraphics books in the category (Precious Rubbish and Raised by Ghosts being the other two.) And half the time when I read a Fantagraphics book I have an amazing time. And the other half I have a lot of questions about their editorial process.
My Life in 24 Frames Per Second - Rintaro
This is a memoir from the director of, among other things, Metropolis. It was totally fine as a memoir of the early days of the anime industry, but some of the time skips were pretty jarring (including a sudden appearance of a woman who we learn is his wife?? This book spent so much time on his dad and maybe a page on the woman he spent his life with?? Which didn't leave a great taste in my mouth.)
It Rhymes with Takei - George Takei, Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, and Justin Eisinger
This is, as you might expect from a memoir by George Takei, almost painfully earnest. It's well done and quite sweet and not really my cup of tea as memoirs go but an enjoyable read.
Precious Rubbish, by Kayla E.
God I really struggled with what to write about this. This is a harrowing chronicle of child abuse of every flavor that's told in a mix of almost Disney-esque cartoons complete with back matter-style games and paper dolls, and visceral gore. It did not at all work for me; despite (or maybe because of?) the very graphic treatment of the subject matter I felt pretty divorced from the emotional reality of Kayla's experience. But also I don't really feel qualified to go "I didn't like this" about the comics equivalent of someone walking up to you with their guts in a bucket, because I wasn't supposed to like it! So I don't know. I think this probably works really well for the people it works for; I just happened not to be one of those people.
Raised by Ghosts, by Briana Loewinsohn
This is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum of memoirs of your bad childhood. Very dreamy watercolors about Loewinsohn's neglectful family. The art is doing some interesting things, but it's also very separate from the words in ways that made this feel less like a comic and more like an illustrated work of prose.
Talking to My Father’s Ghost: An Almost True Story - Alex Krokus
I am not generally a fan of Edgy Talking Animal comics but this is less edgy than just very funny and poignant and well-observed portraits of what happens to your weird family when your dad dies. Shockingly to me because I almost skipped this one, this was my favorite book in the category.
next up: albums, adaptations, and international