Titles listed as Honorable Mentions each received a single vote.

The book receiving the most votes wins and we share the remaining top vote-recipients. The PW Graphic Novel Critics Poll is compiled by asking participating critics to list up to 10 titles they consider the best graphic books of the year, and we tally the results. It's a book that in many ways begins to reconcile Bell's paradoxical need for solitude and deep connection,” writes Rob Clough, a PW reviewer. In her “sketchy, deadpan and bemused style, Bell writes about helping her mother put her life back together after her house is destroyed by a fire. Taking second place with five votes is Gabrielle Bell’s Everything is Flammable (Uncivilized Books), a “powerful and insightful work about mothers, daughters, and the fraught ties that bind them,” according to PW reviewer Chris Barsanti.Īcclaimed for her taut observational autobiographical comics, Bell reached a new level of creative maturity in a memoir that addresses themes of mortality, trauma, and the social negotiations around being an independent woman. He described the book as, “an evocative masterpiece that possesses a level of depth and introspection that other graphic novels could only hope to maintain.” Readers responded to Ferris’s “lushly illustrated diary form, with visuals heavily influenced by the B-horror movies and lurid monster movies that the protagonist devours,” says PW reviewer Steve Bunche. It's an astonishing debut that fuses everything from EC to Harriet the Spy to the Holocaust, ” adds Heidi MacDonald, editor in chief of The BEAT (and former PW graphic novels reviews editor). “Ferris's dense, boundary-breaking art swirls around matters of race, sexuality and coming of age.

The narrative, Shaenon Garrity, a PW graphic novel reviewer says, “slides gracefully between past and present, reality and imagination, with arresting ballpoint-and-pencil artwork.” “Ten-year-old Karen Reyes sees herself as both a monster-like the ghouls in the 1960s monster fanzines she loves-and an amateur detective, in this book that is by turns a haunting murder mystery and a deeply affecting spiritual portrait of the rich social underbelly of 1960s Chicago,” writes PW senior editor Calvin Reid. The book was eventually published by independent comics publisher Fantagraphics-only to have its release delayed when the initial printing was stalled offshore on a bankrupt container ship for months.

Originally designed to be a three volume work-volume two will be published in 2018- My Favorite Thing Is Monsters was first cancelled after being acquired by a New York publishing house. Ferris was only able to finish the work after recovering from a long and debilitating illness. Despite the author’s early struggles to complete the book and find a publisher, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters became both a literary success and a surprise bestseller.

R.C. ‘n’ P.W. by Julia First