‘Feeding Ghosts’ and ‘Victory Parade’ Top PW’s 2024 Graphic Novel Critics Poll

For the second year in a row, the top spot on PW’s annual graphic novel critics poll is shared by two titles. The debut graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (MCD) and the graphic novel Victory Parade by Leela Corman (Schocken) both received a total of five votes from PW’s panel of 11 critics. These powerful works, while distinctive in style, are remarkably similar in theme, with both delving into the inheritance of trauma across generations, particularly depicted through the fraught dynamics of mothers and daughters.

Hulls draws an interwoven, well-researched saga of three generations of women, unfolding from the displacement of her Chinese grandmother, a journalist persecuted under Mao’s regime who eventually emigrated to California (and published a bestselling memoir in Hong Kong in between, which remains banned in China). Hulls's grandmother lived with her and her anxiety-ridden mother throughout Hulls's childhood, suffering from increasing mental health breakdowns until her death in a psychiatric care facility. Hulls grew up in conflict with her own mother, her own mixed-race identity, and the chaos and codependency of the global “ghosts” haunting their home.

“All year I've found myself recommending Feeding Ghosts,” writes PW critic Tahneer Oksman, calling it “a brilliant debut in which a daughter digs into her matrilineal histories. Hulls's facility with making comics—and her endless fascination with how different ideas and stories can be mapped and arranged—is evident on every page.”

The comics narrative, with its “maze-like layouts reminiscent of David B.,” per PW’s starred review, offers a hybrid of history, family stories, and searching confessionals. “There are no tidy epiphanies or easily won battles in this rigorously researched memoir of troubled immigrant history and the trauma-wracked legacy of secrets passed down,” notes PW critic Chris Barsanti. The shifts between documented horrors of war and contested teenaged memories require close reading, but while “Hulls’s multigenerational portrait is dense and expansive—cross-cutting between family stories and a century of Chinese history—it’s also kind of a page-turner,” writes PW critic Chris Burkhalter. “It’s as though the struggle against grief is etched deep into each page.”

The ensemble cast of Eisner-nominated artist Corman’s graphic novel Victory Parade, which is set during World War II, move through parallel narratives across multiple locations: in a Jewish immigrant community in Brooklyn, among factory workers and war refugees, and in Germany at the liberation of Buchenwald. It was named one of PW’s best comics and graphic novels of 2024, noting how “Corman paints indelible characters who grapple with grief on battlefields and in the wrestling ring.” Per PW’s starred review, Corman’s “lithe, purple-toned watercolors bleed on the page—a tactile evocation of how trauma breaks through and crosses generations. It’s a transcendent, visionary accomplishment by an artist at the height of her powers.”

One of the book’s central characters, factory worker Rose, tries to raise her daughter while her husband fights overseas as she engages in an affair with a disabled veteran. She has also taken a German-Jewish refugee into her home as an adopted daughter of sorts, who, fueled by her trauma and grief over her own mother’s death in the war, goes on to become a sharp-edged lady wrestler. The gorgeous, painterly graphic novel offers “an entirely original war story about the cost of survival, told in an explosion of visual ideas,” writes PW critic Shaenon Garrity. With sections depicting spirits fracturing through a kind of spectral plane between the living and the dead, it’s “a genuinely haunted and haunting work,” adds PW critic Rob Kirby.

The PW Graphic Novel Critics Poll is compiled annually, with participating critics listing up to 10 adult trade book releases they consider to be the best graphic novel and comics works of the year. The book or books receiving the most votes wins; we also share the runners-up, and list recipients of multiple votes as Honorable Mentions. Taking part in the 2024 poll are PW graphic novel reviewers Chris Barsanti, Chris Burkhalter, John DiBello, Shaenon Garrity, Rob Kirby, Cheryl Klein, Tahneer Oksman, TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter, and Masha Zhdanova. Also participating are PW graphic novels reviews editor Meg Lemke and PW’s More to Come podcast cohost Calvin Reid.

Second Place

Runners up were also tied this year, with four votes each: I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together: A Memoir, by Maurice Vellekoop (Pantheon), and Mothballs, by Sole Otero and translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics). Both titles were also named among PW’s best comics and graphic novels of 2024.

In I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together, longtime queer cartoonist Vellekoop unpacks his 1970s conservative Dutch Christian upbringing and adventures into art and romance in ‘80s and ‘90s New York City, bringing readers intimately through his therapy as an adult to reconcile his relationship with his mother. The delightful graphic memoir is characterized by witty, whimsical episodes that “showcase [Vellekoop’s] guiding obsessions (classic Disney animation, opera, 1970s television, and fashion) in splendid drawings,” per PW’s best books write-up.

“This gorgeously drawn autobiography from the legendary LGBTQ+ cartoonist & illustrator is detailed to an almost obsessive degree and nakedly candid, making it all compulsively readable,” writes Kirby.

Otero’s Mothballs marked the English-language debut of the Argentinian cartoonist.

“With an absorbing multigenerational storyline and distinctive, vibrantly hued illustrations, Otero’s graphic novel considers the ripple effect of difficult wartime decisions,” writes PW critic Cheryl Klein. “Otero’s dollhouse-like domestic interiors alone deserve attention—from the floorplan illustrations to the boldly-colored midcentury wallpapers,” adds Burkhalter.

The graphic novel again shares themes with Victory Parade and Feeding Ghosts—it centers around an Argentinian woman trying to understand her eccentric Argentinian-Italian grandmother, whose family fled Mussolini’s fascism to land in unexpected social, personal, and ultimately political strife in Latin America. The boisterous art and layered storytelling made it an in-house favorite, a discovery, “bursting with color and linework that playfully dances across the page” that “marks Otero as a rising star of international comics,” per PW’s best books write-up.

Otero’s critical reception also highlights the continuing popularity, among critics at least, of translated comics from global voices. “This was one of at least three highlights of the year for me that were translated by Andrea Rosenberg for Fantagraphics,” writes Burkhalter.

2024 Trends

Critics also reflected on trends across the comics industry, with several noting that the growth in fan communities around webcomics— particularly vertical scroll webtoons—has led to the proliferation of print collections of the online content. “Webcomics-to-print have become a subcategory onto themselves,” writes Garrity, adding that she hopes “creators recognize their worth as websites and publishers scramble to sign popular titles.” Zhdanova agrees, noting that “manga, manhwa, and webtoons are all on the rise” and pointing to the many recent imprints in the overlapping categories.

In contrast to the often lighter pop fare of webtoons, the other rising category noted was the “excellent serious graphic nonfiction” becoming ever more prominent in the graphic novel landscape, as Reid writes. New titles, he notes, span a breadth of topics across such subgenres as graphic biography, graphic history, and the perennial favorite graphic memoir.

While trade publishers large and small have routinely included graphic nonfiction on their lists, there have been notable new entries from university presses and scholarly publishers getting into the comics space for the first time. Oksman says that she’s “excited to see comics biographies of varying stripes, including hybrid fictionalized and hybrid autobiographical ones, including works by Ken Krimstein and Erin Williams, for example, that expertly embrace that challenge.”

And in a crowded market for books, one way that comics stand out is, of course, through the art itself. Oksman cites a favorite trend for her this year as “vibrant, often unexpected use of color, and experimentation with various color palettes—including lots of watercolor.”

Honorable Mentions

Here are the remaining multiple-vote gatherers.

Three Votes

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe by Ken Krimstein (Bloomsbury)

“This graphic biography of two great thinkers focuses on their years in Prague and focuses on the rise of a new, great 20th-century Age of Reason, highlighted by whimsical and detailed artwork. I learned so much about these two men and their foundations of thinking that I'd love a sequel.” – JD

Final Cut by Charles Burns (Pantheon)

“While a return to form in some ways for Burns, this graphic novel about isolation, love, and the substitution of art for reality is perhaps more elegant in its unsettling creepiness than anything he has done before.” – CB

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)

“Ferris sticks the landing in the second half of her magnum opus, which tells the personal story of a singular young girl as a phantasmagoric epic full of monsters, art, and defiant love.” – SG

Two Votes

Babe in the Woods: Or the Art of Getting Lost by Julie Heffernan (Algonquin)

Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson (Ten Speed Graphic)

The Field by Dave Lapp (Conundrum)

The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War by Carl Sciacchitano (Gallery 13)

Mary Tyler MooreHawk by Dave Baker (Top Shelf)

Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy by Sacha Mardou (Avery)

The Puerto Rican War: A Graphic History by John Vasquez Mejias (Union Square)

Previous Critics Poll Winners

2023: Impossible People and Roaming (Tie)

2022: Ducks

2021: Secret to Superhuman Strength