‘Barely a page that doesn’t scintillate’: The best graphic novels of 2023

It’s been a banner year for graphic novels. So much so, I’m left with a quandary. I gushed about Why Don’t You Love Me by Paul B Rainey (Drawn & Quarterly) back in May, which remains my favourite book of the year, but such has been the pace of this year’s output, I’ve decided not to relitigate its talents here. Luckily, it’s a book that’s much, much better pitched with as little description as possible, so please consider that micro-nod all the recommendation you need, before we move on to all-new titles.

In Monica by Daniel Clowes (Fantagraphics/Jonathan Cape) a life story is woven through the darker branches of postwar American history. Broken into nine stories, all are tethered by their connection to the titular character, whose mother Penny absconded to join the counterculture when Monica was a child. Now in her 60s, Monica wants to unravel the mysteries of her childhood, and discover what happened to the mother who never returned.

Some of the nine stories follow this quest in a linear fashion, while others appear to have only an opaque connection to the broader narrative, zooming back and forth in time and place. Those in which Monica picks apart her family mystery are written with the beguiling frankness that’s been Clowes’s calling card since his Eightball series, from which sprang the seminal miniseries Ghost World.

Elsewhere, however, the text takes on the pulpy trappings of old war and horror comics; all arch, first-person narration and cod-Lovecraftian dialogue, a switch that only serves to emphasise the more everyday creepiness of the book’s main plot. The reader is left to surmise which parts of the greater story are true as told, or whether such distinctions even matter, and the result is compelling book, and life, that linger long after reading.

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A vastly different, but similarly effective melange of styles can be found in A Guest In The House by Emily Carroll (Faber), a mind-bending ghost story that flips back and forth from elliptical allegory to grounded domestic parable and several shades between.

Protagonist Abby is settling in as new wife to a widower, and stepmother of his quiet, preteen daughter. As she attempts to find her place within their grief, she is haunted by the spectre – both figuratively and, it would seem, literally – of the woman who held those roles before her. What follows is a taut, toothy drama that serves as both a rumination on bereavement and a chillingly muted psychological horror.

As with her 2019 standout, When I Arrived At The Castle, all of this is elevated by Carroll’s art, which spans from kitchen sink clarity to baroque fantasia, without ever sacrificing the churning emotional reality that makes it one of the best reads of the year.

In terms of pure delight, few books have come close to Roaming by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki (Drawn & Quarterly), a hilarious and moving take on the joy, pain and exuberance of adolescence. Dani and Zoe are Canadian schoolfriends taking their first trip to New York. They are accompanied by Fiona, Dani’s worldly and forthright college roommate, an outsider who risks unbalancing the duo’s dynamic entirely.

What results is a quietly profound statement on young friendship. The dialogue – written by both Tamaki cousins – zips with the casual freshness of sitcom writing at its very best. This is a book that reads as easy as breathing, a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the ecstasy, doldrums and cringe of being young and stupid and smart and scared.

Jillian Tamaki’s art is flawless, injecting these thoroughly human characters with a tenderness that makes them emphatically, even painfully, real. This is a book for everyone that has ever been young and unsure of themselves, or their friends. Which is to say, this is a book for just about everyone who’s ever lived.

Every year, I lament the hacky uselessness of a word like “indescribable” and then along comes a book such as The Gull Yettin by Joe Kessler (New York Review Comics), which is very nearly, well ... take a guess.

Its story starts with a small boy who breaks from playing football with friends to offer a rock – or a button, or a ball? – to an odd, humanoid gull creature, who soon takes him under its wing when he’s orphaned by a house fire. From there, the boy is delivered to new parents, while the gull watches, jealously from afar before interjecting in a moment of alarming fervour, which I will not here spoil.

This book contains no text of any kind, but its wordlessness is merely the first layer of inscrutability. Many text-free books make up for their lack of dialogue by leaning into dense, information-packed art – as in the Frank books of Jim Woodring – or else searing clarity of gesture, expression and framing – in the vein of Richard McGuire’s Here or Fraction & Aja’s Hawkeye #11. Kessler takes no such pains, crafting large parts of this story from blobs, blotches, shapes and grids; images of such abstraction that there are long sequences in which it’s difficult to work out what, precisely, is being depicted.

If such an approach baffles, so too does it mesmerise, creating a wash of instinctive logic that teaches you how to read it as you go along. The result is a stunning achievement in near-subliminal storytelling. You may feel like you have to read it again to understand exactly what you’ve read - all I can say is I was more than happy to do so several times.

The trope of the long-suffering wife, putting up with her husband’s capricious genius, is an old one, but it finds new and subversive charm in My Picture Diary by Fuijiawa Maki (Drawn & Quarterly), whose pictorial memoir of family life was written in, and about, the year 1981. A writer, illustrator and actress of the avant-garde herself, Maki’s diary focuses mainly on the domestic sphere, offering short accounts of family outings, meals and appointments with her four-year-old son, Shōsuke, for whom this diary was originally intended.

From the outset, there are wry and teasing references to her garrulous and depressive husband, who broods over his lack of productivity and surreptitiously indulges his addiction to secondhand cameras. This would be celebrated mangaka Yoshiharu Tsuge, whose own work has been translated into excellent English editions by Drawn & Quarterly in recent years, the most recent of these, the superb and dreamlike collection Nejishiki, came out this summer.

Having greatly enjoyed both books this year, it is Maki’s which has stayed with me the longest, and by some distance. In keeping with its intended audience, most entries are written in the simple language of children’s picture books. Each entry begins with the date and a description of the weather – January 29th. Overcast like it might drizzle. February 26th. Clear with spring-like warmth – and there follows a short snapshot of her day, with an illustration of said events on the facing page. It’s ably translated by Ryan Holmberg (who also translated the Tsuge works referenced above), including one winning reference to “cleaning the bejesus out of the toilet”, the provenance of which I’m desperate to know more about.

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But this is not a children’s story, there is everywhere the drudgery of her endless chores, her position as a woman in society, her poverty and isolation, and her indifferent, work-shy and intermittently cruel husband, whose anxiety attacks and depressive longueurs grow more frequent as the book goes on, culminating in at least one incident of physical abuse, and eventually psychiatric referral. That these events, too, are recorded in that same simple, picture-book style, only makes them more disturbing.

Drawing on not dissimilar themes is Alison by Lizzie Stewart (Serpents Tail). The titular Alison Porter begins this fictional memoir as a teenage newly-wed in Plymouth. Isolated in her cottage on the Dorset coast, she is frustrated by the unfulfillment of her painterly ambitions, before being seduced – in every sense – by famous artist Patrick Kerr, who whisks her away from her husband to join him in the heady art scene of 1980s London.

There, she finds herself cloistered and patronised by Patrick, who alternates between roguish charm and condescending cruelty toward her work and ideas. Put up in a separate flat for Patrick’s convenience, she fears she may have become trapped in a glitzier flavour of the same isolation and obscurity she’s just escaped.

The book switches between standard comic layouts and lightly illustrated prose, without one approach ever making you miss the other, and across sublimely written, memoir-style passages, we watch as Alison prevails; navigating life, love and her burgeoning work in a sequence of milestones, some devastating, some euphoric, but all thrillingly real.

It is a compliment to Alison to say that, after reading so many autobiographical books lately, I consistently forgot I was reading fiction. This is a masterfully subtle work that eschews easy conclusions and boilerplate answers, and is all the more beautiful for it.

The Great Beyond by Léa Murawiec (Drawn & Quarterly) is that rarest of achievements for an author - a spellbindingly original debut that delivers on an annoyingly brilliant premise. Murawiec’s protagonist is Mahel Naher, a young woman in a world similar to ours except for one thing; in her reality, if not enough people know your name, you die.

Unfortunately, Mahel is studiously antisocial and, worse, shares a name with a new pop star who’s siphoning away the little name recognition Mahel. This increasing obscurity results in a near-death experience, and a quest for Mahel to become as famous as – or more so – than her celebrity namesake.

What comes next could be a rote, one-for-one satire of personal branding in a fame-addicted time, but it’s taken to thrilling heights by Murawiec’s storytelling nous and staggering visual talents. There’s barely a page of this book that doesn’t scintillate with enough imagery and ideas to fill its own fictional universe. If nothing else, The Great Beyond proves Léa Murawiec is a name worth remembering.

[ The Irish Times best graphic novels of 2022 ]