Best Books 2024: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

Final Cut

Charles Burns (Pantheon)

A teen in 1990s Seattle chases surreal visions and an elusive redheaded muse into the woods to make a movie, in this sexy and unsettling meditation on the limits of creative ambition. Burns delivers his trademark gorgeously goth, pulpy art and a mesmerizing tale of adolescent lust, longing, and madness. Readers won’t be able to look away—even as the plot turns unexpectedly more existential than horrific.

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The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War

Carl Sciacchitano (Gallery 13)

Comics artist Schiacchitano accomplishes a rare feat in this superb graphic nonfiction narrative. As he documents his father’s Vietnam War–era military service and PTSD, he employs comics’ cinematic tricks to grab readers while also grounding the narrative in dialogue and historical detail. The result is a moving and meticulously constructed examination of the legacy of violence.

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I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together: A Memoir

Maurice Vellekoop (Pantheon)

Vellekoop’s sumptuous graphic memoir is truly a life’s work. In it, the groundbreaking queer cartoonist joyfully showcases his guiding obsessions (classic Disney animation, opera, 1970s television, and fashion) in splendid drawings that trace his path from growing up in a volatile ultrareligious family to finding artistic success in 1980s and ’90s N.Y.C. and fully embracing his sexuality.

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Mothballs

Sole Otero, trans. from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics)

Unrest—of the personal, familial, and political variety—is the unifying theme of Otero’s electric English-language debut. The parallel narratives follow an unhappy Italian woman whose family flees fascism in Europe for Argentina, and her similarly distempered granddaughter, who reckons with her grandmother’s ghost and her own thwarted desires. Bursting with color and linework that playfully dances across the page, this marks Otero as a rising star of international comics.

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Victory Parade

Leela Corman (Schocken)

In a WWII story that toggles between the Brooklyn home front and the liberation of Buchenwald, Croman paints indelible characters who grapple with grief on battlefields and in the wrestling ring. Her 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.

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