Best Books 2026: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

The Abyss of Oblivion

Paco Roca and Rodrigo Terrasa, trans. from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics)

The horrors an oppressive regime keeps buried and the restorative power of reclaiming the past are explored in Eisner winner Roca’s latest masterwork, a collaboration with El Mundo reporter Terrasa. Comics journalism blends with magical realism when activist archivists dig up a mass grave of fathers, brothers, and sons assassinated by the Franco regime in one small town in Spain—and the men’s spirits emerge to narrate their desperate last days.

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Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here): Comics on Pregnancy and Parenting

Julia Wertz (Black Dog & Leventhal)

The infamously caustic New Yorker cartoonist catches herself off guard with an urgent desire to have a child, but domesticity does not come easy. Recounting how she endured a traumatic birth and navigated her child’s medical needs in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Wertz throws her fans—hard and hilariously—into the chaos that is parenting, where tender moments come dripped in the profane.

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The Case of David Zimmerman

Lucas and Arthur Harari, trans. from the French by David Homel (Arsenal Pulp)

Lost Highway glides into French neo-noir in this coolly stylized graphic novel, which follows a depressive who swaps bodies with the object of his desire. But as he becomes her, he loses track of his former self—and the reader becomes unmoored following a slippery series of shifting identities, which serve to critique contemporary class and gender divides. It’s heady sci-fi that looks super sharp on the shelf.

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Charity and Sylvia

Tillie Walden (Drawn & Quarterly)

Eisner winner Walden crafts a transcendent and transformational comics history of two ordinary women in early-19th-century Vermont who openly cohabited as a lesbian couple. Defying expectations of period norms, yet full of meticulously detailed period references, Walden’s storytelling unfolds through poignant, luminously drawn vignettes that capture the radical nature of this remarkable couple’s quotidian struggles, hopes, prayers, and longings.

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The Nightingales

Emil Wilson (Avid Reader)

Replete with ephemera taped to the pages and loose colored-pencil portraits, this elegiac graphic novel has the tactile quality of a lost diary. A teen girl in the 1980s Pacific Northwest forms an unlikely friendship with a man dying of AIDs, who helps her see a future outside her fractured family life as he reckons with his own abbreviated timeline. Wilson’s dexterous debut is the literary comics discovery of the year.

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