The best comics of 2024 so far

polygon.com:

Nothing beats having a new comic book in your hot little hands and settling in for a good read. Fortunately, 2024 has delivered fantastic comics from every side of the industry — and there are lots more on the way.

But for now, these are Polygon’s best comics of the first half of 2024. Stay tuned for more!

Comics were considered eligible if they were graphic novels published for the first time in 2024 or series that were collected for the first time, or published their final collection, in 2024. Everything on this list is available in paperback or collected form for your eager hands — no worries for trade-waiters.

By Taiyo Matsumoto

I’ve never read a cartoonist that makes me feel the space between each panel as strongly as Taiyo Matsumoto. He doesn’t have to fill a page with the buzzing of cicadas or the pulse of a city’s streets for me to hear them in my ear; on a deep instinctual level he knows what two images juxtaposed together will create that ambience, and fill his pages with room tone. He is a master of quiet.

There are also few cartoonists as loud as Matsumoto. His distorted figures and grotesquely expressive close-ups are a gonzo hallmark of his work like Tekkonkinkreet or Ping Pong, which makes the still moments in those stories stand out all the more.

Yet Tokyo These Days has none of those moments of noisy bravura. It’s a more restrained, somber work, about Shiozawa, a career manga editor who surreptitiously decides to quit the business. Yet before he fully settles into retirement, he gives himself a final to-do list: to meet with several struggling cartoonists he used to work with and ask what happened to the love and passion that once lived in their stories, to see if there is any bit of romance left in the medium that wrung them all out. Burning out has never looked so beautiful. —Joshua Rivera

By Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer

Skybound Entertainment’s stealth launch of an interconnected G.I. Joe/Transformers setting was one of the best-kept