2018 was a banner year for comics. Manga ranged from blockbuster action franchises, like Kohei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia, to mournful reflections on gender non-conformity, like Riyoko Ikeda’s Claudine. Kids gobbled up the latest installments of Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man, Svetlana Chmakova’s Berrybrook Middle School, and Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet. The garden of indie comics blossomed with creators new and old who experimented with genre, form, and style.

As a retailer in her third year of funnybook slinging, I serviced a public both conversant and curious, familiar with old standbys like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and eager to tackle what’s new from Ngozi Ukazu. If they made one thing clear, it is this: comics has a canon, and it’s growing all the time. 2018 exemplified that more than ever, and paring its plethora down to 10 representatives was no mean feat. But for old-timers, neophytes, and casual flippers alike, I present it to you: 10 sterling stand-outs in a year chockfull of them. Enjoy them, share them, and get ready for more.

Runaways by Rainbow Rowell and Kris Anka

Rainbow Rowell and Kris Anka had an enormous pair of Sharpie-scribbled Converse to step into with their reboot of Runaways, the fan-favorite 2000s comic about a crew of superpowered teens with supervillain parents. Not only was the original series by Brian K. Vaughan a beloved entry point into cape comics, but it’s been long enough since its publication to acquire the faint glow of nostalgia.

Happily, Rowell and Anka aren’t interested in retreading old ground. Nowadays, Nico can’t stop thinking about Karolina. Gert is alive but stuck as a teenager among young adults. Molly is suddenly aware of how much less charming the world finds young women than apple-cheeked girls. Rowell was well-established as a YA author before she made her way to comics, and her character voices are warm, troubled, and yearning, and Anka is as comfortable depicting couture as heartbroken tears. This isn’t just a fantastic new run for steadfast fans. It’s a coming-of-age journey all its own.

Homunculus by Joe Sparrow

Daisy likes the color blue. Daisy’s favorite Beatles’ song is “Eleanor Rigby.” Daisy is a fractal membrane of quantum particles encased in a black metal shell. And Daisy, over the course of pre- and post-apocalyptic tale, is a survivor. Homunculus is about artificial intelligence, to be sure: how cognition takes form, how it grows, and how it might be used. But it is, above all, a story about what matters and what endures. We rarely see Daisy; Sparrow keeps each and every panel seen through her “eyes,” and there are rarely mirrors. But we see the world she sees and how it changes. And in that way, we see ourselves as well.

I Am Young by M. Dean

M. Dean has long been one of the brightest stars in the comics firmament; her securing of the inaugural Creators for Creators grant that funded this book was the most delightful non-surprise of 2017. But oh, what a glittering assemblage the result is: a collection of short stories, set between the 1950s and the 1990s, each centering on young people and the culture that makes them. Her panel layouts are deliriously inventive. Her coloring evokes the drab green of 1970s tile and the joyous California sunset with equal intensity. And her characters — with us for only a few pages, but as lasting in impression as those from a doorstop novel — catapult this book into greatness.

There are Miriam and George, who meet after a Beatles concert and spend the next few decades chasing that high. There is Roberta, who marries a man bound for Vietnam and is absolutely certain that doing so makes her far wiser than her 16 years. There is Kennedy, who is pretty sure she can write a brilliant novel until she actually tries. I Am Young is Karen Carpenter’s voice, Tom Jones’s swagger, and Chuck Berry’s howl. But above all, it is M. Dean.

Satoko and Nada by Yupechika

Satoko is Japanese, Nada is Saudi Arabian, and together, they’re ready to take on an American university. Sushi parties are held. Shady guys are avoided. Longings for homeland cuisine are satisfied. Above all, a friendship blooms and is captured with the kind of warmth and deprecation that makes the slice-of-life genre sing: our eponymous heroines’ joy in a finding a movie they’d like to see already in stock at a Red Box is as thrilling as any action climax. Yupechika’s gift for caricature brings to mind Kate Beaton; Satoko’s deadpan stare alone is worth the cover price. Satoko and Nada are a comedy duo for the ages and a friendship the comic-reading audience will, hopefully, be able to enjoy for years to come.

Girl Town by Carolyn Nowak

Carolyn Nowak’s work is magical in the tradition of Allende, Borges, and Okazaki, the kind of magic that examines the mundane through its embellishment. Tulips that taste like hot dogs, podcasts for movies no one’s ever seen to completion, and a mall where you can pay a tiger to lick your hair into an updo are among Nowak’s flights of fancy. The more time you spend in Girl Town, the more they resonate. Wouldn’t you like a significant other you never have to worry about trusting? Don’t you sometimes long for absolution that the world will never give you? You don’t finish the stories collected here so much as emerge from them: wistful, yearning, and as from all the best dreams, changed.

Beneath the Dead Oak Tree by Emily Carroll

A young maiden is romanced, misled, and narrowly escapes a dreadful fate — or does she? Emily Carroll’s journeys into the darkest part of the human heart are never straightforward, but this latest sojourn is particularly twisted. Told in rhyming verse, Carroll’s trademark use of deep reds and blue give the proceedings an eerie whimsy, and her layouts — always brilliant — furl and explode across the page. The horror that happens beneath the dead oak tree is as bloody and deranged as you might imagine, yet it is the manner in which such acts pervert the soul that Carroll explores, to a truly harrowing effect.

Street Angel Goes to Juvie by Brian Maruca and Jim Rugg

I first encountered Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s tenacious heroine in 2005. More than a decade later, she has not just changed with the times; she’s triumphed. In this installment, the skateboarding vigilante is ecstatic to spend time in juvie (under the truly inspired pseudonym “Shiraz Thunderbird”) with its movie nights, regular meals, and mandated therapy. The outside world cannot be avoided, but it might just be outsmarted. Rugg and Maruca have perfected the particular blend of sorrow and joy that makes the Street Angel series so special. Jesse spends as much time interfacing with a doofy wannabe-superhero as she does tearing up at a screening of Harriet the Spy. Street Angel remains, as it has for my entire adult life, one of the cleverest, funniest, and most heartfelt comics around.

Emma G. Wildford by Zidrou and Edith

Emma’s fiancé, Roald, has disappeared on an expedition to the remote northern reaches of Norway. No matter — she is certain that, as a modern woman of the 1920s, she can journey up there herself and rescue him from a frosty fate. This is a story, as you might imagine, about the can-do spirit that cannot be tamed, but it is also about the crushing injustice of womanhood and the bargains made in the face of it. In the hands of lesser creators, Emma might have been a heroine laid low by her own Strong Female Charactership. Luckily, Zirou and Edith are committed to Emma’s humanity, and that of the world she inhabits. The result is a stark and lovely meditation on the lengths and limits of love.

Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal

Luminaries across time and space have explored the concept of a world without men: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man, and the one and only Wonder Woman are but a sampling. Within a few installments of this comic, initially chronicled on Instagram, Dhaliwal proves she isn’t just part of that group; she is among its highest ranks.

Woman World — or as some members of the community call it, Gal Globe, Queens’ Quay, and/or Female Federation — is a pretty funny place: children like Emiko treat Blockbuster ruins like sacred shrines, baseball becomes a game involving kissing one’s grandma, and high heels are theorized to be some sort of esoteric tool. But it’s also a place where girls grow into adulthood, women fall in love, and the community must band together in the face of an opaque future. The women of Woman World (aka Dame District, Lady Land, etc) are, as Dhaliwal notes in an afterword, “learning to talk again because they’re not being interrupted,” and the results are utterly joyous.

John, Dear by Laura Lannes

This is a story about an incredible man and, the woman herself informs us, his ordinary lover. This is a story about a woman discovering holes in her skin that house small, white worms. This is, above all, a story about darkness. It is figurative, in that it is about the mortification of intimate relationships and the implacable advance of control one person can exert over another. But it is literal as well, and Lannes wields it like no one else in comics. Certain pages are so deeply inked that faces vanish and reappear depending upon the lighting one reads them in. Shadows mist along the edges until they swell into the abyssal plains. Lannes’ lettering — small, white, regular — flickers across the churning blackness like candles in the wind. This is, in every respect, a descent: into abuse, into erasure, and into the cavernous possibilities of sequential art.

Correction December 13th, 2:20PM ET: This story initially used a fan-translated image of Satoko and Nada. It has been replaced by an official image from the publisher.

2017 was a good year for comics. Creators young and old sent green shoots up through desiccated genres — everything from memoir to textbook to all-ages fantasy burst with talent this year. Kids continued to storm bookstores, libraries, and specialty comic shops for gems like Ru Xu’s NewsPrints and Victoria Jamieson’s All’s Faire in Middle School. Superhero aficionados enjoyed thoughtful beat-em-ups courtesy of Christopher Priest and Carlo Pagulayan’s Deathstroke. Nonfiction readers were stirred by Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do and Roz Chast’s Going Into Town.

Winnowing down this embarrassment of riches is no small feat — but the people demand their end-of-the-year lists, and I am here to provide. The following is one comic creator, critic, and retailer’s idea of what constitutes the best comics of 2017. That it was such a difficult task is a testimony to the talent currently deluging the industry, and a tantalizing look at what’s coming next.

Supergirl: Being Super by Mariko Tamaki and Joëlle Jones

Writer Mariko Tamaki and artist Joëlle Jones take on the Maid of Might with a sensitivity and wryness that makes their take on her origin story one of the strongest entries in the character’s history. This is a book that glories in quotidian detail — one of the most memorable sequences is of Kara and a friend reminiscing over diner food — because, crucially, this is a book that understands how vivid that sort of minutiae is to a teenager. Though the chasm between Kara’s normal life and her not-so-normal powers yawns ever wider over the course of four issues, Tamaki and Jones never forget that she is still a kid with chores, school, and friends to text. It is, to risk a cheesy joke, a wonderfully down-to-earth tale of the girl inside the super.

What is Left by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

This comic opens with a fanciful conceit: the sole survivor of a spaceship explosion has become trapped, like an insect in amber, within physical globules of memory. As she explores the life of a woman she never knew, our protagonist reckons with the life she left behind, the life she finds herself trespassing in, and the death that certainly awaits her as her body floats through space. Valero-O’Connell’s lines are sinuous: hair is lustrous, vegetation snakes upward, and even the explosion of memories is rendered as a gorgeous flood of mauve gel. Alienation is terrifying and complete in these pages — but also, somehow, gorgeous.

Cucumber Quest by Gigi D.G.

Gigi D.G.’s luminous, all-ages adventure has been an online hit for years now, but in 2017, its first volume was released in print giving a whole new crop of young readers a chance to view the world of Dreamside and its cast of rabbit-eared heroes, villains, and all those who lie between. It is that last group that elevates this story of a brother and sister facing down an ancient evil — that wide swath of henchmen, princesses, knights, and even the ancient evil himself that are not all that they appear. Paired with D.G.’s luxurious visuals, including some of the deftest and most inventive coloring and lettering in modern comics, Cucumber Quest continues to fire on all cylinders for all possible readers.

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi

Few might have predicted that Nagata Kabi’s autobiographical tale of 28-year-old virginity would become the hit manga of the summer. But that’s just the thing: nothing about My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is predictable. It is funny, yes, as the cheeky title implies; Nagata’s face, flushing comically as she exclaims that she is “saving this!” while looking at a sexy pin-up is one of the funniest moments from a comic this year. But beneath the sillier experiences of sexual awakening lie Nagata’s wrenching journey from depressed shut-in to… slightly less depressed shut-in. Though this is, ultimately, an uplifting tale, its triumphs are hard-won, and never saccharine. Nagata has something of an eye for dark details; the blood speckling the dry blocks of noodles she wolfs frantically down is one of the most memorable images of the book. In its honesty and specificity, Nagata creates, somehow, a universal story: though we may not all be lesbians with tendencies towards disordered eating, we have all felt lonely and we have all longed for change.

Mirror Mirror II edited by Sean T. Collins and Julia Gfrörer

Darkness is as intimate as a caress and as distant as history in this chilling anthology of horror comics. New and old ground alike are explored to tremendous effect; some work, like Gfrörer’s inventory of historic misery, does both. So masterfully does she detail the malignancy of the human soul so masterfully through her dry recitations that I was certain no other creator could match her. But Mirror Mirror II proved me wrong — again and again and again. Though every reader’s experience of this book will differ, there is no installment I could single out as weak. This collection doesn’t just feel haunting; it feels corrosive.

You & a Bike & a Road by Eleanor Davis

Eleanor Davis has been one of modern comics’ most exciting talents for a while now —but this travelogue, created as she crossed the southern half of the US on her bike, cements her as a master of the form. There is a breathless energy to her work, from the simple scribble of an approaching horizon to the hunch of her own back as she heads into a stiff wind. It is, from its thrilling high points to its devastating observations of border-town racism, an exhilarating chronicle of achievement, solitude, and sacrifice.

Diana’s Electric Tongue by Carolyn Nowak

It is tempting to describe Carolyn Nowak’s work as whimsical. Her characters, and the world they inhabit, are round-edged to the point of gelatinousness, colorful, and, — in the case of this short exploration of loneliness and love — in the habit of purchasing sex robots. But Diana, attempting to recover from a brutal break-up and the motorcycle accident that severed her tongue, can only obscure the crater at the center of her life with her synthetic boyfriend for so long. By the final panel, Nowak’s flights of fancy have given way to a lingering gloom, and it is this contrast that makes her one of comics’ most exciting new creators.

The Girl From the Other Side: Siúil, A Rún by Nagabe

A young girl named Shiva and her teacher, a demon-headed “outsider,” live peacefully together, gathering firewood and making daisy chains. But sometimes, they happen upon corpses in the woods. The villages that surround them are abandoned. And though Shiva insists she has family that will retrieve her some day, weeks go by without word. Nagabe’s fantasyland is as splendid as it is eerie — even as Shiva naps in forest glades, snacks on buns and fried eggs, and crowns Teacher’s horns with flowers, negative space and inky darkness threaten to swallow her. Tension is as lingered upon as beauty; the head of an arrow poised to strike is as prominent as a cozy cottage. Like all great fairy tales, this is a story of love and wonder… and the darkness that lies beneath.

Spinning by Tillie Walden 

Expectations were high for Walden’s memoir, which encompasses figure skating, coming out of the closet, the discovery of artistic passion, and more. Somehow, she not only met those expectations — she exceeded them. Spinning is an absolute thunderbolt of talent, from Walden’s elegant line work to her innovative panel layouts. A sequence in which she drives to practice in the wee hours of the morning, comprised of panels of her face and the road, is one of the most truly powerful moments of fiction I experienced this year. This isn’t just a tremendous work of art unto itself — it is a herald of wonderful work to come.

The Girl Who Flew Away by M. Dean

The year is 1976, and Greer Johnson has been sent to Key West by the boss who impregnated her. Lonely, bored, and threatened by the future, she begins to dream about Eugenie, a wealthy young girl living 50 years prior. Dean won the inaugural Creators for Creators grant, and it’s not hard to see why: her work is impeccable on every level. Visually, her inky lines and warm colors evoke the heat and torpidity of Greer’s tropical pregnancy in all its beauty and frustration. Thematically, she plumbs the depths of everything from the uncertainty of racial passing to the paranoia of the 1970s political landscape. It is, in short, a tremendously complete work — and it isn’t even finished yet.

The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs by Celine Loup

Horror starts at home in Celine Loup’s exploration of postpartum desolation. Emma has found a man to love, a gorgeous house, and finally the pièce de résistance: a beautiful baby girl. But that beautiful baby girl won’t strop screaming. The house seems more and more full of shadows by the hour. And the man she loves has changed, somehow, ever since the day he came down the attic stairs. Loup’s visuals are deeply sensual: the countryside teems with life, chair upholstery is plump and shiny, and the baby’s screams tear across the page in jagged, dry-edged black. At some point, the line between beauty and brutality becomes blurred by this profusion of detail, and the reader becomes as overwhelmed as Emma is, cowering on the floor with her baby in her arms. This is horror of the most visceral sort: of birth, of death, of hearth and home. Emma’s descent into darkness is complete, and will linger long after the final page is turned.