American and British Comics That Defined the 2010s

If you want to know why so many of the decade's comics readers were ten years old, start with Raina Telgemeier's autobiographical Smile. It began as a webcomic and arrived from Scholastic's Graphix imprint in February 2010, then refused to leave the charts: by early 2017 the paperback had spent 240 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Its story of ordinary middle-school embarrassment, told in clean, warm color, proved that comics about everyday life could outsell capes, and the middle-grade graphic novel became one of publishing's busiest shelves.

Few new superheroes of the decade traveled further than Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino teenager who took over the Spider-Man name in Marvel's Ultimate line. Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli created him, he debuted in Ultimate Fallout #4 in August 2011, and this series is where his story properly begins. Pichelli's black-and-red costume is the look that later anchored the Academy Award-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Read the opening issues for the uneasy, funny early days of a boy who never asked for the job.

Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's Batman, from September 2011 to May 2016 DC rebooted its whole line in 2011, and this was the book from that relaunch that lasted. Snyder and Capullo stayed together for almost the entire 52-issue run, which is rare in modern superhero publishing, and it shows in how coherent it feels. The opening arc reveals the Court of Owls, a secret society that has run Gotham behind Batman's back, and later arcs bring a terrifying Joker story and the Zero Year origin. Capullo's big, kinetic pages make it the most accessible mainstream Batman of the decade. Start with The Court of Owls and stop wherever you like.

Saga is the decade's defining creator-owned comic, and the reason Image Comics became the place top writers wanted to be. Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples launched it in March 2012: a space-opera family story about two soldiers from warring sides raising a baby on the run, as funny and explicit as it is sad. The first collection won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, and the series took Best Continuing Series at the Eisners in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. Start with Volume One; it is for adults, and the hiatus after Chapter 54 means its later chapters arrived in the 2020s.

Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye, launched in 2012 This is the book that taught Marvel a superhero comic could be about the hero's days off. Fraction and Aja give Clint Barton an apartment building to defend from a gang of tracksuited crooks, and Aja's flat color, tight grids and diagram-like pages were imitated for years afterwards. Hawkeye #11, told from the point of view of Clint's dog, won the 2014 Eisner for Best Single Issue, and Aja took Best Cover Artist that year. You need no Avengers knowledge at all: start with the first collection, My Life as a Weapon.

Chris Ware's Building Stories is a box rather than a book: fourteen printed pieces, from cloth-bound hardcovers to newspapers, broadsheets and flip books, that you can read in any order. It took a decade to finish and came out from Pantheon in 2012, taking four Eisners the following year, including Best Graphic Album: New. The lives inside one Chicago building are small and often lonely, so pick it for the experience of piecing a life together yourself, not for momentum. It set a high-water mark for what a graphic novel could be as an object.

The civil rights movement as told by one of the people who marched in it. John Lewis wrote this memoir trilogy with Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell drew and lettered it, from Book One in 2013 to Book Three in 2016. Powell's lettering does real work, swelling and shrinking with the noise of sit-ins and beatings. Book Three won the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the first graphic novel ever to win a National Book Award, which changed where comics could be taken seriously. Read all three volumes in order; they work as one book.

A sex comedy that turned out to be one of the decade's kindest books about intimacy. Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's Image series, launched in September 2013, follows a librarian and an actor who discover they freeze time when they climax, and decide to rob his bank to save her library. Time named it the top comic of 2013 and it won the 2014 Eisner for Best New Series. Zdarsky's background gags reward a second read, and the bluntness is the point, so this is strictly for adults. The first collection is the best place to decide whether it is for you.

Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, from 2014 Kamala Khan, a teenage Pakistani American from Jersey City, was the first Muslim character to headline a Marvel comic, and her series proved a new hero could build a real readership from scratch. Wilson writes family, faith and fan fiction with a light touch, and Alphona fills the margins with jokes. The first collection, No Normal, won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story and made The New York Times bestseller list. It is the easiest modern Marvel book to give a teenager, and adults who loved Spider-Man at fifteen will recognize it at once.

Lumberjanes is where the decade's all-ages boom found its friendship-first heart. Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, ND Stevenson and Gus Allen sent a group of girls to a summer scout camp full of monsters and mysteries, and the 2014 launch from Boom! Studios' Boom Box imprint won the 2015 Eisners for Best New Series and Best Publication for Teens. It ran for six years and 75 issues. The early collections are the sharpest; hand them to anyone from ten upward who likes cartoons with a big heart and a strange forest behind them.

The British entry that looked most like the decade itself. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, with colorist Matt Wilson, imagine twelve young people who discover they are reincarnated gods, worshipped like pop idols, with the catch that they will all be dead within two years. It ran at Image from June 2014 to September 2019, and McKelvie's clean fashion-plate figures under Wilson's neon palette gave it the most instantly recognizable look on the stands. Read it for the arguments about fame, fandom and who gets to make art; the mystery plotting gets dense later, so keep the collections in order.

Proof that a comic about three friends getting through university could beat every superhero book to the Eisner for Best Continuing Series. John Allison's Giant Days, drawn for most of its run by Max Sarin, is set at the University of Sheffield and ran at Boom! Studios from 2015 to 2019. In 2019 it won that prize and Best Humor Publication too. The jokes come fast and the British specifics, from student housing to bad nights out, are spot on. Start at the beginning; the friendships deepen as the years pass, and each collection works as a term of its own.

Before Stranger Things nostalgia took over everything, Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang had four twelve-year-old newspaper girls out on their rounds in suburban Cleveland the morning after Halloween 1988, when time travel crashes the neighborhood. Matt Wilson's sunset colors earned him Eisners for Best Colorist in 2017 and 2019, and the 2016 Eisner for Best New Series went to this book. It ran for 30 issues from 2015 to 2019, so it is a complete, bingeable story. Pick it for the meeting between kids and the adults they grow into; skip the one-season 2022 television version and read this.

Tom King's arrival as a major superhero writer, and the coldest suburban horror Marvel has published. The Vision builds himself a synthetic wife and children and moves them to the suburbs, and it goes as well as you would fear. Gabriel Hernandez Walta's quiet, plain-faced art and Jordie Bellaire's muted color make every neighborly scene feel wrong. The twelve issues won the 2017 Eisner for Best Limited Series, and Kevin Feige has said its covers of the Vision at a white-picketed front door helped shape WandaVision. The whole run fits in one complete collection, with no homework.

The most gorgeous book of the decade, and the one that made epic fantasy a serious comics genre again. Marjorie Liu writes and Sana Takeda paints this Image series, which began in November 2015 in a matriarchal world inspired by early 20th-century Asia, where a teenage girl shares a psychic link with a powerful monster. Takeda's ornate, gilded pages are worth the price alone. It took the 2018 Eisner for Best Continuing Series and has won the Hugo for Best Graphic Story more than once. The worldbuilding asks for patience in the first volume, and the violence is graphic, so it suits adult fantasy readers who like to work for a map.

The decade's best argument that superhero nostalgia could be sad rather than smug. Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston strand a group of old-fashioned heroes on a farm outside Rockwood, a small town they cannot leave after saving their city from the Anti-God, and let them get on each other's nerves. Dark Horse launched it in July 2016 and it won the 2017 Eisner for Best New Series, then grew into a whole shared universe of spin-offs. Ormston's scratchy rural pages are the opposite of a glossy Marvel book. Read the first two collections; the spin-offs are optional.

Volume One, published in February 2017 Emil Ferris's debut looks like nothing else on the shelf: a girl's diary on lined spiral-notebook pages, drawn mainly in Bic ballpoint pen, crammed with cross-hatched monsters, pulp-magazine covers and copies of paintings. It arrived from Fantagraphics on Valentine's Day 2017 and won the 2018 Eisner for Best Graphic Album–New, among others. It changed what a debut graphic novel could look like and made a ballpoint pen seem like a serious tool. The story stops on a cliffhanger, so know that the second volume did not arrive until May 2024.

Tom King and Mitch Gerads took one of Jack Kirby's strangest creations, the escape artist Scott Free, and made a twelve-issue DC series about depression, marriage and new fatherhood, published from 2017 to 2018. Gerads holds almost every page to a rigid nine-panel grid, so the rare break lands like a shock. It won the 2019 Eisner for Best Limited Series. You do not need to know Kirby's New Gods; this is the decade's clearest case for the superhero comic as literary fiction, and it reads well in one sitting. The opening pages deal with a suicide attempt, so go in prepared.

The graphic novel that understood the late 2010s internet best, and the first ever longlisted for the Booker Prize. Nick Drnaso's Sabrina, published by Drawn & Quarterly in May 2018, begins when a young woman goes missing in Chicago and a video of her killing is sent to news outlets, then follows the people left behind as conspiracy theorists call it a hoax. Drnaso's flat, affectless figures and small panels keep the horror at a numbing distance, which is exactly the point. It is bleak and slow, and it has stayed with readers precisely because nothing in it is sensational.

Al Ewing and Joe Bennett turned the Hulk back into a horror comic, and it became the late-decade superhero book everyone argued about. Launched in June 2018, it reimagines the Hulk as something that cannot stay dead, a patient, clever presence that takes over Bruce Banner after dark, and Bennett's body horror is genuinely unsettling for a mainstream Marvel title. It ran for 50 issues to October 2021 and earned three Eisner nominations for Best Continuing Series. Start with the first collection; it rewards Hulk newcomers and long-time readers alike, though the gore is not for everyone.

Where Smile opened the decade, Jerry Craft's New Kid closed it by taking the middle-grade graphic novel all the way to children's literature's top prize. Published by HarperCollins in February 2019, it follows Jordan Banks, a twelve-year-old Black boy who loves drawing cartoons, through the culture shock of a private school he never wanted to attend. In 2020 it became the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal, and it took the Coretta Scott King Award too. The jokes about clueless teachers land for adults as well, and Jordan's own sketchbook pages give it a second visual voice.

The decade's last big swing, and the most exciting the X-Men had been in years. Jonathan Hickman wrote two interlocking six-issue miniseries, House of X drawn by Pepe Larraz and Powers of X drawn by R. B. Silva, from July to October 2019. Charles Xavier declares a sovereign mutant nation on the living island of Krakoa, and the dense charts and text pages between scenes make the whole thing feel like a political thriller. Marvel canceled every ongoing X-Men title to relaunch the line from it. Read the two series together, interleaved in release order, and expect homework if you have never read an X-Men comic.