Licensed Comics That Are Actually Good

The book that convinces people a robot comic can make them cry. James Roberts sends Rodimus and a shipful of misfit Autobots across space hunting the legendary Knights of Cybertron, then spends much of its 57 issues on the crew rather than the quest: their friendships, their regrets and what peacetime does to soldiers. Alex Milne draws dozens of characters you learn to tell apart by posture alone. It is the funniest entry here and, issue for issue, the most moving. It does pick up from IDW's earlier continuity, but the opening arc explains what matters, and the cast is new to most readers anyway. Start at issue #1, and if you get hooked, its sequel Lost Light finishes the story.

If More Than Meets the Eye is the long novel, this is the short, brutal war film that came first. Nick Roche and James Roberts send the Autobot commando squad known as the Wreckers into a prison held by a rogue Decepticon, and not everyone comes back. Five issues, one self-contained mission and a real sense that nobody is safe. It works as a test case for skeptics: it reads in an evening, the main cast is mostly obscure even to fans, and it treats the war as something that costs lives rather than a playground fight. Roche's art is expressive enough to make faceplates feel like faces. A good place to start if you want to know whether Transformers comics are for you before committing to a longer run.

Daniel Warren Johnson's run, issues #1 to #24 The easiest Transformers comic to hand someone who has never cared about Transformers. Johnson treats the robots' war reaching Earth like a monster movie, with ordinary people caught underfoot, and draws the first six issues himself in a scratchy, kinetic style that makes every punch land. It needs no prior continuity at all, because it launched the whole Energon Universe from scratch. The comics world noticed: it won the 2024 Eisner for Best Continuing Series, and Johnson took Best Writer/Artist the same night. His writing ends at issue #24, when Robert Kirkman takes over, so those two dozen issues read as one complete run.

Larry Hama's run at Marvel A comic built to sell action figures that its writer refused to treat as disposable. Hama wrote nearly all of Marvel's 155 issues, then returned when IDW revived the book in 2010, and Image picked it up after #300 with the original numbering intact. What sets it apart is how seriously it takes soldiering as a job, and how much inner life Hama gives characters who began as plastic. The skeptic's sampler is issue #21 from 1984, "Silent Interlude": a Snake Eyes mission told with no dialogue at all, which also introduces Storm Shadow. The early issues are uneven, so dip in through a best-of collection before tackling the run from the start.

The cartoon-era Turtles are fun; this version is a proper saga. Co-creator Kevin Eastman and Tom Waltz rebuilt the mythology from the ground up in 2011, pulling in pieces from every earlier version, and the series ran 150 issues before ending in 2024. Splinter, the Foot and Shredder get motives and history, and the brothers argue like actual siblings. No homework needed: it builds its own origin, recasting the brothers and Splinter as a family reborn from feudal Japan, so a newcomer starts level with a lifelong fan. The pace is slow at first and the art changes hands often, but following one continuity for over a decade is a rare payoff in licensed comics. Start with Change Is Constant, which collects the first four issues.

The one TMNT book to hand a skeptic who wants a single, finished story. In a battle-ravaged future New York, the last surviving brother sets out alone to avenge his family, and black-and-white flashbacks fill in the losses that led him there. It grew from a lost outline by co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, scripted with longtime series writer Tom Waltz and drawn by Eastman with Esau and Isaac Escorza, and it goes darker than any cartoon or earlier comic dared: this is a world where the Turtles lost. Knowing the four brothers and Splinter is enough. The collected hardcover of all five issues reached the New York Times bestseller list, and it is the way to read it.

The rare licensed comic that is the official continuation rather than a side story. Joss Whedon picked up after the TV show ended in 2003 and used the page to do what a network budget never allowed, starting with Buffy leading an army of Slayers. It won the 2008 Eisner for Best New Series, credited to Whedon and artist Georges Jeanty. Be honest with yourself about this one. It is the entry here that most needs the source, because it leans on seven seasons of relationships and assumes you know them. For a fan who drifted away, though, it is a genuine eighth season over 40 issues, with Whedon's ear for banter intact. Later arcs get sprawling; the opening arc is the strongest way in.

Four issues that get closer to the dread of the first Alien film than most of the sequels did. James Stokoe wrote and drew it alone, which shows: every pipe, rivet and frosted window of the space station Sphacteria is rendered in obsessive detail, so the station itself feels like a character closing in on its crew. The story cuts between an engineer named Wascylewski stranded alone in the present and the past events that left him there, and the structure turns a familiar monster into a slow-burn puzzle. You need nothing beyond knowing what a xenomorph is. The fourth issue's timeline is the hardest to follow, so read it in one sitting, ideally in the collected hardcover.

A Godzilla story with a human lead worth caring about. James Stokoe, writing and drawing again, follows Lieutenant Ota Murakami, a young Japanese tank officer, from Godzilla's first Tokyo landfall in 1954 through five decades of encounters, so each issue is a different era and a different brawl, while the real subject is one man's lifelong obsession. The kaiju fights are spectacular, drawn with the same dense, neon-bright detail Stokoe later brought to Aliens, but what makes it more than a smash-fest is that the destruction has a cost and a point of view. No knowledge of the films is needed. It is five issues long, so the collected edition is the way to read it.

Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's early issues, from 1970 Proof that a licensed comic can outclass the house characters around it. Marvel licensed Robert E. Howard's barbarian in 1970, and Roy Thomas scripted the first 115 issues, adapting many of Howard's own stories. Most of the first 24 issues are drawn by a young Barry Windsor-Smith, whose art grows from Kirby-style brawling into ornate, almost Pre-Raphaelite fantasy in front of your eyes. You need no knowledge of Howard or the Schwarzenegger films; each tale mostly stands alone. Issue #23 brings in Red Sonja, and #24 won a Shazam Award for best dramatic story. The Windsor-Smith issues are the sampler; if they land, John Buscema's long stretch that follows is the meat of the run.

Kyle Higgins's run at Boom! Studios, through Shattered Grid The show was rubber suits and stock footage; Kyle Higgins's comic asks what it would actually do to five teenagers to fight a war on weekends. It gives Tommy Oliver, the former villain who joins the team as the Green Ranger, real guilt and doubt, which makes the twist that follows hit hard. That twist is Lord Drakkon, an evil Tommy from another universe who made a different choice at the end of the Green Ranger saga. His arrival builds to the Shattered Grid crossover in 2018, the run's high point. You only need the broad outline of the original show, which the comic sketches in. Start at issue #1 and read through Shattered Grid for a complete story.

The answer to "what happened after the finale?" that fans actually accept as canon. Gene Luen Yang, already a celebrated graphic novelist, wrote it in collaboration with the show's creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, and the art team Gurihiru matches the animation so closely it reads like lost episodes. What lifts it above a nostalgia trip is its subject: Aang and the new Fire Lord Zuko deciding what to do with Fire Nation families settled for generations in occupied land, a knotty postwar question with no clean answer. You need to have watched the series, so this is for fans and families rather than newcomers. It comes in three parts, or as one omnibus, and Part 2 reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Ryan North's run, with Shelli Paroline and Braden Lamb A cartoon tie-in aimed at kids that grown-up comics readers can happily keep for themselves. Ryan North, of the webcomic Dinosaur Comics, writes Finn and Jake with the show's anything-goes logic and adds the kind of wordplay and page-turn gags that only work on paper. Shelli Paroline and Braden Lamb draw it with clean, bouncy energy. It won the Eisner for Best Publication for Kids (Ages 8-12), and it is one of the few entries here that works equally well read aloud to a child or alone. Knowing the show helps with the side characters, but the stories are self-contained romps. Start with the first collection.

The best argument that a film franchise's comic can go somewhere the films cannot. Warren Ellis skips the movie Bond entirely and goes back to Ian Fleming's colder, more ordinary man, then drops him into a modern case: back from Helsinki, he inherits a dead 00 agent's workload and is sent to Berlin after a drug-trafficking ring. Jason Masters draws it lean and stark, and the opening chase plays out almost without a word. Anyone expecting wisecracks and innuendo will find a grimmer Bond, but as a tight six-issue thriller it needs no Bond knowledge beyond the name, which makes it a smart gift for a spy-novel reader who would never pick up a comic.