The best graphic novels of 2019 so far

After the banner year that was 2018, comics haven’t slowed down their head-spinning volley of quality in 2019. Here is a lesser spotted volume of four-colour treats, a handful of 2019’s best so far.

For a late summer chill

ICE CREAM MAN (Image)
Writer W Maxwell Prince
Artists Martin Morazzo, Chris O'Halloran
Nothing says summer like the jaunty, discordant trill of an ice cream van rolling through your neighbourhood. That is unless said dairy-dispenser is hiding more in his van than frozen fancies. Alas, in W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo's Ice Cream Man, unlicensed bell chime renditions of pop songs aren't the only thing being butchered. This deliciously knotty horror anthology – the third volume of which, Hopscotch Melange, was released last month – sports that same suspenseful plotting and well-drawn character angst familiar to fans of horror comics like Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez' Locke & Key or Gail Simone and John Davis-Hunt's Clean Room. Spooky, funny and sometimes genuinely nasty, Ice Cream Man is as addictive as a double '99, and more chilling than a post-lolly brain freeze.

For never bettered neo noir

CRIMINAL (Image)
Writer Ed Brubaker
Artists Sean Phillips, Jacob Phillips
Words like 'taut' and 'gripping' are so often used in relation to crime fiction, they might seem like off-the-peg clichés. Then you read a series like Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's Criminal, which wrings suspense, intrigue and charm from its tighter-than-tight storytelling, and you realise why they became go-to terms in the first place. The pair's original Criminal series is one of the most fondly loved series in comics, and this year they've returned with a reboot in all-new monthly format. The joy of good crime fiction is the chance to feel the dirt under your fingernails, to sneak a furtive peek at the high drama of low lives, and slum it with the small time crooks on their way to one big score. These stories are so adept at making you feel like you've been inducted into the criminal fraternity, by each issue's end, you'll have assembled a mental list of local toughs – four guys tops, no guns, and with a decent wheelman out front – so you can heist the next edition from Image HQ yourself.

For a new look at an old favourite

SPIDER-MAN LIFE STORY (Marvel)
Writer Chip Zdarsky
Artists Mark Bagley, John Dell

Poem of the week: Murmuration

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Empire of Democracy: A ‘crucial’ history of the recent past

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The Adversary (2000) by Emmanuel Carrère: A monstrous vanity

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Spider-man has rarely been so central to the comics universe, but Chip Zdarsky’s six-part Spider-Man Life Story (the sixth of which drops this month) finds a novel way to approach Marvel’s masthead mascot. Life Story tracks Peter Parker’s arc through his Spider-Man career in real-time, beginning as a fresh-faced teen in 1962, advancing both him and us one decade per issue, all the way to the present day. What could be a cheap trick delivers unexpectedly big payoffs, allowing the character to age and change through history, rather than as the snappy, eternal twentysomething his stories usually depict. Life Story is also a love letter to the comics styles and sagas of each decade, offering playful – and occasionally pointed – comment on the tangled web of plotlines that half a century of lore has woven around him. With half a dozen ongoing titles and collections, and no less than four Spiderman-starring movies in the past 18 months, you’d be forgiven for wondering: “just how many Spidey stories do we need?”. If they’re as good as this, the answer is, simply, “as many as we can get”.

For the starry-eyed independent

I MOVED TO LOS ANGELES TO WORK IN ANIMATION (Boom Box!)
Writer and artist Natalie Nourigat

Part road trip, part diary and part jobseeker’s journal of progress, the title of Natalie Nourigats’ I Moved To Los Angeles To Work In Animation tells you all you need to know about the premise. As a young artist in Portland, Nourigat schlepped to LA to pursue an impossible dream of working in the industry she loved, a journey she charts, both literally and figuratively, in this charming and incisive graphic novel. Her clean, cartoony style perfectly suits the playful tone, and beautifully underscores her travelogue’s more poignant moments. Even if you don’t know a pixel from a pencil, the struggle to be creative in a world of rising rents and plummeting pay, and the delight to be taken in work you love, is universal. You needn’t have to have trekked across country to enjoy this tale of the art, craft and grind of animation. You just need to know what it’s like to want something enough to move heaven and earth, and hope that it wants you back.

For the frustrated film fan

ALIEN 3: THE  UNPRODUCED SCREENPLAY (Dark Horse)
Writer William Gibson (adapted by Johnnie Christmas)
Artist Johnnie Christmas, Tamra Bonvillain

Dark Horse’s Alien comics have a surprisingly long and complex history, including recent moments of great quality, like James Stokoe’s 2017 mini-series Alien: Dead Orbit. This year they’ve done something a little different; giving William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for Alien 3 the full graphical treatment. Gibson – most famous for coining the term “cyberspace” in his cult novel Neuromancer – had written a script for the sequel that was jettisoned in favour of David Fincher’s entirely different take. Though something of a cult classic now, Fincher’s eventual film was enough of a flop that the two-time Oscar nominee has literally scrubbed it from his CV, whereas the reputation of Gibson’s version has only grown by comparison. Perennially cited as “one of the greatest films never made”, Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain’s spirited adaptation, now released in hardback, gives some sense of just how this reputation came to be. Without getting into spoiler territory, it kicks off precisely where James Cameron’s Aliens left off, offering the tension and suspense of the original movies, with more than a dash of the technofuturism that made Gibson’s name, and maybe something of the gonzo horror of John Carpenter’s The Thing thrown in. It’s unlikely that this will achieve the rare movie-to-comic-and-then-back-to-movie adaptation route that Dark Horse’s Alien v Predator series managed, so for the time being this is your best bet of seeing a lost gem of cinema get something like the airing it deserves.

For the world-building wanderer

THE WILD STORM (DC)
Writer Warren Ellis
Artist John Davis-Hunt, Steve Buccellato

The WildStorm universe began as an independent superhero cosmos that functioned outside of DC and Marvel, positing a world in which superpowered people (metahumans) are routine and exist alongside a panoply of scientific marvels that have come in their wake. Several revivals have come since DC bought the imprint in the late nineties, but few did justice to that world’s potential like Warren Ellis, who revamped the entire cast of characters in 2017. The result was The Wild Storm, a veritable conveyor belt of pulpy thrills whose 24-issue arc just finished up in July. The series’ action set-pieces and procedural elements are undeniably delicious, but the dynamics of its characters and the internal politics of its world are the real draw, not least when we meet characters from another much loved Ellis series, deep in the run. This is a comic that skewers the pomposity of the “blood, guts and guns” school of comics, while also delivering on that genre’s potential for explosive, bristling joy. The Wild Storm has its cake, then eats it, then runs out to the shop to get more.