Goran Sudžuka’s clean, crisp artwork gives the violence on the page a frankness and brutality that might be lost with something a bit more stylized.
The terror that the main characters face is just as much internal as it is external, buried in secrets and monstrousness that’s only glimpsed in brutally quick moments. Garth Ennis isn’t exactly an unknown quantity as a comics writer, and the book comes with a level of gore and horror that’s right in line with his previous work. There’s a weird mystery, some FBI agents and even six issues in it’s not really clear what’s going on-but it’s hard to look away. In the glib shorthand that pop-culture fans and aficionados use to convey tone and subject as quickly as possible, A Walk Through Hell reads like the lovechild of The X-Files and Twin Peaks with some Hannibal thrown in for color and viscera. Steve FoxeĪ Walk Through Hell Cover Art by Goran Sudžuka 9. Jump scares may feel cheap on film, but they’re darn hard to pull off-and perhaps even more unsettling-in comics. Nakayama also manages to build to jump scare after jump scare, especially if you’re reading digitally without any warning as to what the next page might bring. Characters are nonexistent and chapter text is nonsensical, but Nakayama’s penchant for grotesquely morphed faces and bodies, inescapable horrors and…really creepy hair…add up to a surprisingly potent brew of unease. While there are recurring themes and plots throughout the series, PTSD Radio is better thought of as a collection of micro-frights than as a cohesive story or collection of stories. Kodansha has translated five volumes of his work into English so far, and the structure of PTSD Radio fits neatly with Nakayama’s vibe as the near-urban-legend of horror manga. Without fail, whenever I put out a call for scary comics, Masaaki Nakayama’s name gets uttered like he’s an insider secret-an underground favorite only known by the cool kids. PTSD Radio Cover Art by Masaaki Nakayama 10. It’s masterfully written and beautifully drawn, a reminder to other survivors that they are not alone, and a primer for people who want to better understand the isolation and pain that can come with surviving. It’s not just that something horrific happened to her in the past, but that her terror continues as she’s forced to confront her own memories and her attacker daily at school. Carroll uses raw expressions, faceless monsters and sharp white on black to convey just how frightening Melinda’s life has become. Carroll has been responsible for some of the best horror comics of the past couple of years and her work here only heightens the sense of fear and anticipation that threads through every page of. Based on Anderson’s own experiences as a teenager, the original book and the graphic novel adaptation both read like a diary, a bit unfocused and sometimes non-chronological but all the more powerful for allowing the main character’s conflicted and roiling emotions to sit front and center. It’s a difficult read not because of any flaw in the work, but because it’s so sharp and true to the way real life often treats young women who have survived sexual assault. But Laurie Halse Anderson’s book was a powerful piece of writing about agency, grief and pain, and Emily Carroll’s incredible art only elevates the text. It would be easy to underestimate the impact that Speak can have, write it off as simply an adaptation of an already popular prose novel. Speak: The Graphic Novel Cover Art by Emily Carroll 12. If nothing else, we hope our newly expanded categories send you into 2019 with plenty of reading material. A title that stood out when viewed holistically might rank lower when assessed through a specific lens, and books that didn’t make the cut for the master list can easily come out on top of these individual breakdowns. Some will overlap with our main list, but many won’t-and the way rankings shift around may surprise you. Before the holidays roll around, we’ll be honoring books that excelled in the specific categories mentioned above. Our year-end rankings don’t discriminate between capes-and-tights adventures, creepy manga, bonkers webcomics or navel-gazing “literary” graphic novels, but when compiling our master list, we realized that 2018 was a deceptively great year for sequential art, and 25 notable books just didn’t cut it. Paste prides itself on taking as broad a look at the medium of comics as our small team can possibly manage. “Hey, wait a minute Paste-didn’t you already publish your big best-of list for 2018? And didn’t that list contain superhero comics, kids comics, horror comics and sci-fi/fantasy comics, all under one big umbrella? What gives?” Well, intrepid Paste reader, you’re not wrong.
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