Healy’s bittersweet portrayal of a troubled friendship is full of finely observed detail and deadpan humour, but it’s also a deeply felt exploration of happiness, trust and the lies we tell our friends and ourselves. When his friend Giorgio breaks his arm, Frank moves in with him, but their relationship feels the strain. Photograph: Faber & FaberĪnother Frank appears in Luke Healy’s The Con Artists (Faber), but this one seems closer to home: Healy’s Frank is, like him, a London-based Irishman with a standup career. Dreamlike yet bracingly physical, this is a book with its own hypnotic vernacular, a psychedelic vision of perseverance, hedonism and rebirth.įrom Oxygen Mask by Jason Reynolds.

Characters shrink, explode, eat each other, tunnel into the ground and travel through space. Woodring’s wordless, woodcut-style panels follow the adventures of a bucktoothed bipedal creature called Frank, but they don’t so much tell a story as present a bewildering series of events. Jim Woodring has been drawing surreal comics for 40 years, and One Beautiful Spring Day (Fantagraphics) combines previous works with new material to produce a single sinuous epic. Ducks (Jonathan Cape) is very different work: a fierce, thoughtful and revealing memoir about the Albertan oil industry, which puts money in the pockets of workers (she used it to pay off her student loan) and petrol in car tanks but leaves great scars on both the landscape of northern Canada and the people who staff its giant machines and equipment rigs. Kate Beaton, meanwhile, made her name with the perceptive and playful comics series Hark! A Vagrant. It is a vivid and lyrical work, but there’s sharpness and anger here too, as well as real emotional clout. Like her affecting debut collection It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be, this is about friendship, possibility and the passing of time. In Alison (Serpent’s Tail), Lizzy Stewart uses a mix of sketches and prose to relay the life of a woman who falls for a self-regarding painter before finding her own way as an artist. This year also saw two great full-length debuts from writers who had previously excelled with shorter work. It’s a brilliant collaborative effort: you can inhale it at speed or linger over every startling page. American YA writer Jason Reynolds lets his stream of consciousness unspool over three long sentences and 384 pages, while artist Jason Griffin shows blotches, bricks, buildings, masked faces and scenes of incarceration and apocalypse. Oxygen Mask (Faber) charts a boy’s panicked thoughts as the pandemic and George Floyd’s death dominate the news, while his ill father coughs and coughs “like something in him is breaking up and breaking down at the same time”. O ne of the year’s most gripping works focused on a family glued to the TV.

Graphic novel ducks