Updated All Time Top Rated Comics 2025

Here is my updated list of all of the comics I've rated a 9 or above. Only one new book (Seven Ways Through the Woods) was added in 2025.


9/10

All In The Family Part Two: Angel
Amulet Book Two: The Stonekeeper's Curse
Amulet Book Seven: Firelight
Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You
Boxers
Dog Man And Cat Kid
Dog Man: Grime and Punishment
The Flutter Collection
Ghosts
Guts
Heartstopper Volume 1
Life With Archie #16
Lumberjanes Volume 3: A Terrible Plan
Lumberjanes Volume 4: Out of Time
Lumberjanes Volume 5: Band Together
Machiavelli
Rival Angels Season 3 Volume 2
Saga Compendium 1
Seven Ways Through the Woods
Small Town Type #1
The Treasure of the Black Swan
Understanding Comics
Warriors: Graystripe's Adventure
We Won't Be Erased
White Bird
With the Light Volume 2

9.5/10

Amelia Rules: When the Past is a Present
The Arrival
Castle Waiting Volume 1
I Kill Giants
A Monster Calls
The Prince and the Dressmaker
Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey

10/10

Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic In One Volume

Looking forward to reading more great books in 2026!

2025 Recap

I read and reviewed 56 comics in 2025, up from 35 in 2024, and slightly above weekly, still a long way from daily.

There weren't a lot of highlights in 2025. I only rated one book above an 8. There were also a fair amount of below-5 ratings.

Highs and Lows of 2025:

Highest-Rated Comics of 2025

Seven Ways Through the Woods (9/10)
Choose Your Own Adventure: Tobacco Hornworm (8/10)
Heartstopper Volume 3 (8/10)
Midwest Books To Prisoners Community Zine 2023 (8/10)
Monsters in Sweaters (8/10)
The Question #8 (8/10)
You Know You're A Rural Queer When... (8/10)

Lowest-Rated Comics of 2025

Bio-Booster Armor Guyver Volume 3: Dark Masters (4.5/10)
Godzilla: The New Heroes (4.5/10)
Marvel Comics Presents #29 (4.5/10)
Pathfinder: Wake the Dead #1 (4.5/10)
Ranma 1/2 Volume 4 (4.5/10)
Sugarholic Volume 2 (4.5/10)
Superman's Good Guy Gang 2025 FCBD Special Edition (4.5/10)
Harley Quinn: Lootcrate Exclusive #1 (4/10)
Silver Surfer #2 (4/10)

Top 5 Books Read in 2025

 This is my top 5 books (all genres, not just comics) read in 2025:

5. My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
4. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
3. Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff
2. The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
1. John Adams by David McCullough

Ranma 1/2 Volume 4

From my books retrieved from storage.

Title: Ranma 1/2
Issue: Volume 4
Date: 1995
Publisher Viz Media
Writer: Rumiko Takahashi
Artist: Rumiko Takahashi

Ranma, a local martial arts prodigy, has a bit of a curse to deal with. He changes sex whenever he gets splashed with cold water. Hot water reverses the change.

Things get even more complicated when Ranma's old frienemy, Shampoo, shows up, along with her great-grandmother, who uses a secret pressure-point technique to make Ranma intolerant of hot water, causing Ranma to be stuck in girlform. From there, Ranma sets out on a series of schemes to get the great-grandmother to reverse this latest indignity. We end with a cliffhanger involving a shark.

This was goofy fun, a bit hard to follow in places, although some of that was just from jumping into the series at volume 4. The characters are more meant to be laughed at than to be sympathized with, which left me without much of a hook to care about the story beyond the slapstick antics. This was decent in terms of mayhem, but there wasn't much in the way of substance.

Rating: 4.5/10

Seven Ways Through the Woods

Title: Seven Ways Through the Woods
Date: 2025
Publisher: Greenwillow Books (HarperCollins)
Writer: Jenn Reese
Artist: Devin Elle Kurtz

Not a comic. This is a children's picture book.

Jenn Reese presents a series of adventurous kids looking for a way through the dark and mysterious woods. They each find their own way to cross, complete with Devin Elle Kurtz's absolutely gorgeous illustrations and a bit of helpful advice for each method of crossing. Don't try the crystal serpents if unless you enjoy their singing! The story ends with a bit of insight on the nature of the obstacles in our paths, and a very different seventh approach.

This was charming and delightful.

Rating: 9/10

Tactics Volume 1

From the shelf of unread books.

Title: Tactics
Issue: Volume 1
Date: 2007
Publisher: Tokyopop
Writer: Sakura Kinoshita, Kazuko Higashiyama, Lianne Sentar
Artist: Sakura Kinoshita, Kazuko Higashiyama
Letterer: Star Print Brokers
Editor: Lillian Diaz-Przybyl

Kantarou is a folklore scholar who's not exactly making the big money off of his publications. Fortunately, he moonlights as an exorcist of sorts who deals with problems caused by youkai. These beings are usually invisible, but Kantarou has the ability to see them. To really get ahead in his business, though, he's been searching for Haruka, the legendary demon-eating tengu.

But once he finally gets Haruka on his side, it only adds lots more complications to Kantarou's life.

This series is episodic with something of a mystery-solving vibe. Each situation that Kantarou and Haruka encounter seems to break the rules of the supernatural as they understand them at first, and it's up to them to figure out what is really happening.

The dialogue flits all over the place, especially in the midst of the action, and the stories tend to rely on an epilogue-like bit toward the end to help the reader make sense of it all. The world does have good internal consistency and enough variety of supernatural beings and effects to keep things interesting, and the banter between the characters is fun in places.

Rating: 5.5/10

Flash Gordon #34

I picked this up at the Brimfield Antiques Show in September of 2025.

Title: Flash Gordon
Issue: 34
Date: 1981
Publisher: Whitman (Western Publishing)
Writer: John Warner
Artist: Gene Fawcette

Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Doctor Zarkov travel to a remote area to loot one of Emperor Ming's observation posts for spare parts. The station appears to be unguarded, but it's actually defended by a type of gas that Ming devised that knocks out its victims and causes potentially fatal hallucinations. This is one of those classic unnecessarily slow deathtraps, and it's really just an excuse to give us a peak into each character's worst nightmare and watch them deal with these dream scenarios.

Zarkov faces off against the most frightening thing he can imagine: Literally his own brain! In a jar! Except it's evil. 

Dale, is a scenario very much playing to stereotypes, finds Flash falling in love with a strong and beautiful (and blonde!) warrior woman who is more than ready to handle any of Dale's objections with fist and sword, all while Flash stands by, dazzled by his newfound love.

Flash himself gets the least interesting nightmare: Getting crushed by Ming himself, grown to giant-size.

It takes Zarkov's wit and Flash's strength of will to overcome the effects of the nightmare-gas. I was a little bit disappointed that the writers weren't able to make things a bit more parallel and have a clearly defined strength of Dale's that lets her overcome her own scenario. That would have made the story a lot more satisfying. Instead, she gets rescued by Flash, as per normal.

The story was still fairly interesting in spite of how contrived it all was.

There's also a backup story in which Flash is searching for Charn, a leader in the rebellion against Ming. Charn was captured by a tribe who enslave their captives, and his will has been just about broken in captivity. Flash is captured as well, and needs to find a way to instill hope in Charn so that they can attempt to escape. This story was a good concept but suffered a bit from page-count limitations, as it could have used some more time to develop. 

The worldbuilding and character interactions in both stories were good.

Rating: 5/10

Sugarholic Volume 2

From the unread book shelf.

Title: Sugarholic
Issue: Volume 2
Date: 2009
Publisher: Yen Press
Writer: Gong GooGoo
Artist: Gong GooGoo
Letterer: Terri Delgado

Jae-Gyu has agreed to pose as Whie-Hwan's girlfriend for a month. She's struggling to deal with his strict rules and life in the big city in general. And the fact that she's caught the eye of a star musician is not making things any easier. This is a slow-burn romance that has the potential to go in a lot of different directions. The characters all tend to be a bit flighty and high-strung, which makes everything they try to do more complicated. This issue was still mostly setup as the main characters take their places in the scenario. Everyone in the story is very pretty, but no one is all that likeable at this point. I did like some of the intrigue that is happening with Whie-Hwan's very powerful family, which provides a bit of a mafia vibe to put an edge on the romance.

Rating: 4.5/10

Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?

My wife and my mother-in-law borrowed this from the Wilbraham Public Library in Wilbraham MA USA.

Title: Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?
Publisher: Celadon Books
Date: April, 2019
Writer: Patricia Marx
Artist: Roz Chast

Collection of single-panel cartoons, featuring wisdom and fashion sense from the author's mother. Part snarky mother-daughter interactions and part (also snarky) etiquette guide. The author writes for the New Yorker, and the illustrator (also a New Yorker staffer) is working in the magazine's classic cartoon style. I found the cartoons to be a bit hit-or-miss, but there were some funny ones, and the mother's personality shines through in some really unique and unexpected ways.

Rating: 5.5/10

Pathfinder: Wake the Dead #1

This was a bargain-bin purchase from Most Excellent Comics and Games in Enfield CT USA on Free Comic Book Day 2025.

Title: Pathfinder: Wake the Dead
Issue: 1 
Publisher: Dynamite
Date: 2023
Writer: Fred Van Lente
Artist: Eman Casallos
Colorist: Jorge Sutil
Letterer: Tom Napolitano
Editor: Joe Rybandt
Cover: Steve Ellis

This is an adaptation of the Pathfinder tabletop roleplaying system. The story here is essentially meant to assemble the team of heroes as a bunch of characters on converging missions meet in a horrific city district of living flesh known as the Awful. There's a lot of posturing the eventually becomes fighting, and everyone gets to show off their moveset before some badder enemies arrive and we go to cliffhanger.

This was fine, but it had a lot of characters involved and none of their powers or skills was anything we haven't seen before. After the comic action is finished, there's a section detailing the game stats of some of the spells, items, and characters in the book, including the most memorable thing in this issue: the tragic backstory of the champion character Seelah. That would make a good comic adaptation, and I think I would have preferred Seelah in a solo book, or at least to start with her and build the team a bit more slowly.

Rating: 4.5/10