Best of 2023

    Welp, my first year without a local comic shop. Without the "browsing the shelves" factor to get me to try something new, my consumption of "regular" comics slowly decreased as titles ended and weren't always replaced. I made up for that by increasing my manga and manga-adjacent consumption, though. With ComiXology being officially killed, I lost most of my interest in even trying new digital titles, although some of the trade collections below were hardcopy collections of webcomics.

Other Media     Much like 2022, there was a lot of recommended stuff. Unlike 2022, something did stand out head and shoulders above the rest. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - Is it as good as Into the Spider-Verse? Hard to say. But it's certainly worthy of awards and recognition. Digital Content     As suggested above, nothing. Some good stuff, but nothing that hit the Strongly Recommended level other than collected editions in hardcopy. Everything in the Trades and Collections list to the right except for the Great Cleric is a webcomic collection (and Great Cleric was part of the Kindle First experiment while Amazon was in the process of killing ComiXology).

Trades and Collections Cursed Princess Club vol 1 and 2 - A Webtoons series collected in hardcopy and sold pretty widely, much like Magical Boy. Full archives still available online, series will be ending in early 2024. The Little Trashmaid vol 1 - Also a Webtoons series, but this one was printed by the creators via crowdfunding rather than as part of Webtoons's publishing program. Archives are available online. How To Be A Mind Reaver vol 3 - Yet another webcomic, but not a Webtoons comic, also published via crowdfunding. I read it online through Patreon. Batman: Wayne Family Adventures vol 1 and 2 - Annnnnd back to Webtoons collected editions. But this is really good. Full archives are available online. The Great Cleric vol 1-6 as a whole - I swear, I did read a lot of manga this year...this is just the only one to really grab me without reservation. Note, the first couple of volumes are slow to get going, but the arc as a whole is very good, and makes it worth the slow start. Floppies     I think the fact that I'm reading through all of a month's comics at once is making it harder for individual issues to really stand out. That, or I'm just missing out on some really good new books because I can no longer just grab things off the shelf and skim them. (The local shop I no longer have a pull with has a strict "no opening the sealed bags to look" policy, and judging books by their variant covers is not a great plan.) My Little Pony Classics Reimagined: Unicorn of Odd #3 (of 4) - The whole series is good, but #3 is where it really kicked in for me.