The 16 Best Image Comics Graphic Novels

Cosmic sagas, blood-soaked horror, and genre-bending crime sit beside cult indie darlings. Which one tops your shelf?

1

Invincible

Robert Kirkman's coming-of-age superhero saga of a teen learning his father's dark secret.

1000pts

2

Saga

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples's sweeping space opera about lovers from warring alien worlds.

820pts

3

The Walking Dead

Robert Kirkman's long-running black-and-white zombie-apocalypse survival epic.

799pts

4

Descender

Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen's painterly space saga centered on a lost robot boy.

761pts

5

The Fade Out

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's noir murder mystery set in 1940s Hollywood.

666pts

6

Spawn

Todd McFarlane's antihero saga of a murdered soldier resurrected as a hellspawn warrior.

666pts

7

The Wicked + The Divine

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's tale of reincarnated gods who live as pop stars.

605pts

8

Monstress

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's lavishly illustrated dark fantasy of war and ancient monsters.

605pts

9

Sex Criminals

Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's comedy about a couple who stop time during intimacy to rob banks.

605pts

10

Deadly Class

Rick Remender's 1980s-set story of a homeless teen enrolled in an academy for assassins.

605pts

11

Paper Girls

Brian K. Vaughan's 1980s sci-fi adventure following four newspaper-delivery girls through time.

605pts

12

Chew

John Layman and Rob Guillory's Eisner-winning series about a detective who reads objects by eating them.

532pts

13

East of West

Jonathan Hickman's apocalyptic sci-fi Western reimagining the Four Horsemen in a fractured America.

532pts

14

Black Science

Rick Remender's reality-hopping sci-fi about a scientist stranded across dangerous dimensions.

532pts

15

Bitch Planet

Kelly Sue DeConnick's feminist sci-fi satire about women imprisoned on an off-world penal planet.

532pts

16

Criminal

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's acclaimed anthology of interlocking hard-boiled crime stories.

444pts