Graphic Content: the best of 2014

JP Ahonen & KP Alare, Published by Abrams Comic Arts

If Pixar were ever to make a film about a Finnish metal band, Satanic demons and an ursine drummer (a bit of a stretch I know) then JP Ahonen and KP Alare's Sing No Evil would make the perfect storyboard. Genuinely funny dialogue, polished art and a fully rounded story. You don't have to read it while listening to Impaled Nazerine ...

9 Just So Happens

Fumio Obata, Jonathan Cape

In which Fumio Obata covers grief, ideas of home and the position of women in Japanese society. Obata, who studied at Glasgow School of Art, can really draw and, as a result, this graphic novel just sings when it just watches people walk down the street, or talk in offices. If only the real world looked as handsome as this.

8 Bumperhead

Gilbert Hernandez, Drawn & Quarterly

Bullies, girls, glitter rock, punk rock, anger, heart attacks, sloth, slackers, middle age, middle-aged spread, death, grief and life, or what passes for it: Gilbert Hernandez's disjointed snapshots of his protagonist Bobby's existence takes him from youth to decrepitude. Graphic novel as time travel anyone?

7 Here

Richard McGuire, Hamish Hamilton

Actually, the time travel starts now. Richard McGuire's book Here, an extended riff on a strip he did for Raw back in 1989, tells the story of the corner of a room in New Jersey through the millennia. One double page spread alone takes us from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 1870 and then back to 1402. On all three occasions we're seeing the corner of the room before there was a room. Before, even, there was a house for there to be a room in which there could be a corner. You still with me? Reading Here we jump back and forth through the 20th century and jump ahead of today without ever escaping this one little plot of land. In doing so McGuire displays how the comic strip can move back and forth in time more easily and more affectingly than any other art form. The result is sublime simultaneity.

6 Supercrash

Darryl Cunningham, Myriad Editions

This graphic documentary about the political ideas of Ayn Rand and the influence they had on the financial crash of 2008 is a fine example of the possibilities of form. Cunningham eloquently uses symbolism and visual repetition to illustrate philosophical and economic ideas. What makes it dazzling is the range and depth he gives to his argument.

5 Ant Colony

Michael DeForge, Drawn & Quarterly

Like nothing else (and what higher praise can you give than that). But let's give comparisons a go. Michael DeForge's account of love and war in a dying ant colony reads like someone has spliced the genes of a Woody Allen film with those of a David Lynch movie. The result is the blackest of black comedy. But that doesn't tell the whole story. That doesn't explain the originality of the art, the on-the-page rightness of the world DeForge creates, the acid colours he uses and the off-the-cuff-but-perfectly-judged imagination at work. Here spiders look like dogs, centipedes like extended tubular limousines and the ant queen is an HR Giger character redesigned by Tex Avery. It's funny and it's horrible and it has the best battle scene - as black ants take on red ants - ever.

4 (In a Sense) Lost and Found

Roman Muradov, No Brow

This slim story is about the idea of innocence, a spot of cross dressing, offhand surrealism and big city sadness. There's a light-touch playfulness to San Franciscan cartoonist Muradov's use of language and pattern that makes you skip through the pages. A delight.

3 Through the Woods

Emily Carroll, Faber

Canadian artist Emily Carroll's collection of horror stories are all about the pleasurable shiver. She draws on such traditional stories as Bluebeard and Little Red Riding Hood but then reconfigures them into something rich and strange and new. Angela Carter, you suspect, would approve.

2 Beautiful Darkness

Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoet, Drawn & Quarterly

This French fairy tale is easily the darkest thing on the list and yet it looks so pretty. A gorgeously painted fable about our capacity for cruelty, full of tiny cartoon people and all-too-human-sized pain, created by a husband-and-wife creative team is a remarkable poisoned candy apple of a book.

1 The Love Bunglers

Jaime Hernandez, Fantagraphics

Jaime Hernandez has been chronicling the lives of Maggie Chascarillo, Hopey Glass, Ray Dominguez and their crowded list of supporting characters (getting on for 200 at the last count) for more than 30 years now. You might think he would be running out of steam by now but The Love Bunglers proves the opposite. His writing is as funny and candid as ever. His drawing is - always has been - just a dream. It seamlessly combines conventional representation and cartoony exaggeration - often in the same panel. But it's the depth that you drown in, the sense that we are swimming in the deep waters of the heart here.

There is a two-page spread near the end, nine panels on each page, each panel encapsulating one half of a story; the other half to be found on the opposite page. It's a summary of two people's lives from childhood to middle age, a summary of 30 years of storytelling and a summary of just how concisely yet hugely expressive the comic strip form can be.

Mentioned in dispatches

Mary and Bryan Talbot and Kate Charlesworth's Sally Heathcote, Suffragette, a working class feminist heroine is something to be; Gilbert Hernandez's Loverboys, because one great graphic novel a year is not enough for Beto; Charles Burns's Sugar Skull, the last of a trilogy and not in the top ten only because the solution is never as much fun as the mystery; and Jamie Cole's Art Schooled, Stephen Collins's Some Comics and Guy Delisle's Even More Bad Parenting Advice, because all three will make you laugh out loud.