Comics, like all art, can be a mirror on society or a safe harbor from its worst tendencies, and thankfully again in 2018, we got some incredible books this year. I’ve been watching our pull lists since the calendar flipped in January, keeping an eye out for the best comics to share with you, and we’ve finally cut it down to just 10. But first, a few honorable mentions.

Yoshitoki Oima’s To Your Eternity was probably the best new manga I read this year, but I kept it off the list because as good as the newest volumes are, the first one is stellar and it was published too early. Transformers: Unicron is a great way to end a fascinating era of Transformers comics, one that (oddly enough) spent as much time exploring notions of gender, romantic love, and politics as they did making giant robots punch each other. Sean McKeever and Alexandre Tefenkgi’s Outpost Zero isn’t on the list, but it was exactly the kind of hard-ish sci-fi I needed at exactly the right time. I spent a lot of the year really wanting an Alien comic to love, and Johnny Christmas’ adaptation of William Gibson’s Alien 3 script is giving me precisely that. So did Corrina Bechko and Gabriel Hardman’s Green Lantern: Earth One. Annie Nocenti and David Aja’s The Seeds is baffling but gorgeous, and I think it’s going to end up being incredible when it finally wraps. Kel McDonald and Tyler Crook’s The Stone King feels like I just started a Zelda game.

And at the big two, there are five writers who are making The Leap. Kelly Thompson and Tom Taylor have both had career years. Sina Grace’s Iceman was the first X-book in years that connected with me, and Thompson and Taylor did that for team books in Rogue & Gambit and X-Men Red respectively. They are quite honestly the best X-Men comics in more than five years. And their other comics are just as good – Taylor defined Laura Kinney in All-New Wolverine, and Taylor’s story in this year’s Batman annual is as good as Tom King’s Ace the Bathound story was a couple of years back, while Thompson’s West Coast Avengers is a joy to behold.

Chip Zdarsky’s career is mind boggling. He used to be the guy who had his own convention in a hotel room in Toronto and wrote a notepad full of porn jokes about Marvel characters, and now he’s the guy who wrote the best Fantastic Four comic since Jonathan Hickman left with Marvel Two-in-One and one of the best Spider-Man runs of all time on Peter Parker: Spectacular Spider-Man. If he had been announced on Daredevil two years ago, I would have assumed it was all masturbation and Catholicism jokes, but now I assume it’s going to be really good, with a light sprinkling of masturbation and Catholicism jokes.