Alison Bechdel and Joe Sacco return; plus Black Country cowboys, vengeful gods and an angling classic reimagined
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any of 2025’s best graphic novels looked to the past with mixed emotions. Growing up in 1970s California, Mimi Pond found the aristocratic Mitfords, born in the early years of the 20th century, compellingly exotic. She shares her lifelong fascination in Do Admit! (Jonathan Cape), a splendid book of geopolitics, jolly hockey sticks and gossipy asides, as the sisters choose between fascism and socialism and help shape attitudes to everything from class to funeral rites.
Pioneering photographer William Henry Jackson captured the old west for posterity, yet the popularity of his images speeded its destruction. Veteran cartoonist Bill Griffith recounts his great-grandfather’s life in Photographic Memory (Abrams), which takes in the civil war, slavery, the obliteration of the Great Plains peoples and the inauguration of the United States national parks, as well as the brutal legwork and dangerous alchemy of 19th-century photography. The narrative sometimes clunks, but the story is so good it’s hard to care.
Gareth Brookes’s inspiration goes even further back. His adaptation of Izaak Walton’s 1653 fishing manual The Compleat Angler (SelfMadeHero) sets linocut prints and inky drawings alongside Walton’s poetic prose, conjuring a landscape of cruelty and plenty in a meditative book of subtle carp, malicious frogs and dainty eels.
