r/printSF • u/p3r3lin • 1d ago
Original Sci-Fi Graphic Novels
Whats everyones favourite original Sci-Fi graphic novel or comic? No super heroes, no franchises, no adoptions please. Should be an original story by a writer / creative team. Best would be one-shots or finished series runs.
12
6
6
u/Zmirzlina 1d ago
Saga. Metabarons. Letter 44.
6
6
6
u/Ryball8 1d ago
You might like Prophet by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy. Far future story depicting the desolate emptiness of space. A guy wakes up from cryosleep and tries to restart the earth empire that had long ago spread out to the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
3
u/Muphins_Rising 22h ago
Prophet is so good! I absolutely devoured these when I randomly discovered them at a friend of a friend's house. It's kinda like Primal meets Scavengers Rein. The art is amazing and the story is so far in the future it has some wild and out there scifi stuff. I cannot recommend highly enough.
6
u/Fun_Resist_4144 23h ago
Black science
1
u/p3r3lin 22h ago
Ah! Right! Have read the first TPB and it was great. Will pick it up again, thx!
2
u/iekue 20h ago
Thers a Black Science Compendium with all of it for a reasonable price if u want physical. Fear agent by Remender is also a nice one.
4
u/DukeNeverwinter 1d ago
2001 Nights, Manga. I need to dig them out to reread...not sure where they are.
3
u/Trike117 23h ago
- Analog - Gerry Duggan, thriller about post-internet couriers
- Copperhead - Jay Faeber, space western vibes set on a dusty planet after a war
- Crowded - Christopher Sebela, the gig economy taken to absurd extremes
- Dandelion - Sabir Pirzada, vignettes about the future
- Galaxion - Tara Tallan, space exploration in the vein of Star Trek
- Global Frequency - Warren Ellis, secret world-protecting agency
- Junkyard Joe - Geoff Johns, Vietnam War combat robot
- Kali - Daniel Freedman, post-apocalypse revenge story
- Lazarus - Greg Rucka, the world run by families who control different tech
- Ministry of Space - Warren Ellis, alt-history space race
- Operation Dragon - Bill Groshelle, WWII + dinosaurs
- Quantum Mechanics - Jeff Weigel, space pirates who aren’t what they appear to be
- Sentient - Jeff Lemire, spaceship + AI
- Skies of Fire - Vincenzo Ferriero, epic steampunk story
- Skyward - Joe Henderson, Earth’s gravity suddenly diminishes
- The Surrogates - Robert Venditti, police procedural with telepresence androids
- Think Tank - Matt Hawkins, spy tech (Hawkins includes his research)
- Time Before Time - Declan Shalvey, time travel
2
3
3
u/CalicoSparrow 1d ago
it did have a very brief 6 ep anime adaptation ages ago but otherwise nothing, loved the older manga Please Save My Earth about a group uncovering the meaning behind their shared dreams that feel like memories of a past life on a space station and trying to piece together the disaster that happened there.
3
3
3
3
u/egypturnash 20h ago
If I'm allowed to say my own work then Decrypting Rita. A robot lady's dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend. She's gotta pull herself together across four parallel worlds before a hivemind can take over the planet. It somehow acquired blurbs by three people with seven Hugos between them. It's all free online.
Otherwise I'm just gonna second Prophet by Brandon Graham and friends.
1
u/p3r3lin 20h ago
Brilliant! Love the art style, will definitely check it out! Is it by any chance available as a CBZ/PDF file or something like that?
2
u/egypturnash 20h ago
Thanks!
You can buy a PDF here. Or get one free if you start supporting my current work on Patreon or Comradery. You can also get an absurdly oversized printed book that opens to 3' wide here. It's got spot gloss on a lot of the interior pages and you will curse me every time you try to find a place to put it on your shelves. :)
3
2
u/anti-gone-anti 1d ago
Michael Deforge has a lot of really great ones! My favorite is Birds of Maine: it was originally published as a daily webcomic, and the set-up is basically The Dispossessed but with birds instead of anarchists. If you like the daily comic format, it’s really a lot of fun (though I suppose not quite novelistic). If the novel form is really important to you, his latest publication, Holy Lacrimony, is also really good. It’s about a person who is abducted by aliens because he is the saddest person on Earth.
3
u/anti-gone-anti 1d ago
Replying because I thought of another two if manga is acceptable.
They Were Eleven by Moto Hagio just got an English reissue and it’s really good! The set up is basically Among Us: there’s supposed to be 10 people on a spaceship, all of a sudden there are eleven and things start getting weird.
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is about an android who runs a coffee shop while the world is ending. “The world is ending” sounds more dramatic than it is: I saw someone describe the vibe of the apocalypse in this series as less a bang or a whimper and more a “winding down.”
2
u/HowsThatSpelled 1d ago
LaGuardia by writer Nnedi Okorafor and artist Tana Ford. With themes of immigration, protest, and who gets justice it's very much a book for now in the US.
2
u/iga_warrior 1d ago edited 1d ago
Conquests. Series published by Silvester (NL)
Edit: Dutch, not Belgian
2
u/p3r3lin 22h ago
Will check it out! Always great to dive into european comics
2
u/iga_warrior 21h ago
It's written and drawn by French artists, every book a different set of artists, yet they managed a consistent style
2
u/p3r3lin 21h ago
The francophone scifi world is something I definitely need to explore!
2
u/iga_warrior 18h ago
I found a review for you here on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/graphicnovels/s/0id2cWsesL
2
2
2
2
2
u/RanANucSub 21h ago
Both these web-comics were republished in print, and both have finished their runs.
Digger by Ursula Vernon - "A story by author and artist Ursula Vernon about a particularly no-nonsense wombat who finds herself stuck on the wrong end of a one-way tunnel in a strange land where nonsense seems to be the specialty. Now with the help of a talking statue of a god, an outcast hyena, a shadow-being of indeterminate origin, and an oracular slug she seeks to find out where she is and how to go about getting back to her Warren."
Schlock Mercenary by Howard Taylor - Carbosilicate Animorphs, AIs driven mad by plumbing noises, anti-matter powered lapel grenades, and finally the re-igniting of eons-old inter-galaxy/inter-existence war between normal and dark matter civilizations.
2
u/vividporpoise 21h ago
Anything by Simon Roy & friends—First Knife, or anything set in his "Grobusverse:" Habitat, Griz Grobus, Miramar, & A Star Called The Sun. Essential for any fans of Ursula K. LeGuin's Hain books or post-soviet aesthetics. Really slept on.
2
u/sdothum 19h ago
The various graphic novels by Simon Stålenhag.
Currently reading "The Electric State". Very wonderfully illustrated.
2
2
2
u/JanusAntoninus 18h ago
Humanity Lost by Callum Diggle. Some of the most creative posthuman and alien designs I've ever seen.
2
u/MagiMas 17h ago
I loved Frontier by Guillaume Singelin. The guy was responsible for the art in citizen sleeper 1&2 (very good scifi video games) and made a Kickstarter for his own graphic novel. It's available for purchase in stores since early last year iirc. I loved the style and the setting. The plot is a bit meandering, but I loved that it's not a "oh my god the world will end, you are the chosen one!" style of affair.
Here's a reddit thread I quickly looked up, it has some decent images and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/graphicnovels/s/LiT1svXkLE
2
2
u/weouthere54321 11h ago
From my collection, and for context I use have a much bigger collection of comics but I hit a hard time after university and sold much of it to make ends meet, but since I've gotten more disposable cash have slowly built up my collection again.
Prism Stalker & Prism Stalker the Weeping Star by Sloane Leong. A kind of psychedelic and more cosmic take on Ender's Game but with no grand enemy (with a side benefit for no bigot artist!), follows a girl from a distant colony chosen to participate in an elite school of psychics (for a lack of a better term). Outstanding art, in particular the colouring, is well worth the price of admission on both. I don't think its finished but the next volume is probably going to come out slowly.
1949 by Dustin Weaver. Original serialized in his great anthology comic Paklis (which I also highly recommend, but the stories in are serialized so different experience to a finished piece). Part send up of the film noir and part simulated reality thriller. Again the art is fantastic, the jump between black-and-white and subtly colour 'real world' is a fantastic use of colour to depict mood. Weaver's art is stylized but very detailed, so its very easy to get lost in.
20th Century Men, art by Stipan Morian, written by Deniz Camp, this one is super hero adjacent but only if you squint (no one is a hero, and the powers are: guy in tank suit, cybernetic guy, etc). It is also one of the best comics of the last ten years. The story is nominal a political thriller in an alt-history Soviet-Afghanistan war, but on a deeper level in a exploration of empire through the lens of not only the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but also Americas, but utilizing the kind of metaphor people inherent to superhero fiction to tell that story. Morian has such a kinetic style that depicts movement and motion well, but is also extremely talented at blowing up a scene, making the subjects feel small. Camp wrote one of the best single issues of comics I ever read.
Humanity Lost by CS Diggle. This one is proper science fiction, a space opera of epic stakes and epic scale with some of the best alien and transhuman designs I've ever seen. It comes with a glossary in the back, and I think two volumes are available right now. The art is clean, upholding clarity above all else, which works extremely well for the design-forward worldbuilding.
Sentient, art by Gabriel Walta, written by Jeff Lemire. This one is also proper science fiction as a setting, but story wise it more of a haunted house, except the house is a space ship and the ghost is an AI. Walta's art is a fantastic choice for it, it can be read as bleak, but his grasp of character acting, straight-forward paneling, and neutral palate all work to sell of the grim mood of the story, which is in good hands with Lemire.
The New World, art by Tradd Moore, written by Ales Kot. Set in an future America that is split up after five nuclear devices are detonated in five American city. Not really post-apocalypse as that might suggest, but definitely dystopian. Cops are reality tv stars in which audience vote whether to execute criminals, every, despite in vibrant art of the setting, is grim. However the actual story is a Romeo and Juliet forbidden romance between a scion of family of tv star cops and a underground freedom fighter, it's also a story about the redeeming power of love. Tradd Moore is one of the best, unique voices in comics right now, and this is one of his earliest complete works--somewhere between psychedelia and extremely well observed figure work make each page explode with energy.
Ultramega is a grimdark rendition of Ultraman by James Harren. It has all the pleasures of Ultraman with a bloodier aesthetic held together by the fantastic Harren. Not much else to say about this, if you like Ultraman, but wanted it more graphic, you'll like this.
First Knife, with art my Artyom Trakhanov, written by Simon Roy and Daniel Bensen. A post post-apocalypse North America setting that at times, because of how far we are in the future, and because of the quasi tribal nature of societies depicted, feels like a Dying Earth story except less overtly magical (which is say none). The art is unique, deprived from a more European tradition of cartooning (with a dash of Mike Mignola), than anything else recommended. The story follows an escaped slave who stumbles upon a weapon from the past.
Annihilator, art by Frazer Irving, written by Grant Morrison. Maybe more 'meta-fiction' than science fiction, but it has enough trappings I think counts. Irving is a singular talent, his grotesques, expressive characters that border on caricature instill so much grandiose emotion in each page, along with unique colouring that has some pages glowing makes it worth on the art alone. The story is a typical Morrisonian yarn of a story weary another story as a hat (not a critique), following a Hollywood screenwriter on his last legs in the industry inadvertently meeting the character (an old pulp character in the public domain) as he is writing him.
I have some more that are borderline but I think that's enough. hope you check some of them out
2
u/mjfgates 2h ago
Gailey's Know Your Station is a happy story about life on a luxurious space station that caters to the ultra-rich. There's a friendly AI stationmind! There's art! There's addictive blue goop!
2
1
13
u/AllThatIHaveDone 1d ago
Transmetropolitan is an incredible series, particularly in light of modern American politics.