Introducing the Broken Frontier Awards 2025 – Events in Gaza Make Their Presence Felt in Another Eclectic Set of BF Nominations

Broken Frontier proudly presents the shortlists for our 22nd annual Broken Frontier Awards. Our team has selected five nominees for each of the 15 main categories that comprise the BF Awards, honouring some of the creators and publications of the past year whose work has particularly spoken to us in 2025.

As always, you will have a big say in who gets to take home an award!

The BF crew have kicked off the Broken Frontier Awards for 2025 by compiling this year’s nominations and now it’s up to you to play your part in deciding our winners in the public ballot. As ever, the final decision will come from an equal 50-50 consideration of the votes of the comics community and the Broken Frontier team. Voting will run until the end of January 14th UK time, with the results to be announced on January 19th, 2025.

So, the usual (cut and pasted as ever!) blurb at this point: our nominations look to provide an eclectic list giving as much consideration to self-published tiny print run comics and zines as we do to popular serialised genre work. Acclaimed “big name” creators sit side-by-side with newer voices you may not have discovered as yet and, as ever, there will be omissions that may surprise you, especially this year. But this is a representation of work that particularly spoke to our team in 2025 and reflects the ethos, approach and values of Broken Frontier. Comics that embrace or experiment with the language of the form, work that has a socially relevant theme, and practice that comes from the direction of exciting newer voices on the scene.

We’ll also be announcing the next two names to be added to our Hall of Fame when the results go live. Our criteria for that honour is individuals or organisations who have made significant contributions not just to comics publishing but also to comics community over the course of more than a decade. Of the two names one is selected from the UK scene and will be somebody who has in some sense collaborated or worked with BF to push the medium. The other choice is an international voice who similarly works to champion the form and its practitioners.

Housekeeping notes: we choose the word “periodical” over “serial” or “serialised” for a reason. And we have included work that debuted at the tail end of 2024 and was too late to be included in last year’s ballot as eligible, particularly in the case of the ‘Best Book About Comics’ section given how much longer work in that area takes to read. We’re also loosely defining graphic novels as being 100-plus pages in length, so graphic novellas are included in the One-Shots section, while graphic memoir that may play with meta subjectivity is still eligible in ‘Best Graphic Non-Fiction’. ‘Best Colorist’ is shorthand for best use of colour and ‘Best Letterer’ can also be interpreted that way. ‘Best One-Shot Anthology’ is something of a catch-all category and may contain collected work from individual creators. There may be books that could easily slot into different category definitions but we work to place things where we feel they fit best. And Breakout Talent doesn’t necessarily mean first book but rather what we may feel is a significant moment in a creator’s practice, career, development or publishing history. Artists may have been working in the medium for years (self-publishing for example) and still be eligible for that category. Yes, that may all seem rather arbitrary but, let’s face it, categorising comics always will be to some extent.

Finally, the most important part. Please check out the work of anyone featured here that you are unfamiliar with. Awards for artistic endeavour have their detractors and, indeed, we recognise that valid points can be made there. But what we hope comes across from our shortlists each year is that there’s excellent practice on offer from every direction, whether that be established household names and renowned publishers. or DIY practitioners totally unknown to you who are still assembling their comics and zines with a long-arm stapler. Comics is a wonderfully democratic scene and we hope that by elevating lesser seen but equally worthy work with this awards process each year we are also making a positive contribution to our community.

So don’t forget your input will play a vital role in the final results. Join us in celebrating some of the best indie, experimental, socially important and alt comics of the year by clicking on the blue ‘Vote now!’ button below and casting your votes from this year’s choices in the Broken Frontier Awards 2025!

Vote now!

Broken Frontier Awards 2025: The Nominations

Best Writer

• Darryl Cunningham (Elon Musk: American Oligarch, Seven Stories Press)
• Deniz Camp (Assorted Crisis Events, Image Comics, Absolute Martian Manhunter, DC)
• Mariko Tamaki (This Place Kills Me, Abrams)
• Marjorie Liu (Monstress, Image Comics)
• Paul Cornell (Who Killed Nessie?, Avery Hill Publishing)

Best Artist

• Abs Bailey (Mother, Self-published)
• Anna Readman (Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion, Macabre Valley #1, Comics Bookcase)
• Donya Todd (The Witch’s Egg, Avery Hill Publishing)
• Keezy Young (Hello Sunshine, Little, Brown)
• Linnea Sterte (A Garden of Spheres, Peow Studio)

Best Colorist

• Abs Bailey (Mother, Self-published)
• Bex Glendining (On Starlit Shores, Abrams)
• Dave Stewart (Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown, Dark Horse)
• Javier Rodríguez (Absolute Martian Manhunter, DC Comics)
• Joe Latham (Haru: Book 3: Fall, Andrews McMeel)

Best Letterer

• Becca Carey (Exquisite Corpses, Image Comics)
• Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (Assorted Crisis Events, Image, Absolute Martian Manhunter, DC)
• Lucas Gattoni (Young Men in Love: New Romance, AWBW, Krypto: The Last Dog of Krypton, DC)
• Rob Jones (Who Are the Power Pals?, Dark Horse Comics)
• Rus Wooton (Escape, Image Comics)

Breakout Talent

• Alex Taylor (Bone Broth, SelfMadeHero)
• Bex Glendining (On Starlit Shores, Abrams)
• Kay Sohini (This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, Jonathan Cape/Ten Speed Press)
• Kayla E. (Precious Rubbish, Fantagraphics Books)
• Paige Hender (The Confessional, Silver Sprocket)

Best Periodical Series

• Colossive Cartographies (Anthology series – multiple creators, Colossive Press)
• Fizzle (Whit Taylor, Radiator Comics)
• mini kuš! (Anthology series – multiple creators, kuš! comics)
• The Phoenix (Anthology series – multiple creators, David Fickling Comics)
• Wedding Juice and Other Melodramas (Sanika Phawde, Self-published)

Best New Periodical Series

• Absolute Martian Manhunter (Deniz Camp, Javier Rodriguez & Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, DC)
• Assorted Crisis Events (Deniz Camp, Eric Zawadzki, et al., Image Comics)
• Pleasure Beach (Josh Pettinger, Self-published)
• Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum (W. Maxwell Prince, Martín Morazzo, et al. DC Comics)
• Who Are the Power Pals? (Duane Murray, Ahmed Raafat & Rob Jones, Dark Horse Comics)

Best One-Shot

• Diary of a Detainee (R. E. Burke, Self-published)
• Free for All #1 (Patrick Horvath, Oni Press)
• The Keluarga Cable Ship Company (Mereida Fajardo, LDComics Online Fair)
• Mother (Abs Bailey, Self-published)
• Safaa and the Tent: Diary of a Cartoonist from Gaza Oct 2023-Dec 2024 (Safaa Odah, LICAF)

Best One-Shot Anthology

• ∞: The new WIP Comics Anthology (Edited by Mike Armstrong, multiple creators, WIP Comics)
• Brain Damage (Shintaro Kago, translated by Zack Davisson, Fantagraphics Books)
• Samidoon: Comics for a Free Palestine (Edited by David Mariotte & Anas Abdulhak, multiple creators)
• World Within the World (Julia Gfrörer, Fantagraphics Books)
• Young Men in Love: New Romance (Edited by Joe Glass & Matt Miner, multiple creators, A Wave Blue World)

Best Webcomic

• Cartoonists for Gaza (Organised by Krent Able and Rachael Ball, multiple creators)
• Nap Comix (Rachael Smith)
• Ruin of the House of the Divine Visage (Eve & Spire Greenwood)
• Safaa and the Tent (Safaa Odah’s Instagram reportage from Gaza) (Safaa Odah)
• Schroeder’s Ahoy (Paul Schroeder)

Best Graphic Novel

• Cannon (Lee Lai, Drawn & Quarterly)
• Drome (Jesse Lonergan, Macmillan)
• Hello Sunshine (Keezy Young, Little, Brown)
• Precious Rubbish (Kayla E., Fantagraphics Books)
• The Witch’s Egg (Donya Todd, Avery Hill Publishing)

Best Graphic Non-Fiction

• 30 Seconds from Gaza: Diary of Genocide (Mohammad Sabaaneh, Olive Branch Press)
• Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me (Mimi Pond, Drawn & Quarterly)
• Elon Musk: American Oligarch (Darryl Cunningham, Seven Stories Press)
• Gaza in My Phone (Mazen Kerbaj, OR Books)
• Gesticulating Gentrification (Rick Trembles, Conundrum Press)

Best Collection of Classic Material

• Brooklyn Dreams (J.M. DeMatteis & Glen Barr, Dark Horse)
• The Cabbie: Definitive Edition (Martí Riera Ferrer, translated by Andrea Rosenberg Fantagraphics Books)
• Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (Diane DiMassa, New York Review Comics)
• Saga de Xam (Nicolas Devil and Jean Rollin, Anthology Editions)
• The Smythes (Rea Irvin, edited by R. Kikuo Johnson and Dash Shaw, New York Review Comics)

Best Book on Comics

• American Comic Book Chronicles 1945-1949 (Keith Dallas, John Wells & Richard J. Arndt, TwoMorrows Publishing)
• Marvel Age of Comics: The Mighty Avengers vs. the 1970s (Paul Cornell, Bloomsbury)
• Conversations with Denis Kitchen (Edited by Kim A. Munson, University Press of Mississippi)
• Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics (Eike Exner, Yale University Press)
• Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund (Caitlin McGurk, Fantagraphics Books)

Best Publisher

• Avery Hill Publishing
• Drawn & Quarterly
• Fantagraphics Books
• New York Review Comics
• SelfMadeHero

Broken Frontier Hall of Fame 2025 entrants

• TBD by the Broken Frontier team!

Thank you for voting in the Broken Frontier Awards for 2025!