The 10 best comic book panels of 2022

A comic panel can be described as an atom. You can make anything with just a few of these panels.

Shocking reveals, narrative mic drops — even comedic timing, in a medium in which timing itself is in the hands of the reader. The search for a “best panel” is not the same as a search for “best comic.” It’s the search an ineffably striking moment captured on the page, an image that forces a reaction from you even if you have no idea what the comic is about. Here are the 10 comic panels from 2022 that we can’t stop thinking about.

(And for more on what’s happening in the pages of our favorite comics, make sure to read Monday Funnies, Polygon’s weekly list of the books that our comics editor enjoyed this past week.)

Supergirl cradling Comet’s corpse

Supergirl: Woman of TomorrowTom King, Bilquis Evely and Clayton Cowles

Image: Tom King/DC Comics. Mat Lopes, Clayton Cowles, Bilquis Evely.

The question isn’t “Is one of the best panels of the year in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow?” It’s “Which panel in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow do I choose?” I’ve previously said Woman of Tomorrow is the most Sandman-like thing Tom King has written, and while some portion of that is the semi-contained fable of each issue, it’s also the craft that artist Bilquis Evely brings to the comic’s worldbuilding, in a space adventure by way of the inexplicable creatures of Star Wars rather than the scientifically enumerated biomes of Star Trek.

But what makes Evely’s single panels wondrous is her compositions and her acting. Artists have used the iconography of Superman to recreate Michelangelo’s Pietá before, but Evely may have done it best, choreographing cape and clouds and sun onto the essential pose. Where Evely draws Kara Zor-El with a gaze hard enough to pierce the reader’s heart, Mat Lopes pops her irises with ice blue flecks, his work a carefully conducted symphony, emphasizing the important even as it highlights Evely’s intricate linework.

Jen Walters – Jen Walters on her heels

She-Hulk, Rainbow Rowel, Rogê Antônio, Rico Renzi, Joe Caramagna

Image: Rainbow Rowel, Rogê Antônio, Rico Renzi, Joe Caramagna/Marvel Comics

Sometimes a great panel is three panels, like Rainbow Rowel and Rogê Antônio pulling off this small but PerfectionThe first issue of Their Magazine contains a visual gag She-Hulk. We don’t think of a comic book panel as having its own point of perspective, as a frame of a movie has a point where the camera was placed. But Rowel and Antônio show that it can be really funny if you do.

Do a Power Bomb freeze frames are breathtaking

Do a Power Bomb, Daniel Warren Johnson

Image: Daniel Warren Johnson/Image Comics

This is the story of Do a Power BombThis is Daniel Warren Johnson’s love letter. This book is a collection of pages. Power Bomb that’s ashamed or sheepish of its subject matter, it’s all sincerity, all camp, all heart, and all spectacle. However, the movement is what takes your breath away from comics.

Comics are a deceptively still medium, in which we use phrases like “motion lines” to mean “a developed iconography of abstract lines which are invisible to the characters but indicate to the reader that motion has occured.” Wrestling, on the other hand, is a pastime in which movement — literally “wrestling moves” — are the entire deal.

Johnson is a Renaissance painter’s eye. Power Bomb. He picks the exact moments that convey both previous and impending motion; the exact point in the shot where somebody like Zack Snyder would switch to slo-mo; the moment every voice in a crowd would gasp in unison — and blows a split second out on the page so that the tension and beauty of it hangs forever.

Not an angry god but an angry friend

Batman #127, Chip Zdarsky, Jorge Jimenez, Tomeu Morey, Clayton Cowles

Image: Chip Zdarsky, Jorge Jimenez, Tomeu Morey, Clayton Cowles/DC Comics

Hollywood has made sure that we all know the iconography of an angry Superman — he floats impossibly in the sky, his eyes glowing a radioactively furious red, a promise that looks can kill and maybe he will too. Red-eye mad Superman looks temptingly powerful. But Batman #127 says: It’s also a crutch.

What if instead, Superman’s anger was righteous and controlled, a protective reflex? What if it wasn’t a burning laser, but an icy breath that douses a house fire and hangs in the air as he makes a final attempt at deescalation? We could be sure that Superman’s anger is not because he sees his enemy as a god who has raged at him.

Run to the beat

Saga #55: Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Image by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples/Image Comics

Writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staple’s epic is the exception that breaks every rule in American comics publishing — a hit with Wednesday Warriors and trade-waiters alike that only grows more popular over time, never loses narrative steam, and will probably never get optioned for a cinematic adaptation. Hollywood won’t be chill until the film is X-rated and contains a lot of special effects.

For 2022 SagaThere was another rule that had to be broken. The book returned from its three-and-a half year absence with, perhaps, a wider audience than it did when it stopped in 2018. It was even more amazing that the book had nothing left to say. Saga#55: It was as good as Saga #54.

The book felt as if it had never been there. And it’s a testament to Vaughan and Staples’ talents that the first panel of their comeback is a simple reframing of the very first page of their comic, and a jump cut-style time jump, yet still felt like the natural next step.

Victor Fries’ passion

Batman: One Bad Day — Mr. FreezeGerry Duggan. Matteo Scalera. Dave Stewart. Deron Bennett.

Image by Gerry Duggan/DC Comics. Matteo Scalera and Dave Stewart.

It’s hard to give a well-known story a fresh retelling, but that’s what DC Comics has been doing all year with it’s Batman: One Bad Day line: Handing the origin stories of the biggest names in Batman’s Rogues Gallery over to the biggest talents working for the company. Batman: One Bad Day — Mr. Freeze stands out from its peers, not least because of Matteo Scalera’s beautiful use of negative space (not to mention the borrowing of Mike Mignola’s indelible character designs created for Batman: The Animated Series).

Credit to Gerry Duggan, the writer: Scalera is allowed to work. Mister FreezeIt is brimming with pages worthy of framing, and each spread deserves to be framed. This one is special. The essence of a tragic villain’s turning point, distilled to a single, impeccably composed frame.

What to do when you introduce yourself

Step by Step Bloody Step, Si Spurrier, Matias Bergara, Mat Lopes

Image: Si Spurrier, Matias Bergara, Mat Lopes/Image Comics

Comic books don’t have opening credits sequences, full of scrolling words and scene setting montages — but if they did, this double page spread is surely where Si Spurrier and Matias Bergara’s names would appear. Spurrier and Bergara take a few pages to introduce the central duo of their opus — the naked child and the armored guardian — and then pull out to introduce the comic’s third character: the hostile, helpful, wondrous world around them.

The hook is a part of Step by Step Bloody Step is that it’s completely wordless, but this page is where Spurrier and Bergara remind their reader to be quiet, too. Spurrier and Bergara take a break from the main story in order to highlight their talent and intentions.

Superman wearing a Pride cape

DC Pride 2022, Devin Grayson, Nick Robles, Triona Tree Farrell, Aditya Bidikar

Image: Devin Grayson, Nick Robles, Triona Tree Farrell, Aditya Bidikar/DC Comics

Corporations should stay out of Pride — and deep down, Big Two superheroes are populist iconography, as the closest thing America has to modern folk heroes. These ideas can be both true. In terms of story impact, it doesn’t get much stronger than making Superman into a potential PFLAG parent.

And we can recognize that even if a “Superman” is Clark Kent’s son, rather than Clark Kent himself, having Superman make out with his boyfriend in mid air above a Pride parade while he wears a cape lined with Each Pride flag an artist can place on itThis powerful iconography makes a strong statement.

Judgment Day is here

AXE: Judgment day #4, Kieron Gillen, Valerio Schiti, Marte Gracia, Clayton Cowles

Image: Kieron Gillen, Valerio Schiti, Marte Gracia, Clayton Cowles/Marvel Comics

AXE: Judgment day was the best Marvel Comics spectacle in years, but there’s just one image from the event series and its voluminous tie-ins that is stuck indelibly in my brain. It’s mortals disintegrating under the wrath of god, while the tiny silhouette of Captain America stalwartly raises his shield — and the cosmic forces turn the innocent in his arms to a husk anyway.

Judgment Day constantly reminded the reader of the human stakes of the end of the world, and the vast gap between the struggle of average citizens to avoid god-meted carnage, and the super-strong, super-regenerative, in-many-cases-literally-deathless heroes who fail to protect them. Even Captain America, Marvel’s most iconic everyman, survives when every man around him is obliterated.

It’s a necessary dichotomy for a story where two of Marvel’s most powerful groups of superheroes — the Eternals and the Mutants — ultimately realize they must change how they share their gifts, and this single panel explains what just took me over 100 words to say.

Hera’s prophecy

Wonder Woman History: The Amazons#2 Kelly Sue DeConnick. Gene Ha. Wesley Wong. Clayton Cowles

Image Credit: Kelly Sue DeConnick (Gene Ha, Wesley Wong and Clayton Cowles/DC Comics

The goddess Athena tells Hera, whose thousand eyes see a thousand futures, that she would like to keep the woman-avenging Amazons hidden from Zeus’ retribution “long enough for women to see justice.”

Hera feels sad. “There will be no justice for women. Not now.” Her lip curls and her brows furrow in divine disgust, as she imperiously raises her fan. “Not a hundred years from now.”

You can then turn the page.

Sometimes a panel is so brilliantly conceived, so beautifully crafted, so flawlessly executed, so emphatically presented in its original form, that there’s simply no better way to tell someone how good it is than to press a book into their hands and beg, “Read this, Read this, read this.”