The best comics to read when you wish you were sitting around a campfire

I love the way Lisa Hanawalt draws nearly anything, but I especially love the way that Lisa draws animals, the desert, and the West. If you’re a Bojack Horseman fan, you’ve already fallen in love with her innovative cartooning style (she was a Bojack producer and its production designer). Her work here is all absurd movement, perfect timing, hilarious expressions, and, oh, yeah, a main character that’s a horseback-riding half-coyote, half-dog, full of messy humanity—a visceral, subversive Western, as delicious and satisfying as sleeping under a starry sky. 

The immediacy of Whit Taylor’s work and its accessible, urgent symbology is especially poignant in this diary of her Montana road trip with her husband.

Diary comics are one of my favorite genres of graphic storytelling for reasons exemplified here: you are engaging with Whit’s experience with this sprawling, beautiful land and its brutal history alongside her. Big sky, to her pen, to your eyes. It’s an intimate experience, one that comics do best.

The iyashikei (literally ‘healing’) genre of manga and anime concerns itself mainly with deeply character-driven narratives where nothing much happens. Except, of course, the simple living of life is beautiful, often the sweet spot where everything happens, and the creators behind this work know it.

This book is a pinnacle of that genre, a gorgeously illustrated meditation on the beauty of camping, campfire cooking, and the landscapes of Japan, as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful, funny group of high school girls. 

Eleanor Davis’s line is one of my favorites anywhere in comics. She gets so much movement and flow in the width and depth of her inkwork. That movement is at some of its finest here, chronicling her glorious, arduous bike ride from Arizona to Georgia.

You are arrested by her work immediately, rooting for her and the folks she encounters throughout the journey, all rendered with a nib’s organic caress, giving them and the entire book a rooted, organic, alive feel. The road laid out before you, shimmering with possibility. 

Luke Healey’s highly graphic, wonderfully expressive cartooning style is especially powerful in this memoir of his time hiking the Pacific Coast Trail. Through-hiking the PCH is an obvious physical feat in any circumstance, but it’s a deeply taxing mental one, and Luke’s reflection on his trip compels you forward.

You are next to him on the trail, begging the question repeatedly: how can we bear moving forward? How can we do this, day after day? You feel right there as Luke laces up his boots, takes a breath, and walks on.