The 2020 ComicBook.com Golden Issue Award for Best Ongoing Comic

Another year has come and come gone. While 2020 felt much longer than most years, it’s finally past, and it’s time to take stock of our favorite entertainment from the year that was. The ComicBook.com team came together to vote on the best in television, movies, and comic books from the past 12 months. Nominees were selected, and now winners have been chosen from those groups. Here we’re going to discuss our favorite ongoing comic book series of the year. This is the kind of comic book that we look forward to each month, and that becomes a staple of our monthly reading habits. Despite fewer comics out this year due to the pandemic, there was still stiff competition in this category.

And the winner of the 2020 ComicBook.com Golden Issue Award for Best Ongoing Comic is…

X-Men by Jonathan Hickman, Leinil Francis Yu, Mahmud Asrar, Sonny Gho, and Gerry Alanguilan, published by Marvel Comics!

In 2019, Jonathan Hickman and his artistic collaborators turned the X-Men franchise upside down in the dual miniseries House of X and Powers of X. From late 2019 until the epic X of Swords crossover event in late 2020, he and other creators have explored this new status quo through Marvel’s Dawn of X line of mutant-centric comic books.

X-Men is the Hickman-written flagship title drawn mostly by Leinil Francis Yu. Rather than a traditional X-Men superhero title, Hickman has used the book to tell episodic stories that lay the groundwork for the larger meta-narrative he and the other X-writers are building, at the same time revealing the nuances of Krakoan culture. From cultural rites like the Crucible — a trial by combat through which depowered mutants can earn their rebirth — to recontextualizing Magneto not as a reformed villain but as a mythic hero of his people, the series has yet to run out of big ideas, and Leinil Yu and Sonny Gho have consistently risen to that scale with aplomb.

There have been other tales that veer away from Krakoa’s cultural growth. The X-Men send a special team into the lair of the Children of the Vault, where they experience accelerated time. They’ve yet to return. In another installment, the mutants tangle with elderly botanists. In another, Gabriel Summers and his crew would really like to get drunk on the moon.

At the heart of all of this is the Summers family, with Cyclops at his center. Scott Summers is now the Captain America of mutants, the believer who always gets the job done. He finally has the family, the happiness, and the home he was always told was just a dream. His dedication to preserving it has given him magnetic new confidence and a more compelling lead than ever before.

X-Men blends superheroes, sci-fi, family dynamics, and worldbuilding into a potent and fascinating brew that we’ve anticipated reading with every new issue. That earns it our award for best ongoing series.

Nominees:

• Bitter Root
• Daredevil
• DIE
• Usagi Yojimbo
• X-Men — WINNER