Graphic Novel Review: Jesse Lonergan’s DROME is the front-runner for 2025 book of the year

Drome

Cartoonist: Jesse Lonergan
Publisher: 23rd Street
Publication Date: August 2025

I have been a fan of Jesse Lonergan’s work from the time I first saw it. This was back in the summer of 2020, with Image Comics’ publication of Hedra, a 50-plus page silent sci-fi comic one-shot printed in oversized newspaper format. The format and subject choices alone were enough for me to make it an automatic physical purchase. But all those (good) choices mattered less than the actual cartooning. What I found when I opened Hedra was nothing short of a revelation, a cartoonist who was a top-tier storyteller and also seemed to have a deep curiosity for toying with the boundaries of comics as a medium, like Chris Ware if he wanted to get deep and think-y with outsized genre stories.

I was immediately hooked, and I have since read every project Lonergan has worked on, from the under-the-radar-but-excellent graphic novel Arca to the Mike Mignola collaboration to the few pages he contributed to DC Comics most recent New Gods series. All of that work has been excellent. If you’ve read any of Lonergan’s comics, you know what he does with grids and page layouts and intricate details packed into surprising spaces. Their aesthetics could not be more different, but discovering Lonergan’s comics reminds me of when I saw the first Wes Anderson’s movies as a teenager — in that both creators put their mark on their mediums by forging a unique visual language. When you read a Lonergan comic, your brain fires dopamine at every page turn, taking in every choice and every detail, almost independent from the narrative.

All of that said, I had started to feel of late as if Lonergan’s best work was yet to come. As he put out book’s like Man’s Best Friend or a stand alone story in a color-themed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles anthology, I started to feel like I was witnessing a master-level cartoonist in search of his masterpiece, of the book that would put him up there as one of the most exciting cartoonists of this generation. With the publication of Drome, that masterpiece has arrived.

Drome is Lonergan’s longest and most ambitious project to date. The 300-plus page book is a feudal-tinged, sci-fi creation myth. It uses dialogue sparingly, while fully embracing the utilization/shattering of grid boundaries that is the hallmark of Lonergan’s work. It has romance and hubris and contemplations of violence. And it’s absolutely gorgeous from start to finish.

It’s almost hard for me to pick what elements to drill down on . The characterization is strong — from the gods to the human beings under their gaze — and the narrative arc is, indeed, an engrossing one. Even without Lonergan’s playful tweaking of comics craft, Drome is a great read on the merits of its story. But one thing that struck me as especially well done in the book, and perhaps even this book’s secret weapon, was the way that Lonergan uses color.

Maybe that’s an obvious point, given that the book is divided into sections with colors as their titles, but on the opening pages of Drome, before the comics even start, there are bars of primary colors, of the familiar CMYK colors, in fact, that comics printing has long been built upon, dating back to their own genesis. It looks great the way Lonergan uses these colors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his plotting used those shades as inspiration. But as I read, I started to derive more meaning from their presence (often with the god scenes). It felt like I was taking in an almost ineffable contemplation of those colors as building blocks of both comics and stories and maybe even life. It’s something I need to think about more, and I’m happy to do so. Hell, I may even need to give this one another read before the year as out.

But that might also just be me as a reviewer proscribing undue meaning to an aesthetic choice that was made simply because it’s cool (to be fair, that’s a big part of the job of a comics reviewer). So, I don’t want to lose site of this either — as deep as you want to get with Drome, this book is just badass and awesome and cool on its genre merits. The characters are big and they punch hard. They punch giant crabs (among other things) and they fight guys who have a dozen swords and they box with the most primal powers of the universe.

In this way, Drome speaks to nearly everything that I personally love about comics. It’s a masterful display of craft, and it’s one that pairs up lofty philosophical ideas with face-pounding genre badassery. It’s a comic that might expand your thoughts around the nature of the universe on one page, before a big freaking fire guy split into two dozen panels erupts on the next, getting ready to punch things. Simply put, I think it deserves a full recommendation to any and all comics readers.

And while there is still a good 1/3 of the year remaining for new releases, as it stands right now today — Drome by Jesse Lonergan is my favorite comic of 2025.

Drome is available this month via 23rd Street