The best queer YA graphic novels to crack your heart in half

“They’re only stories. They’ll change when they need to.” A beautiful, lyrical, and visually staggering coming-of-age story as a young gay child and his immigrant mother come to understand each other through the telling and retelling of classic fairy tales – each illustrated with Nguyen’s poignant elegance and inflected by the dreams, fears, and cultural influences of their respective teller. This graphic novel made me weep at its beauty – both that of its incomparable art and the careful, sweet kindness of its story. A treasure and a work of art.

When a seamstress’s outré dress design causes a scandal among the Parisian aristocracy, she loses her job – and gains a mysterious new patron, who hires her to deploy her avant-garde taste to spectacular effect and with an unlimited budget for dress after dress that sets France’s society set on fire with gossip and envy. But as “Lady Crystallia’s” notoriety escalates to a fever pitch, how long can this blossoming friendship keep its secrets? Wang’s fairytale setting is wedded to a visual sensibility full of charming characters and beautiful settings – and, above all, spectacular costume design, as the reader delights along with the crowd at every dress debut. It feels like the children’s film from an animation renaissance that never was – compassionate and thrilling, heartfelt and sincere. I thought it was a marvel.

Boys are one way; girls are another; that’s the way it has always been. But when Aster finds himself ineluctably drawn to the magic that should only be the province of the women in his family, he begins to realize some rules are not only antiquated, they can do material harm to the soul. Ostertag deftly uses the supernatural as a simple and elegant metaphor for the thousand indignities we can heap upon the queer and gender nonconforming, with an art style that simultaneously insists upon and celebrates the multiplicity of bodies and expressions that are our lived experience and belie these closed and closeting norms. An ingenious allegory, smartly and briskly told with charm and generosity.

A tender love story between a shy, anxious wallflower and the ebullient jock he thinks is impossibly beyond his reach – until, all at once, he isn’t. Gently and tranquilly observed, Oseman’s eye for emotional detail also informs an art and lettering style that feels as fragile and transitory as a math class doodle – moments come, and they are gone, and we feel as though they are captured as quickly and desperately as the first furtive adolescent love they depict. It reminded me of that sweet and tentative joy of young love both exactly as it was, and exactly as it was never allowed to be.

A rough-and-tumble gaggle of middle-schoolers on the C-string girl's soccer team navigate first crushes, coming out, queer identity, and relationships – and being really, really bad at soccer. Johnson’s perfect ear for tween voices is matched by a frenetic art style that pops with crisp energy and a delirious, bouncy pace that rebounds around its panoply of League Of Their Own-esque characters like a soccer ball zig-zagging across its field. All the cheers, all the skinned knees, all the dizzying emotions and close friendships of the tween years come rushing back.