ComicsAlliance’s Best Of 2016: The Best Fantasy Comic of 2016

Magic! Mystery! Stone people! A whole lotta furries! Kurt Busiek and Ben Dewey’s fantasy epic about a the world ending — twice — continues to unfurl, with lush art and colors, well-defined characters, and a carefully balanced plot that teases out just enough mystery to keep the reader hooked. Every issue throws a new wrinkle and a new twist our way, as this series plays the long game but never loses sight of the fact that every issue counts. [Charlotte Finn]

This shamanic fable tells the origin of Santa Claus as though it were a Disney adaptation of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign written by a professor of anthropology, and it's absolutely fantastic. Like many of Grant Morrison's simpler stories, Klaus is charming, adventurous, and thrumming with an indefatigable energy from the first page to the last. With artist Dan Mora striking a perfect balance between family-friendly cartooning, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and musclebound action, Klaus is iconic, magical, and ebullient — all fitting traits for a book about Santa Claus. [John R. Parker]

Any medieval fantasy story featuring female dwarves that doesn’t give them bodacious beards is, frankly, spitting in the face of the word "fantasy" itself. Luckily, Kyle Latino’s webcomic Savage Beard of She Dwarf certainly is. While on her quest to learn if she’s the world's last dwarf, She Dwarf beard-wrestles burly men, tussles with Shorcs (shark-orcs), and slays a fearsome wolf-dragon. With his electric colors, expressive illustration, arresting world, and script of equally heartening and hilarious measure, Latino crafts a fantasy worth having. [Jon Erik Christianson]

Monstress is a lushly rendered dark fantasy series that pits Arcanics, a type of magical being, against the Cumaea, sorceresses that eat Arcanics in order to maintain their powers. Monstress, a collaboration between writer Marjorie Liu and artist Sana Takeda, deals with racism, war, and family, in whatLiu has called an "alternate Asia," following the Arcanic Maika Halfwolf as she searches for the truth about her murdered mother and the endless hunger that lives inside of her. [Zina H.]

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's WicDiv continues to be one of the most thoughtful and ambitious titles on the stands, even as it pushes harder on the poppier, more superheroic elements of its premise. Rising Action was five issues of fight comic about the inhumanity of violence, followed by a Sandman-esque short set in the 19th Century, and an issue that abandoned the comics form entirely to become a Kevin Wada-illustrated fashion magazine. There's nothing else out there like it. [Alex Spencer]