Portal Fantasy Graphic Novels

When I told my 10-year-old I was putting together this list and asked her for her own personal fave, she immediately mentioned this one, which I’m pretty sure was her gateway to loving comics. In the first book in this series, a boy buys magical seeds at a local market, plants them in his backyard, and wakes up to a garden that’s… well… different from your average garden. For one, the garlic bulbs are alive (as in they have legs and can run around). For another, the garden itself seems to be a gateway to another world, from which a monster appears, kidnapping his little sister. With the fate of his sister in his hands, Jack will need to become mighty to make things right again.

This is another one I initially read with my child. After losing her father in a car accident, Emily moves with her mom and her brother to the home of her deceased great-grandfather, who went missing years ago. When a tentacled creature drags her mom through a door in the basement, Emily and her brother follow, determined not to lose another parent. The door they pass through disappears behind them and they find themselves in another world. All Emily cares about is rescuing her mom, but it seems the world’s inhabitants have bigger plans for her.

My kiddo and I read this one together, too, and she was immediately enamored. In this all-ages graphic novel, our protagonist and her two adopted siblings are sent to spend the summer with their estranged grandmother in her rundown hotel. They’re tasked with fixing up the place, but they soon discover that each hotel room contains a portal to another world. In accessing these worlds, however, the worlds themselves begin to collide, ushering the universe toward impending doom. Can these three children and their grandmother save all the worlds?

I picked up the prequel to this popular webcomic on Free Comic Book Day 2018, and it brought immediate Neverending Story vibes. SOLD! I ended up preordering the first print volume. In this series, a boy grappling with the loss of his mother steps through a painting in his grandmother’s attic and finds himself in another world. Unable to return to the world from whence he came, miraculous adventures ensue. I remember being blown away by the artwork when I first picked this one up.

Okay. We’re about to get way more dark. Tenement is just one series in Lemire and Sorrentino’s horror universe known as the Bone Orchard Mythos (and I highly recommend them all). In this series, the seven residents of an apartment building enter the unit belonging to their dead neighbor, only to find themselves sucked into a horrific alternate universe, running for their lives through an apartment building that is theirs—but also not—searching for a way back to the world they knew. Their journey, however, will be harrowing, and no one escapes completely unscathed.

This is another dark one. Once upon a time, a group of teenagers disappears into a role-playing fantasy game. Two years later, they reappear, though one of them is missing. None of them is capable of speaking about what happened. Years later, one of the dice from the game pops up again, covered in what appears to be their friend’s blood. Though they’re now fortysomethings, the die sucks them back into the game, where they are determined to locate their friend and—this time—get all of them back home safely. Unfortunately, things don’t end up being so simple. A heads up that this series is relentlessly grim.

In this newish comic series, college students are all about the newest internet sensation—The Fade—a dream world folks can pass into at night by following a few simple steps (steps that look much like spellcasting). When besties Jeannie and Arno eventually make their way there, they find it much more attractive than their actual lives, and begin using it more and more often as a form of escapism. But it starts to seem that this dream world is more real (and more dangerous) than they first assumed.

I stumbled upon this last one when reading fellow Book Rioter Patricia Thang’s post on isekai, the Japanese equivalent of portal fiction. In the first volume of this manga, three middle schoolers on a field trip in Tokyo get sucked into another world, apparently summoned by an imprisoned princess, who believes they are the fate magic knights of legend. It’s a lot to swallow. Nevertheless, they embark upon a quest to save the princess and, by extension, the world so that they might eventually return to their own.