The Best Basketball Comics to Keep the Knicks Hype Going
Another NBA season has come and gone, but this latest one ended in a blaze of glory, with the New York Knicks winning their first championship in 53 years. Fans eager to keep the energy going through the offseason would do well to check out any of these great basketball comics.
Dragon Hoops
Yang’s graphic memoir is easy to love, no matter your previous experience with the sport. Readers who aren’t familiar with basketball will start out much like Yang himself, who barely understands the sport at the start of the book but then gets caught up in the story of the team at the high school where he teaches. Much like the Knicks, the Bishop O’Dowd Dragons had a long championship drought that the players and coaches were driven to overcome. The story has plenty of exhilarating ups and downs, and it’s awesome to see Yang’s art—usually deployed in service of superheroes and fantasy adventures—translate the rhythm of basketball so faithfully to the page.
The Comic Book Story of Basketball
Like the rest of Ten Speed Graphic’s line of history comics, Van Lente and Cooper’s collaboration explores the origins of basketball and how it came to be played and viewed as it is today. Newcomers to the sport can expect a primer on various important milestones, like how a sports gambling scandal helped delegitimize college basketball enough to allow a professional league to thrive, and how the now-defunct American Basketball Association influenced the modern NBA. It’s a history lesson, but a very entertaining one.
Wish I Was a Baller
Although basketball was invented at the end of the 19th century, it arguably reached peak popularity in the 1990s—and this middle grade graphic memoir brings that iconic era back to life. Based on Shah’s own experience of being a teen journalist who covered golden-age NBA teams like the Michael Jordan–led Chicago Bulls and Shaquille O’Neal’s Orlando Magic, Wish I Was a Baller features both the giants ‘90s basketball and a coming-of-age story replete with first crushes and trying to impress your friends. “The names change, the clothing styles change, but being young and wanting to do something, that’s always going to be there,” Shah told PW in 2025.
Real
Inoue’s 1990s basketball manga Slam Dunk helped popularize the sport in Japan. His follow-up, Real, put a new spin on the sport, focusing on wheelchair basketball. The story revolves around three teenagers who all come to the specialized sport through different paths: One lost his leg to bone cancer, one was paralyzed in a car accident, and one carries his guilt over paralyzing someone else into becoming the team’s enthusiastic supporter. Real makes basketball just as epic to see on the page as Slam Dunk did, but with a new emphasis that there’s more than one way to play.
A Map to the Sun
Though the NBA season has ended, the WNBA season is in full swing over the summer, and fans of the women’s league will enjoy Leong’s YA graphic novel, an epic coming-of-age story about high school girls dealing with friendship drama and disappointing parents as they start their school’s first girls’ basketball team. Leong often eschews dialogue in favor of letting body language and the game itself communicate the characters’ emotions, and colors everything in dreamy sunset pastels that evoke the unique beauty of West Coast golden hours.
