The Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic is given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories told in graphic form and published or translated into English during the previous calendar year. It has been awarded annually since 2009. Prior to 2020, the award was known as the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. The Hugo Awards have been described as "a fine showcase for speculative fiction" and "the best known literary award for science fiction writing".
In the 20 nomination years, 112 works from 70 series have been finalists, including Retro Hugos. Works from 13 different series have won the award, including Retro Hugos. Girl Genius, written by Kaja and Phil Foglio, drawn by Phil Foglio, and colored by Cheyenne Wright, won the first three awards. After their third straight win in 2011, the Girl Genius team announced that, in order to show the category was a "viable award", they were refusing nomination for the following year (after which the award was up for re-ratification); Girl Genius was a finalist a fourth time in 2014. For the following five years, the award was taken by a different series or work every year, and included both webcomics and installments of published series. The 2017–2019 awards saw the second series to win three times, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's Monstress, and was followed since by different works each year until 2024, when Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples's Saga won for a second time. The three Retro Hugos were won by early comic books such as Bill Finger and Bob Kane's Batman #1, William Moulton Marston and H. G. Peter's Wonder Woman #5: "Battle for Womanhood", and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman: "The Mysterious Mr. Mxyzptlk". Saga has the most final ballot nominations at eight, followed by Monstress at seven and Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary at five, while Bill Willingham's Fables, Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls, and Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon have been nominated four times. Nine other works have at least two nominations.