Good Alternative Graphic Novels
Discover the best alternative graphic novels for unique storytelling and artistry. Explore our curated list of unconventional and must-read graphic novels beyond the mainstream.
Book
Blankets
by Craig Thompson
This is a highly charged, personal story, crammed with pain, discovery, family and first love.
Book
Fun Home
by Alison Bechdel
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
Book
The Impostor's Daughter
by Laurie Sandell
In graphic novel format, describes the author's youth as the daughter of a man who shared fantastical tales about his privileged Buenos Aires youth, Vietnam heroism, and celebrity friendships, and her astonishment upon learning that her father fabricatedm