Multicultural Graphic Novels
Discover powerful multicultural graphic novels, from Gene Luen Yang's *American Born Chinese* to Art Spiegelman's *Maus* and Marjane Satrapi's *Persepolis*. Explore diverse voices, history, and identity through acclaimed comics and memoirs.
Book
Maus
by Art Spiegelman
The author-illustrator traces his father's imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel.
Book
Palestine
by Joe Sacco
A landmark of journalism and the art form of comics. Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, this is a major work of political and historical nonfiction. Prior to Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995―Joe Sacco's breakthrough novel of graphic journalism―the acclaimed author was best known for Palestine, a two-volume graphic novel that won an American Book Award in 1996. Fantagraphics Books is pleased to present the first single-volume collection of this landmark of journalism and the art form of comics. Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism. Like Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine has been favorably compared to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus for its ability to brilliantly navigate such socially and politically sensitive subject matter within the confines of the comic book medium. Sacco has often been called the first comic book journalist, and he is certainly the best. This edition of Palestine also features an introduction from renowned author, critic, and historian Edward Said (Peace and Its Discontents and The Question of Palestine), one of the world's most respected authorities on the Middle Eastern conflict.
Book
Deogratias, A Tale of Rwanda
by J.P. Stassen
Deogratias is just a boy. Benina is just a girl. Teenagers just like teenagers everywhere. Only he is a Hutu, and she is a Tutsiso say their ID cards.We are in Rwanda in the days leading to a swift and gruesome genocide which the world will watch but do nothing to stop. In less than a hundred days, eight hundred thousand human beings will be hacked to death.Moment by moment, piece by piece, J.P. Stassen skillfully builds a masterpiece, an unforgettable tale that probes mans inhumanity to man. His eloquence, his storytelling power, and his sheer poetry elevate this harrowing story to the rank of a testimonial to one of the darkest chapters in recent human history.With great skill and understanding, Stassens Deogratias takes us back and forth in time, showing only before and after the killings and inexorably revealing the grip of madness and horror on one young boy and his country.Difficult, beautiful, honest, and heartbreaking, this is a masterwork by a major artist of our time.
Book
American Born Chinese
by Gene Luen Yang
"Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to participate in the popular culture. Presented in comic book format." -- Title page verso
Book
Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
BEST SELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. “A wholly original achievement.... Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances.... A stark, shocking impact.” —The New York Times: "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years" In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the coming-of-age story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.
Book
Pyongyang
by Guy Delisle
One of the few Westerners granted access to North Korea documents his observations of the secretive society in this graphic travelogue that depicts the cultural alienation, boredom, and desires of ordinary North Koreans.
Book
Fax from Sarajevo
by Joe Kubert
Documents a family's wartime survival and escape against unbelievable odds.
Book
Jew Gangster
by Joe Kubert
With his father's words, Don't be a Jew gangster, still ringing in his head, a young man finds himself doing just that, as no other path in life opens for him. Easy money and easier women lure him into doing the dirty work of the local gang; it's not a pretty life, but he can eat well, and his mother's apartment continues to get heat all through the cold winter. But what he has to pay -- in flesh, in pride, in honour -- may not be worth all he earns. With the same intensity and eye for detail that he put into Yossel, Joe Kubert recreates a time when even the most innocent person was caught up in the dark underbelly of society.
Book
Epileptic
by David B.
Hailed by The Comics Journal as one of Europe’s most important and innovative comics artists, David B. has created a masterpiece in Epileptic, his stunning and emotionally resonant autobiography about growing up with an epileptic brother. Epileptic gathers together and makes available in English for the first time all six volumes of the internationally acclaimed graphic work. David B. was born Pierre-François Beauchard in a small town near Orléans, France. He spent an idyllic early childhood playing with the neighborhood kids and, along with his older brother, Jean-Christophe, ganging up on his little sister, Florence. But their lives changed abruptly when Jean-Christophe was struck with epilepsy at age eleven. In search of a cure, their parents dragged the family to acupuncturists and magnetic therapists, to mediums and macrobiotic communes. But every new cure ended in disappointment as Jean-Christophe, after brief periods of remission, would only get worse. Angry at his brother for abandoning him and at all the quacks who offered them false hope, Pierre-François learned to cope by drawing fantastically elaborate battle scenes, creating images that provide a fascinating window into his interior life. An honest and horrifying portrait of the disease and of the pain and fear it sowed in the family, Epileptic is also a moving depiction of one family’s intricate history. Through flashbacks, we are introduced to the stories of Pierre-François’s grandparents and we relive his grandfathers’ experiences in both World Wars. We follow Pierre-François through his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, all the while charting his complicated relationship with his brother and Jean-Christophe”s losing battle with epilepsy. Illustrated with beautiful and striking black-and-white images, Epileptic is as astonishing, intimate, and heartbreaking as the best literary memoir.
Book
Safe Area GoraĹľde
by Joe Sacco
A graphic novel based on the author's 1995-96 visits to Gorazde, one of the U.N.-created "safe areas" in Eastern Bosnia, showing the brutality and humanity that coexisted there during the Bosnian War of 1992-95.
Book
Pride of Baghdad
by Brian K. Vaughan
Inspired by true events, a provocative graphic novel examines the life on the streets of war-torn Iraq, raising questions about the true meaning of liberation through the experiences of four Lions, who escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during an American bombing raid in the spring of 2003.
Book
Kampung Boy
by Lat
Relates the life experiences, from birth to beginning boarding school, of a boy growing up on a rubber plantation in rural Malaysia.