The Best Comics and Graphic Novels
Discover the best comics and graphic novels of all time, from Persepolis and Maus to Watchmen and Blankets—essential reads for every book lover.
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Watchmen
by Alan Moore
Imagine a future where Nixon is still President, America won the Vietnam War, and the nuclear clock stands at five minutes to midnight.
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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.
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The Complete Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
A MEMOIR OF GROWING UP AS A GIL IN REVOLUTIONARY IRAN, PERSEPOLISE PRIVIDES A UNIQUEGLIMPLSE INTO A NEARLY UNKNOWN AND UNREACHABLE WAY OF LIFE.
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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.
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From Hell
by Alan Moore
In graphic novel format, offers a fictional investigation into a series of murders in 1888 London carried out by the infamous Jack the Ripper.
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Buddy Does Seattle (The Complete Buddy Bradley Stories from "Hate" Comics, Vol. I, 1990-94)
No summary available.
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Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
by Chris Ware
The first and now critically-acclaimed book from Chicago artist Chris Ware. A lonely and emotionally impaired everyman, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, is provided with the opportunity to meet his father for the first time when he is 36 years old. The story, set in 1890s Chicago and 1980s small-town Michigan, is told in hundreds of small, precisely drawn panels that regularly expand to reveal stunning draughtsmanship, and supported by fold-out instructions, an index, paper cutouts and beautifully drawn period adverts.
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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.
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V for Vendetta
In a futuristic Britain where a totalitarian regime rules, a young woman is rescued from death by a masked vigilante calling himself "V," who launches a one-man crusade against government tyranny and oppression.
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Vampire Loves
by Joann Sfar
A collection of four graphic comics that follow the strange and romantic adventures of Ferdinand the vampire and his friends.
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Black Hole
by Charles Burns
“The best graphic novel of the year” (Time) tells the story of a strange plague devastating the lives of teenagers in mid-1970s suburban Seattle, revealing the horrifying nature of high school alienation—the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety, and the ennui. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways—from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable)—but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters—some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it—what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself. And then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it—back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…
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Blankets
by Craig Thompson
This is a highly charged, personal story, crammed with pain, discovery, family and first love.
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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.
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Bone
by Jeff Smith
Three modern cartoon cousins get lost in a pre-technological valley, spending a year there making new friends and out-running dangerous enemies, in a compilation of the creator's Bone series all in one binding.
