Ampersand's favorite graphic novels

In comments, Nancy asked me to list my 10 or 20 favorite graphic novels. Actually, I posted a favorites list in 2003, but looking through the list now there are several comics I want to add. So here it is, reposted and updated.

I’m only considering graphic novels here — meaning only comics that are available as bound books (i.e., no webcomics, and no floppies), and no collections of comic strips. I’m also not including any superhero comics, mainly because even the best of them aren’t as good as the ones on this list. Maybe I’ll do follow-up posts listing favorite webcomics, strips, and superhero comics.

Also, my list is deficient because I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to manga and Eurocomics. And the recommendations aren’t given in any particular order. And this list is by no means complete — there are lots of books I love that aren’t listed here. Nonetheless:

• Curses by Kevin Huizenga. To quote from a review on Amazon:
  

  The Ganges stories here vary greatly in length, from a three-page quickie that appeared in Time magazine to a forty-page adaptation of a Sheridan LeFanu story (“Green Tea”, for those keeping track). Ganges and his wife are the only solid connectors between the stories, but incidents and characters crop up again and again in different stories, so the volume has more of a feel of coherence than it otherwise would. Much of it reads rather like a magical-realist memoir; there’s a realistic setup (e.g., Glenn and his wife trying to have a kid…) that leads to a thoroughly absurd conclusion (…and the only way to do that is to steal a feather from an ogre who lives somewhere beneath 28th Street), or vice versa. It’s a good deal of fun, and Huizenga’s somewhat minimal drawing style is adaptable to just about anything (and there’s some wonderful versatility to be found between these pages).

  All true. To be fair, some of the early stories here drag a little, but the ones that don’t drag are so audacious and funny that it’s one of my favorites anyway. And the artwork, understated and influenced by early newspaper strips, is wonderful.

• Get a Life by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian. These slice-of-life short stories about the life of a bachelor in Paris are a little bit sexist, and sometimes use stock characters; but the jazzy, cartoony artwork is brilliant, and the writing is funny and kindhearted. These stories are hugely popular in France, and a companion volume, Maybe Later, contains autobiographical short stories about the cartoonists’ lives (concentrating on their work lives).
• Baker Steet: Honour Among Punks, by Gary Davis. Sherlock Holmes reimagined as a punk woman of color in an alternate-universe London. Damn, I wish this series had lasted longer; but David did complete one full-length murder mystery, plus a couple of short stories. Davis’ stunning, detailed black-and-white penwork — and his obvious knowlege of the British punk scene¹ — make this comic one I can reread many times (it was written and drawn in the 80s). Some of it doesn’t age very well, though; in particular, there’s a radical feminist trans character who makes me wince now.
• Maus by Art Spiegelman. I don’t really need to describe this one, do I?
• Blankets by Craig Thompson. Great, thick autobiographical tale of the author’s first love and his journey from fundimentalist Christianity to disbelief. I reread this last week and was blown away again. I love Thompson’s expressionistic drawings, and his relaxed, takes-as-many-pages-as-it-takes approach to storytelling.
• Black Hole by Charles Burns. This thick horror graphic novel, about a venerial disease that causes bizzare and variable symptoms (full-skin peels, tails, cat-person-face, etc) among a community of suburban white teens, is fueled almost entirely by Burns’ mastery of mood. It’s creepy, it’s repressed, and it’s drawn in brushwork so lush and controlled that it seems a little inhuman.
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Here’s how Time described it when they named it their book of the year: “The unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. Oh, and it’s a comic book: Bechdel’s breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.”
• American Born Chinese by Gene Yang. The Amazon.com description: “Indie graphic novelist Gene Yang’s intelligent and emotionally challenging American Born Chinese is made up of three individual plotlines: the determined efforts of the Chinese folk hero Monkey King to shed his humble roots and be revered as a god; the struggles faced by Jin Wang, a lonely Asian American middle school student who would do anything to fit in with his white classmates; and the sitcom plight of Danny, an All-American teen so shamed by his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee (a purposefully painful ethnic stereotype) that he is forced to change schools. Each story works well on its own, but Yang engineers a clever convergence of these parallel tales into a powerful climax that destroys the hateful stereotype of Chin-Kee, while leaving both Jin Wang and the Monkey King satisfied and happy to be who they are.

  Yang skillfully weaves these affecting, often humorous stories together to create a masterful commentary about race, identity, and self-acceptance that has earned him a spot as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People.”

• Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet. I’ll quote Publishers Weekly:
  

  French cartoonist Larcenet has created a leisurely story about Marc, a 20-something photographer, who is embroiled in crisis in both his life and art. His artwork is not satisfying him; his elderly parents and working-class childhood are weighing on him; and his crippling panic attacks have become more frequent. On the other hand, he falls in love and hatches a new photography project aimed at exploring and redeeming his shipyard roots and ailing father. But this is not just another coming-of-age tale. Through his characters, Larcenet presents a vision of French politics, history and society, weaving all of these strands together to create a multilayered book. The dialogue is insightful and sometimes painfully realistic; the artwork firmly roots readers in the French landscape and milieu while maintaining a cartoonish distance with the character designs and expressions.

• Notes For A War Story by Gipi. Possibly the best comic I’ve read all year. Despite the title, it’s not what people usually think of as a war story; there are no battles, and the characters aren’t in the army. They’re three young men trying to find a way to get by in a region ripped apart by war. It’s a story more about how war interacts with class, friendship, and the hunger of young men for male role models. Plus, Gipi’s drawings are awesome.

  There are very cheap copies available on Amazon.

• From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. The grimmest of Moore’s comics (which is saying a lot), but also the one with the most texture and richness. This is also the only Jack The Ripper story I’ve ever seen which makes the victims into real characters, rather than just generic ripper-bait.

  (They made a terrible film based loosely on this comic, but you shouldn’t judge the comic by the film — the film really butchered it. As it were.)

• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. The single most essential work of non-fiction about comic books is a comic book, and a damn entertaining one. This is the one book to read if you want to deepen your understanding of how comics work. Scott’s recent sequel, Making Comics, is also terrific, especially if you’re interested in creating graphic novels yourself.
• Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse. This coming-of-age story about a young gay man in the South during the 1960s civil rights struggles is the most criminally underread comic book of the last decade – one of the few comics that could sit next to Maus on your bookshelf and not be outclassed.
• Palestine by Joe Sacco. This nonfiction comic describes Sacco’s time spent in Palestine. Sacco’s depiction of the situation in Palestine is humanizing and spectacular, and it’s made palatable by his evident doubts about his own purpose in going to Palestine. (This is one of several journalistic comics by Sacco, all of which are fantastic).
• Cages by Dave McKean. “McKean is also an accomplished cartoonist in his own right. This is his magnum opus to date: an immense, pulsing graphic novel that’s also a treatise on art, creativity and the uses and misuses of technique. Originally serialized between 1990 and 1996 (and collected in 1998), it’s been out of print for several years. The book’s plot is fairly rudimentary: a painter, a writer and a musician who live in the same apartment building find their lives intersecting. But the book’s gradual shift from literalism to fanciful allegories and stories-within-stories mostly serves as the springboard for a visual tour de force.”
• Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Usually, adaptations of novels into comics suck. This is the exception – an adaptation with as much wit and depth as the original. What makes it work is Paul Karasik’s and David Mazzucchelli’s cartooning, which combines simple (but incredibly well-chosen) lines with wildly playful, sometimes surreal layouts that explore the novel’s themes of identity and obsession. Amazon currently has used copies of this available for only two bucks.

  So what’s it about? Umn, on the surface, it’s sort of a hard-boiled detective novel, except it’s really about an author of hard-boiled detective fiction who gets sucked in to pretending he’s an hard-boiled detective, and one of the false identities he takes on is Paul Auster, the author of the novel this comic is based on.

• The Frank Book by Jim Woodring. This is as wonderful as it’s indescribable. The Publishers Weekly description is okay: “Woodring, a modern master of hallucinatory cartoon fables, specializes in comics that look normal but aren’t. Woodring’s hallmarks are inventive, often bizarre creatures who inhabit otherworldly landscapes and dreamlike narratives. This book’s hero, Frank, is a catlike anthropomorph who lives in a surreal, exotic world.” But it fails to mention how horrifying and grotesque Woodring’s dream-world often is.
• Love and Rockets, the amazing comics of brothers Gilbert and Jamie Hernandez. The trouble is, there are so many reprints, it’s hard to know where to begin. There’s a huge volume of Gilbert’s comics, Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup stories, but it’s currently out of print. If your library doesn’t have that, I recommend starting with Human Diastrophism, which is astounding. Gilbert’s work features magical realism taking place (mostly) in a small village – I’m not sure if it’s in Mexico or Central America – but the stories are stunning, with some of the best-realized characters ever seen in comics.

  Jamie Hernandez’s huge reprint book Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories is still in print, and if you don’t mind being spendy it’s worth it. But if you want a more reasonably-priced sample, maybe you’re better off starting with volume 3 or thereabouts. Anyhow, Jamie Hernandez draws better than almost anyone in comics; his spare, efficient lines and black spotting are flawless. His writing is terrific, too; part slice-of-life, part soap opera, focusing on twenty-something punk Mexican-American women living in L.A.. Totally absorbing.

• Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. They made a pretty good movie of this comic, but the original is much better (and tells a significantly different story). This book, about two teenage girls, charts out one of those friendships-that-will-last-forever that people have in high school, and why it doesn’t even last to college.
• Playboy by Chester Brown. An autobiographical comic about Brown’s experiences (and particularly adolescent experiences) with Playboy magazine. Intelligent, disturbing, asks more questions than it provides answers.
• It’s a Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken by Seth. An autobiographical (or is it?) comic about art and obsession, focusing on Seth’s search for an obscure 1940s cartoonist. “While trying to understand his dissatisfaction with the present, Seth discovers the life and work of Kalo, a forgotten New Yorker cartoonist from the 1940s. But his obsession blinds him to the needs of his lover and the quiet desperation of his family. Wry self-reflection and moody colours characterize Seth’s style in this tale about learning lessons from nostalgia.”
• Mr Punch, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Gaiman’s famous for Sandman, but Mr Punch is a much better comic. “Neil Gaiman has several recurring themes to which he revisits again and again like the swallows returning to Capostrano. Foremost among these is the persistence of memory, which is the theme of ‘The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch.’ … The tale revolves around a Punch n’ Judy show at a seaside carnival and how it acts as a trigger for a young boys memories of his family. As with much of Gaiman’s work, there are tales within tales here, and the real story he tells is more implied than elucidated upon.”
• The Complete Crumb Comics Vol 17. I know that starting with Vol 17 seems weird, but the comics collected here – short stories from the last few issues of Weirdo and from Hup – are among the best Crumb has ever done. However, Crumb’s misogyny will rightly repel a lot of “Alas” readers.
• Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks. “World-famous cartoonist Dick Burger has earned millions and become the most powerful man in the comics industry. However, behind his rapid rise to success, there lies a dark and terrible secret, as biographer Leonard Batts discovers when he visits Burger’s hometown in remote New Zealand.” A mix of extreme cleverness, good writing and genuine love of comics makes this graphic novel so much better than you’d expect it to be.

  Plus, I love Horrocks’ drawing, which disdains trying to impress readers with a flashy surface, and instead impresses with stunningly great everything-but-the-surface.

• Bone by Jeff Smith. This is a pure epic fantasy adventure, with good characters and a plain joy in cartooning that shines out of the pages. If you can’t stand the fantasy genre, then you won’t like this, but otherwise it’s a classic. Just start with volume one and keep on reading.
• When I originally wrote this post, I said: “Beanworld deserves to be an all-time classic, but it’s marred because Larry Marder never completed it.” However, Larry Marder is now restarting Beanworld, which makes me very happy. Probably that means there will be new reprints coming out soon, too.
• Cerebus should have been an all-time classic, but unfortunately Dave Sim suddenly turned into an extreme misogynist and religious fundimentalist and ruined the story in the last quarter. Nonetheless, some of his work before he lost it includes some of the best comics ever done: In particular, High Society, Church & State, and Jaka’s Story are amazing achievements. High Society is the place to begin; it’s actually the second volume of Cerebus, but you can follow the story well anyway, and the first volume isn’t nearly as good.

1. Well, for all I know, he made it all up. But if so, he did it convincingly. [↩]