LibGuides: Graphic Novels: Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo
Call Number: PN6727.O86 A351 2000

ISBN: 1569714983

Set in Tokyo 38 years after its destruction in World War III (which, according to this story, happened in 1992), Akira eventually evolves into a philosophical investigation of time.
--Publisher's Weekly
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Call Number: PN6727.B87 B53 2005

ISBN: 037542380X

The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. 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.
--Amazon.com
Blankets by Craig Thompson
Call Number: PN6727.T467 B53 2003

ISBN: 1891830430

This sensitive memoir recreates the confusion, emotional pain and isolation of the author's rigidly fundamentalist Christian upbringing, along with the trepidation of growing into maturity.
--Publisher's Weekly
Bone by Jeff Smith
Call Number: PN6727.S546 B66 2004

ISBN: 188896314X

Three modern cartoon cousins get lost in a pre-technological valley, speanding a year there making new friends and out-running dangerous enemies. Their many adventures include crossing the local people in The Great Cow Race, and meeting a giant mountain lion called RockJaw: Master of the Eastern Border. They learn about sacrifice and hardship in The Ghost Circles and finally discover their own true natures in the climatic journey to The Crown of Horns.
--Amazon.com
Buddha by Osamu Tezuka
Call Number: PN6790.J34 B83 2003

ISBN: 1932234438

Tezuka, the master of Japanese comics, mixes his own characters with history as deftly as he transfers the most profound, complex emotions onto extremely cartoony characters, and his work defies easy categorization. In Buddha, originally serialized in the 1970s and one of his last works, he lavishly retells the life of Siddhartha.
--Publisher's Weekly
Cerebus by Dave Sim & Gerhard
Call Number: PN6732.S5 C47 1986

ISBN: 0919359086

Welcome to Estarcion, the wildly absurd and funny world of Cerebus the Aardvark. In 1977, when the Cerebus comic book series began, Sim initially conceived of it as a parody of such popular series as Conan, Red Sonja, and Elric but quickly mined that material and transformed the scope of the series into much more.
--Amazon.com
Complete Concrete by Paul Chadwick
Call Number: PN6727.C42 C667 1994

ISBN: 1569710376

Part man, part...rock? Over seven feet tall and weighing over a thousand pounds, he is known as Concrete but is in reality the mind of one Ronald Lithgow, trapped inside a shell of stone, a body that allows him to walk unaided on the ocean's floor or survive the crush of a thousand tons of rubble in a collapsed mineshaft...but prevents him from feeling the touch of a human hand. These stories of Concrete are as rich and satisfying as any in comics: funny, heartbreaking, and singularly human.
--Amazon.com
Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini
Call Number: PN6728.E45 P5635 2003

ISBN: 1401201288

Originally published in the 1970s, ElfQuest chronicles the adventures of a forest-dwelling tribe of elves forced from their homes by evil humans. After encountering some duplicitous trolls, the band of refugees makes its way across the wilderness and finds another, previously unknown tribe of elves. The perils of the trip and the integration of the two tribes make for all sorts of dramatic tableaux.
--Publisher's Weekly
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Call Number: PN6727.C56 G6 2003

ISBN: 9781560974277

One of the best-selling and critically-acclaimed graphic novels of all-time telling the story of two supremely ironic, above-it-all teenagers facing the thrilling uncertainty of life after high school. As they attempt to carry their life-long friendship into a new era, the careful dynamics of their inseparable bond are jolted, and what seemed like a future of endless possibilities looks more like an encroaching reality of strip malls, low-paying service jobs and fading memories.
--Amazon.com
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
Call Number: PN6727.W285 J56 2000

ISBN: 0375404538

Ware's graphically inventive, wonderfully realized novel-in-comics follows the sad fortunes of four generations of phlegmatic, defeated men while touching on themes of abandonment, social isolation and despair within the sweeping depiction of Chicago's urban transformation over the course of a century.
--Publisher's Weekly
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Call Number: D810 .J4 S643 1991

ISBN: 0394747232

Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and '70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel. By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form--the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs--Spiegelman compels the reader to imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew.
--Amazon.com
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka; adapted by Peter Kuper
Call Number: PN6714 .K87 2003

ISBN: 1400047951

Acclaimed graphic artist Peter Kuper presents a brilliant, darkly comic reimagining of Kafka’s classic tale of family, alienation, and a giant bug. Kuper’s electric drawings—which merge American cartooning with German expressionism—bring Kafka’s prose to vivid life, reviving the original story’s humor and poignancy in a way that will surprise and delight readers of Kafka and graphic novels alike.
--Amazon.com
Our Cancer Year by Joyce Brabner and Harvey Pekar
Call Number: RC265.6.P45 B73 1994x

ISBN: 1568580118

"This is a story about a year when someone was sick, about a time when it seemed that the rest of the world was sick, too." So begins Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner's painful comic book autobiography centering on the year that they found out that Pekar had cancer; the year that also saw Operation Desert Shield turn into Operation Desert Storm. Drawing upon the many personal trials they faced, Pekar and Brabner create a portrait of a man beset with fears both real and imagined.
--Amazon.com
Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez
Call Number: PN6727.H47 P25 2003

ISBN: 1560975393

In 1983, Hernandez started writing and drawing short stories in Love and Rockets about a little central American town called Palomar and the interconnected lives of its inhabitants. The "Heartbreak Soup" stories, as they were called, established his reputation, and this mammoth, hugely compelling book collects the first 13 years' worth of them.
--Publisher's Weekly
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Call Number: PN6747.S245 P4713 2003

ISBN: 0375422307

Satrapi's autobiography is a timely and timeless story of a young girl's life under the Islamic Revolution.
--Publisher's Weekly
Sin City by Frank Miller
Call Number: Graphic Novels PN6728.S563 M55 2005

ISBN: 1593072937

Sin City launched the long-running, critically acclaimed series of comics novels by Frank Miller. Having worked on some of the most important comic books in the 1980s, including Marvel Comics's Daredevil and the influential Batman graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, Miller was already a heavy-weight cartoonist, but he hit his stride with Sin City. It gave him the freedom that doesn't come when working on someone else's characters. While the art isn't as polished as in later books, it is in many ways the quintessential Sin City story: tough-guy Marv finds the girl of his dreams, an incredible beauty named Goldie. But when Goldie is murdered on their first night together, Marv scours the bars and back alleys of Sin City to find her killer in hopes of avenging her death. -- Amazon.com
Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse
Call Number: PN6727.C74 S86 1995

ISBN: 1563892553

From Amazon.com:
A truly eye-opening comic. The story is set in the South in the early '60s and deals with homophobia, racism and the gay subculture of that period. The art is absolutely beautiful; Cruse is a master of the cross-hatching technique, which gives a certain "texture" to his art work and brings his pages to life. Stuck Rubber Baby is easily the most important comic book since Art Spiegelman's Maus.
Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai
Call Number: Graphic Novels PN6727.S15

ISBN: 1569714134

From Amazon.com:
Miyamoto Usagi is no Bugs Bunny. He's a rabbit bodyguard, a samurai who wanders the mountains, plains, and villages of a 17th-century Japan populated almost exclusively by anthropomorphic animals. Cats, snakes, rhinos, and ninja moles plot and fight their way across a land ravaged by civil war. The 10 stories in this first collection introduce Usagi, the evil Lord Hikiji, and a host of other characters. The stories themselves can stand alone, but taken together they begin to form an ongoing saga of treachery and revenge. Sometimes violent, sometimes funny, Usagi's adventures are filled with fascinating historical detail. The costumes, landscapes, and buildings are beautifully drawn, creating such a sense of realism it's easy to forget the hero is a rabbit. If you buy the first book in this series, you'll want the rest.
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore & David Lloyd
Call Number: PN6737.M63 V2 1990

ISBN: 0930289528

It is 1998 (which was the future back then!) and a Fascist government has taken over the U.K. The only blot on its particular landscape is a lone terrorist who is systematically killing all the government personnel associated with a now destroyed secret concentration camp. Codename V is out for vengeance ... and an awful lot more.
--Mark Thwaite, ReadySteadyBook

Stuck Rubber Baby

More Graphic Novels

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (Illustrator)
Call Number: PN6727.B3757 Z46 2006

ISBN: 9780618477944

Publication Date: 2006-06-08

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.
A Contract with God by Will Eisner (Illustrator)
Call Number: PN6727.E4 C6 1985

ISBN: 1563896745

Publication Date: 2000-05-01

It's fair to say that Will Eisner invented modern,comic art. A Contract with God has been called the,first graphic novel, and its divergence from,traditional comics themes and forms highlights,Eisner's foresight and brilliance. Dealing with,stories and memories from his childhood in a Bronx,tenement, he explores the brutality, fragilityand tenderness possible among people living in,close quarters close to the poverty line. The four,stories here are tough but funny, deep but finely,detailed, much like the traditional Jewish stories,he drew upon to flavor his own work.
Watchmen by Alan Moore; Dave Gibbons
Call Number: PN6737.M6 W35 1987

ISBN: 0930289234

Publication Date: 1995-04-01

It all begins with the paranoid delusions of a half-insane hero called Rorschach--but is he really insane or has he, in fact, uncovered a plot to murder super-heroes and possibly millions of innocent civilians? Following two generations of masked super-heroes from the close of World War II to the icy shadow of the Cold War comes this groundbreaking comic story--the story of The Watchmen.
Epileptic by David B.; Kim Thompson (Translator)
Call Number: PN6747 .B2 2002

ISBN: 0375423184

Publication Date: 2005-01-04

With stunning black-and-white illustrations, a noted cartoonist chronicles growing up with an epileptic older brother. The author charts his complicated relationship with his brother from childhood to adulthood, and the effects of the illness on the entire family.