Graphic Novels

Kate Beaton’s first graphic novel is an autobiographical masterpiece. After finishing university in 2005, Beaton leaves Nova Scotia (job opportunities are slim) to work in the lucrative Alberta oilsands, which seems to be the only feasible option for paying off her student loans before they accrue unmanageable amounts of interest.  And it’s a mixed bag to say the least. The world of the oil sands it’s an almost all-male offshoot of the real world, where most workers live on site from a variety of backgrounds (some rich kids with jobs landed through nepotism, some working class tradesmen whose original professions have been destroyed), isolated from society in a pressure cooker environment of poor safety standards, environmental carnage and daily workplace sexism. This is an eye-opening memoir of a particular time and place and experience, and perfectly mixes the quirky flair of Beaton’s web-comics with depth, seriousness and humanity. Sure to be a graphic novel modern classic in the veins of Persepolis and Fun Home.

This graphic novel is nothing short of a masterpiece. Honestly, it’s going to join the canon of “absolute mega-hits” alongside Fun Home, Maus, that kind of thing.

I knew nothing about Sammy Harkham or this comic up until this year, but it turns out it’s been almost two decades in the making, released in partly serialised format in a regular comics anthology. You can see why – it’s clear how much work went into this. We follow Seymour, an Iraqi Jewish ex-pat living in 1970s LA as a frustrated and disregarded film editor, mostly for exploitation films – but with ambitions to write and direct his own horror flick: The Blood of the Virgin. His trials in bringing this movie to fruition make up the brunt of the action, but underlying his artistic struggles are his personal travails: his unsuccessful marriage to Ida, his infant son from whom he feels his estranged, Jewish identity, the recent history of the Holocaust. It’s seriously powerful, and feels as much of an accomplishment for the comic format as Maus was.

The Hard Switch is the highly anticipated sci-fi graphic novel from Owen D Pomery (architectural artist turned comics writer) – and it lives up to the hype in a big way! The story follows a rag-tag bunch of interstellar scavengers (two humans, one octopus) in a vast universe which is about to get much smaller. The galactic civilisation is on the brink of fuel scarcity, after which interstellar travel will be impossible (except for the very rich)… unless? FFO Star Wars Original Trilogy, Firefly 

Kafka’s stories adapted in manga form – it wasn’t something I knew I needed, to be truthful. But, honestly, Kyodai’s style suits Kafka so much (it’s very reminiscent of a more geometrically inclined Edward Gorey). These are adaptations in the truest sense: the focus is different, things are left out or emphasised, the detail in the artwork adds to rather than subtracts from the text and the choices that are made are exceptionally interesting and further evoke the beguiling, strange and unsettling atmosphere of Kafka. Perfect stocking-filler fodder for Kafka fans, manga fans, lovers of slightly weird book-shaped delights.

Chef and gastronome Rubin Baksh learns that Anthony Bourdain has died and decides he needs to share his own love of food with the world. He tracks down Mo, a disillusioned young filmmaker, to make a food-travel-documentary around India together, with Rubin in the starring role. Each chapter is defined by a different recipe (and the recipes are included!) and the people, stories and traditions behind them, but as their road trip draws on things start getting pretty damn sinister… The charismatic cigar smoking chef isn’t exactly what he seems. Great graphic novel, awesome drawings, no notes. Immaculate. 

Yoshiharu Tsuge’s first full-length graphic novel to be translated into English (though the last he wrote in his career) is an unrelentingly bleak but completely beautiful artifact, an autobiographical reckoning with the ultimate futility of doing anything creative with your life. It’s lols all round, as you can imagine. We follow a version of the author as his desire to create comics ebbs and flows, but not as much as his relationship with his increasingly frustrated family who depend on him for support but can’t access his inner life. Tsuge’s cipher scrabbles about in the muddy waters to the west of Tokyo to find rocks to sell rather than actively seeking lucrative drawing work, and he’s captured in a kind of professional paralysis that creative folks will find only too relatable. Strange and beautiful, internal yet expansive. 

Alison Bechdel is one of the greats, no doubt about it. All her “graphic memoirs” are brilliant, but Fun Home is the place to start. It’s a coming-of-age and a coming-out story, exquisitely self-reflective and profound, but it’s also a beautifully realised family history. Bechdel’s family grew up in a funeral home, in the long shadow of Alison’s emotionally distant father: the undertaker of the funeral home and relentlessly literary local high school teacher, and, as it turns out, a much more complicated man than any of them realised. This is a profound, meditative, genre-defining graphic novel and absolutely worth your time.

If you have already read Fun Home (as many of you will have), then I highly recommend the other two. Are You My Mother? follows directly on from Fun Home and covers the relationship with Alison’s mother and how that was influenced by the publication of Fun Home. The Secret to Superhuman Strength continues Alison’s biographical pieces a couple of decades in the future with a radically different theme (exercise, sport, the body, cycling, hiking) but with the same philosophical and literary depth that she uses in her previous books. The theme is more of a uniting force and a honing device that brings all the good stuff together – plus deep analysis of the transcendentalists and the Beat Poets and their place in the history of queerness. Bechdel is rightly considered a total genius.

A read-in-one-sitting, can’t-put-it-down graphic novel. Not a short one, but a “stop what you’re doing for a couple days” level of brilliant. Equal parts very funny and moving, a story about what it means to try and connect with other people and express something real with big helpings of rom-com (in the best, When Harry Met Sally-style rom-com way).  

Virtuosically brilliant and confessional auto-bio-comic following 6 months in the life of Zoe Thorogood – the months in which she’s making this comic. It’s a comic about a comic, and also about her other comics… and her comics career. Comics! Big big content warnings for suicide and self-harm, as these topics are explored at length in the book – which is not to say it’s a depressing read at all. Thorogood jumps around through art styles and time and place and uses the comics form in a way that few artists do. Funny, cathartic, and singular. 

If you’re already familiar with Hannawalt’s now-legendary animated TV shows, you’re likely to find echoes of the underlying melancholy of those works in the deftly hilarious graphic novel. Partly a queer reimagining of classic westerns of yore, there is a sullen yet tender quality to the humour that yanks the whole novel and its wandering narrative out of the past and very much into a liltingly surreal present.

We can heartily recommend anything by Noah Van Sciver, but this is a good place to start!

His work sits precisely between satire and pathos, especially with the three-volume Fante Bukowski, where he satirises the character of the Wannabe Writer.

As A Cartoonist is a grab bag collection of his shorter works, including plenty of autobiographical pieces from his Mormon upbringing, comic strips about his life as a successful cartoonist (not all glitz and glam as it turns out). It’s all genuinely hilarious and beautifully realised. Be duly warned, you may up binging all his work after reading this, as we have.