Grafix

Kids who know I write the Daisy Dreamer comic for Chickadee magazine often hit me up for suggestions on comics to read. But I seem to get asked for graphic novel recommendations from adults fairly regularly too.

I sent a long(ish) list to my pal Andy Riga the other day, and he suggested I blog it. So here goes.

Just about any discussion of graphic novels seems to start with Art Spiegelman's Maus and Maus II. They have become canonical, and remain a great place to start for people who aren't sure about the whole comics thing. You can't get much farther from the super-hero genre than a story that blends the difficult relationship of a Holocaust survivor and his son, with the survivor's horrific tale. Spiegelman uses the funny pages tradition of anthropomorphic animals to bridge the gap between comics as a genre for kids and as a means of telling stories with tough, mature themes.

Both of the Persepolis books by Marjane Satrapi are brilliant. They are comics memoirs. Volume one tells the story of her childhood in post-revolution Iran, and volume two picks up with her in boarding school in Vienna, but eventually making her way back to Iran. Graphically very simple, almost childlike, but very absorbing. And it is eye-opening to see the Iranian revolution from the inside, and how, especially to a child, incidents on which the West spilled lots of ink were barely noticed. Interestingly, Satrapi's introduction to graphic novels came through Spiegelman. She has written that "when I read him, I thought 'Jesus Christ, it's possible to tell a story and make a point this way.'"

Ben Katchor writes an odd little comic called Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer, and many of the strips are collected in books. Though I like Knipl's quirkiness, the Katchor book I love most is The Jew of New York, which is set in the 1830s and mixes fantasy and history (along with a plan to carbonate all of Lake Erie).

These aren't strictly speaking graphic novels, but Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo books are superb. Set in 17th-century Japan, they tell stories centred on a masterless samurai named Usagi, who wanders the country. He has a couple of good friends who reoccur in the books, and a son who (Usagi thinks) doesn't realize that he is really his father, and not his uncle. The characters are all anthropomorphic animals. Usagi is a rabbit (Usagi Yojimbo means Rabbit Bodyguard), the bounty hunter Gen is a rhinoceros, etc. When I first started reading the books, this threw me off, but I quickly got used to it. Stan Sakai has done a lot of research into medieval Japan (and often tells you about his sources in the endnotes) and brings it all to life. The stories are filled with action, but the violence is never gory or gratuitous (maybe in part because you've got animals fighting each other). There is much more to them than sword-fighting though. These are stories filled with compassion and heart.

I also really like the "comics journalism" of Joe Sacco, especially his Safe Area Gorazde, about an enclave of Muslims hanging on (not always successfully) during the Bosnian war. Haunting and chilling, but very well done. Sacco manages to bring out the horror of the situation without resorting to gore. Take the scene where a Muslim family is roused from sleep by Serb thugs. We see an image of shoes just under the bed. Someone in the family asks for permission to get their shoes on. Their abductor says it doesn't matter -- they'll all be dead in a few minutes anyway. I walked around with this book in my mind for months after reading it.

A word about Will Eisner. Am I a heretic? I've never been especially drawn to Eisner, even though he is revered as the father of the graphic novel, and has one of the big comics awards named for him. To comics creators he's a key influence who has made their work possible. But I still find his artwork a bit ham-fisted and the storylines predictable.

Chester Brown's Louis Riel biography -- even though it is not always historically accurate -- is a landmark work in Canadian comics history. I felf like I truly understood the Riel rebellion for the first time after reading this. And for purists (like me), Brown does include extensive notes both for reference, and also to clearly notewhere he has deviated from the truth for the sake of storytelling.

I also absolutely love the work of Michael Kupperman, but I'll save that for another post.

Finally, I highly recommend Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It's a non-fiction book (in comics format) that really thinks through the history and future of the genre, and looks into how and why comics work. He followed it up with Reinventing Comics, and is about to release Making Comics -- and will then kick off a cross-continent tour that will see him coming here to Halifax.