Blankets by Craig Thompson
Craig Thompson’s semi-autobiographical story about first love and growing up in a deeply religious community demonstrates a full range of graphic and storytelling skills. The brushed images are ‘to die for’ and consistently strong across hundreds of pages. The pace and content of the script is skilfully paced to give enough depth to get a real flavour of the world Thompson is exploring, without slowing the development of the story.
Ultimate Spiderman: Power and Responsibility by Brian Michael Bendis, Bill Jemas and Mark Bagley
Marvel’s Spiderman character had lost its way over the years and the Ultimate series set out to place Spiderman back at the centre of Marvel’s superhero line-up. The plan was to update the original storyline from the outset, allowing a new generation of readers to meet the original ‘cast’ in a modern setting.
Success or failure depended largely on the skills of the writers and artists. Bendis and Jemas proved more than capable of adapting the original material, while Bagley’s fluid artwork gave the stories a new intensity. Even the smaller panels are packed with dynamic figure drawing, and some of the larger panels set a new benchmark in terms of the number and quality of high impact panels within a comic book. The same quality continues throughout the next two collections of the comic editions, so it’s easy to recommend Volume 1 of the Collected Sets.
Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 1: Power and Responsibility
Yossel: April 29th, 1943 by Joe Kubert
Joe Kubert was a comic book legend long before he sat down to create this harrowing story of the Nazi assault on the Warsaw Ghetto during World War 2. Kubert’s own family escaped the Nazis before it was too late but the depth of feeling shown throughout suggests that Kubert was very close to the subject. In part, because his family could so easily have been caught up in the Holocaust.
The images are all loose pencil sketches, which are incredibly powerful both in terms of setting out the artist’s obvious skill and conveying a sense of the grey, hopeless world occupied by victims of the Warsaw Ghetto and Hitler’s concentration camps. If you read none of the other graphic novels in our selection please check out Yossel. It is a masterpiece among graphic novels. Not only does it demonstrate the value and uniqueness of the form as a whole, it also shows the critical importance of sketching in the production of any comic or graphic novel.
The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
Neil Gaiman has written many clever graphic novels. The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish stands out, because it takes teenagers and adults back to the world we occupied as young children. The book shows and closes the distance between our childhood hopes and priorities, and the rules and values of adult life. In doing so, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish demonstrates how graphic novels can communicate as well as, if not better than, most media. Particularly when Gaiman’s concept and scripting could only work if McKean’s graphics were equally successful in bridging the gap between children and adults.
The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish
Little Apple Dolls: Welcome to the Inbetween by Ufuoma Urie
You don’t need to be a Goth to appreciate Welcome to the Inbetween. It’s part collage, part comic, part existentialism. It’s also highly recommended, despite being quite expensive given the number of pages.
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