A History of Violence by John Wagner

I must admit I've never seen the film, and I can see that this is a graphic novel that could be easily translated into a gore fest with little delicacy. However, the graphic novel treats what could be quite a sterotypical story with great deftness and feeling. Tom McKenna is in hiding, outwardly a pillar of his local small town, married with a little girl, the proprieter of a diner in an idyllic close knit neighbourhood. But when he shoots and kills one of a pair of predatory killers who try to rob him he becomes a media celebrity and attracts the interest of the mob. It is the characteristation, quality of drawing and careful touches which draw together the story of a man thrown back to memories of a traumatic coming of age. Very highly recommended.

Metamaus by Art Spiegelman

I learned so much in this book. I knew that Maus had affected me deeply and that it wasn't just to do with the subject matter, but in MetaMaus I felt I really came to an understanding of the level of craft Spiegelman put into his work. Spiegelman speaks about the different levels of his books, the overt subject of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, but also the framing narrative of intergenerational misuderstandings and conflict, that being a survivor of the Holocaust doesn't make you perfect, and of the deep reasons for the use of animal models that reflected how Nazis themselves propagandised about Jews. I learned about the symbolism and movement of the panels across each page and Spiegelman's own struggle to express his ambivalism about his family history. I didn't think I could respect Spiegelman more that I did, but I do now. A wonderful piece, not just about Maus but about the history and methodology of the comic medium.

The Four Encounters: Buddha 2 by Osamu Tezuka

The young Prince Siddhartha, the boy who will one day become the Buddha, is growing up, baffled by the stark contrast between the privileges of his life as heir to the throne and those of people around him in a society viciously controlled by caste. He becomes aware of the realities of suffering and death that he has been so assiduously sheltered from, and begins to question the assumed order of his world. Falling in love with a pariah tragedy strikes and Siddhartha increasingly battles with the gulf between his role and his feelings, eventually casting off his life as a priceand all his finery, and hair and becoming a wandering monk.

Tezuka brings together the familiar Buddhist myth with a cast of ordinary people, tragic, hilarious, stupid, drawn with such skill and bringing the story of Siddhartha's inner and outer journeys vividly to life within a landscape and society that are both historic and timeless, with some wonderful anachronisms.

Devadatta: Buddha Book 3 by Osamu Tezuka

Prince Siddhartha, the boy who will one day become the Buddha, has cast off his life as a prince and becomes a monk. Volume 3 of Tezuka's epic chronicles his ordeals, opening with the beautiful boy monk asleep under a tree wakening in full awareness to a new day. We follow him as he meets with the monk Dhepa whose backstory was introduced to us in Volume 1. He takes Siddhartha to meet his master Naradatta introducing him along the way to the ascetic tradition of undertaking ordeals in order to cleanse the self of desire and become purer, entertainingly ridiculed to show how the Buddha began to question this polar opposite to his former regal life and at the end of this volume attains enlightenment.

Tezuka brings together the familiar Buddhist myth with a cast of ordinary people, tragic, hilarious, stupid, drawn with such skill and bringing the story of Siddhartha's inner and outer journeys vividly to life within a landscape and society that are both historic and timeless, with some wonderful anachronisms.

Charley's War 2 June - 1 August 1916 by Pat Mills

Charley's War is always brilliant, the collection of Battle comic strips of young Private Charley Bourne, fighting in the worst hells of the Western Front. In this collection we at the Front in August - October 1916, as the first 'landships', better known to us as tanks, are unleashed on the Germans. If the powers that be had used the full capacity of these new weapons the war would have been over, but as ever Mills and Colquhoun express the incompetence of the generals with brilliant black and white illustrations and show rather than tell us the horrific consequences of their stupidity on the lives of the soldiers fighting at the Front.

Charley's War: The Great Mutiny by Pat Mills

Charley's War is always brilliant, the collection of Battle comic strips of young Private Charley Bourne, fighting in the worst hells of the Western Front. In this collection we are Etaples training camp in August 1917 where the brutal treatment of trainees by officers explodes into mutiny. Then, filled with remorse for having to shoot one of his comrades for desertion he joins the stretcher bearer's, unarmed soldiers charged with going out of the trenches unarmed to collect the wounded with only armbands with the words SB on them to protect them. As ever Mills and Colquhoun express the unfairness and slaughter of the Western Front with brilliant black and white illustrations and show rather than tell us the horrors of shell shock, malnutrition, gas attacks, class hierarchies and black humour.

Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

Castle Waiting begins as the fairy tale castle Sleeping Beauty slept in for 100 years before being woken by a prince, but Linda Medley asks what happened after she woke and went off with her price. Medley answers with a wonderfully bizarre story steeped in cultural mythology and fairy tales, homage paid to the talking animals of Aesop, to Grimm and Andersen but also, becuase this is a (beautifully drawn) graphic novel, to Rackham and Beardsley. The hardback itself is beautiful, a lovely size on buff coloured paper bound with elegant endpapers.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Alison's father is a funeral director in a town so small he teaches part time to supplement his income. Both he and Alison's mother Helen are distant and emotionally unavailable leading to Alison's siblings and parents existing in the home behind the funeral home, the 'fun home' of the title in separate bubbles, like an artist's enclave. It is Alison's relationship with her father she focuses on in this brutally honest but gently wry and revelatory autobiography. He is a repressed homosexual obsessed with asthetisism, consumed with restoring their home to it's historical glory at the expense of his wife and children's own tastes and personal space. As Alison goes to college and discovers her own emerging homosexuality the truth about her father's affairs with boys comes out and she struggles with her deep love for a man unable to express affection for her. Compelling and well drawn.

Daredevil: The Man Without Fear TPB by Frank Miller and John Romita Jr

This is a beautiful rendition of the Daredevil genesis story arc  from the masterful pens / pencils of Frank Miller, John Romita, Al Willamson, Christie Scheele and Joe Rosen.

The artwork stunningly accompanies the devastating tale of Matt Munro, the motherless son of a boxer and reluctant mob enforcer raised in Hell's Kitchen.  An accident in which he is blinded by a chemical spill saving another man's life seems the end of his ambitions to educate himself out of the ghetto.  But a strange man known only as Stick comes into his life and teaches him how to use his other senses.  After his father is murdered for refusing to throw a fight Matt turns vigilante and metes out a terrible revenge, but loses his mentor as Stick abandons him as a lost cause.  Things don't look good as Matt is becomes passionately involved with fellow vigilante Elektra but he is redeemed by his fight to save a young girl.  From this he emerges as the fully fledged Daredevil.  Awesome.

The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman


I'm not a fan of horror films, this was selected for me by one of my current comic pushers at my library and I'm glad he did.

Rick Grimes wakes up in hospital having been in a coma, only to find himself the survivor of a horrific plague that has turned people into cannabilistic zombies.  Grimes makes his way to Atlanta in search of his wife and son and just escapes being eaten alive.

Rather than being splatter gore zombie fare Kirkman looks at what it means to be a survivor, how it feels to be left alive and what survival does to people's character.  Excellent execution (excuse the pun) and writing.

Y: The Last Man : One Small Step (Book 3) by Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra

After a plague which wipes out every creature carrying an X chromosome except for one man, Yorick Brown (alas) and his monkey Ampersand, the pair are travelling across post apocalyptic America with mysterious government agent 355 and bioengineer Dr Mann in search of the doctor's experimental files and a possible cure for the plague.  Israeli soldiers, a Russian agent and the return to earth of three astronauts, two male, from the International Space Station make for a great dystopia, can't wait to read the next.  Brilliantly written by Vaughan and drawn by Guerra.

Blankets by Craig Thompson


This is Thompson's autobiography and at over 580 pages it is a doorstep of a graphic novel, but utterly compelling, expressively drawn in lovely monochrome.
Craig and his younger brother Phil sleep together in a single bed, suffering the everyday traumas of growing up as an outsider, strict Christian fundamentalist parenting and sexual abuse at the hands of a babysitter.  As he negotiates high school with its social hierarchies and casual brutalites he falls in love at Christian summer camp with fellow outsider Raina.  She has her own burdens, a brother with Downs, a sister who is mentally retarded and an utterly selfish older sister who leaves the care of her own baby to her sister and mother.  Thompson chronicles the tender wonder that was his experience of first love, wonder battling with his fundamentalist inspired terror of the sins of lust, of his vision of Raina as a beautiful angel set in contrast to his own self loathing.  Blankets took me achingly back to my own adolescent years, it is stunning in its honesty and expression.

The title refers to a number of evocative concrete images, of a quilt created as a message of love, I know as a quilter the act of creation for a person means that there is an alchemy of thoughts about the person the quilt is destined for in every stitch.  Blankets also refers to the thin inadequate blanket Thompson and his brother shivered under together as boys, that could in their wild lovely imaginations become a pirate ship but could also lead them to fight, to Phil being punished by being traumatically shut in the house's tiny dark spider infested cubby hole and to Thompson carrying a burden of guilt at being unable to protect his brother. Blankets refers to the snows that cover the land during his time with Raina, to memories of creating snow angels, of watching snow fall in the dark and of the coming of the end of love with the thaw.

Cannot recommend enough

The Quitter by Harvey Pekar, art by Dean Haspel

Pekar is one of the giants of American comic writing and in this book expressively drawn in monochrome by Dean Haspel you can see why.  This is Pekar's autobiography of his younger years and he is relentlessly brutal and honest about his own shortcomings, in particular his inability to keep going with any task when faced with being less than perfect and not receiving adultation.  It is a tendency all of us have and dealing with failure is an essential part of character growth and Pekar is mercilessly candid about the ways this shortcoming has crippled his emotional and professional life.  One of those rare comics which is not action driven, not much happens but you come away feeling that you have encountered a mind of rare clarity and a story that you can truly learn from.  I only wish he'd completed the story.

The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels by Danny Fingeroth

This is a really well written and constructed guide to graphic novels.  It is divided into eight clear sections, starting with what constitutes a graphic novel and the history of the genre with a 40 page graphic novel about writing comics as interlude before moving on to Fingeroth's selection of 60 best graphic novels, the writers, artist and publishers and finishing with a good informative section on Managa, a section on film adapations and resources.  The layout is really attractive, with blue boxes in the margins providing information along the lines of 'if you like this, you might like...'.  It is good but not great, and it isn't completely up to date, being published in 2008 it misses some of the major movements of the last four years, such as the rise of steampunk, and there are some puzzling omissions as to major writers and artists.  However, a good starting point which has given me plenty of new information.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, adapted by Nancy Butler and Sonny Liew


Austen is both a challenge and an opportunity when it comes to translating into graphic novel form.  Her books deal with complex social hierarchies and subtleties, but Nancy Butler and Sonny Liew do an excellent job of adapting Sense and Sensiblity.  The pictoral element of graphic fiction can make light work of portraying paragraphs and pages of the novel and Liew elegantly makes the most of the format to communicate feelings and motivations.

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are sisters left impoverished and bereft of their family home by the death of their father and inheritance of the house by their elder half brother.  Elinor is sense, calm and determed, deep thinking, self sacrificing and loving, Marianne is sensibility, impulsive, passionate, headstrong and hasty.  Both have lessons to learn in life and Austen's novel is well handled by Butler.

Zita the Space Girl by Ben Hatke

Zita is playing with her friend Joseph when they find a fallen meteorite, wedged within is a red button.  Zita cannot resist and is appalled when on pressing the button Joseph is yanked through a gateway out of their reality by mechanical tentacles.  After a moment of reflection she presses the button and jumps after him into a world of strange creatures 3 days away from being hit by an annihilating asteroid.  In search of Joseph she meets strange creatures and makes friends such as the space traveller Piper who lulls enemies to sleep playing his pipe, One the Heavily Armoured Mobile Battle Orb, ostracised because he isn't a team player and Pizzicato the enormous mouse who hates his name.  Bewitchingly cute, Hatke's drawings and story create a world that enchanted both me and my 7 year old daughter.

Trouble Maker by Janet and Alex Evanovich, drawn by Joelle Jones

Sam Hooker, NASCAR driver and his mechanic and spotter Alex 'Barney' Barnaby along Hooker's massive St Bernard Beans are on the trail of their friend Rosa, kidnapped by Miama underworld  figure Armando 'Nitro' Dupont.  Cue a high octane ride through the world of Miami voodoo and alligator ridden swamps, complete with explosions, rpgs and snakes.  Super handsome Hooker and gorgeous blonde Barney are excellently drawn by Joelle Jones, full of expression and colour.

The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, adapted by Ian Edginton, illustrated by INJ Culbard

Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story The Valley of Fear is translated into a graphic novel excellently by Ian Edginton and the artwork of INJ Culbard.  Culbard's style is stark, graphic and dark, echoing the ligne claire style of strong lines and clear colours Herge used for Tintin.  The Valley of Fear is a twisting tale of secrets and terror, claustrophobically contained within the moat bound country house of Birlstone Manor and the mysterious murder of the rich country gentleman John Douglas, a tangle of threads leading back to secret societies and goldrush America.  A good adaptation.

Jar of Fools: A Picture Story by Jason Lutes


The Amazing Ernesto, prestidigiator, is on his uppers, haunted by the death of his escapologist brother who drowned in a failed stunt which took him to the bottom of the river, and by the loss of his girlfriend Esther. His previous mentor Al, once Flosso the Magnificent, turns up having escaped yet again from his nursing home. One trying to forget the past that haunts him, the other with genuine memory loss, go on the run with con artist Lender and his daughter Claire, running from child services and the law. Homeless and destitiute Ernie and Al teach Claire card tricks and a tender friendship springs up between the failed magicians and the father and daughter. It can never end well, but resolutions do come, and love, and good choices made for the right reasons. A compelling, quiet and sensitive graphic novel with starkly charming black and white graphics.

The Mighty Thor by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby


Collecting The Mighty Thor: Journey into Mystery 83-100 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, these are great 1960s comics.

Lame self effacing but brilliant Dr Don Blake is fleeing from alien stone men from Saturn when he stumbles into a cave discovering the hammer of Norse god Thor.  Striking it on the ground he becomes the mighty Asgardian, son of king of the gods Odin, mighty in strength, creator of thunder and great storms, but also mighty in heart.  When he lets go of the hammer for more than 60 seconds he returns to the body of the enfeebled Dr Blake, in love with but unable to express his affections to his beautiful nurse and constant companion Jane.

This is a great collection of a beloved Silver Age superhero, but I loved it also because it is also an encapsulation of early 1960s society and mores, how men and women related and loved, expressed themselves to each other.  Thor is used mercilessly as a propaganda tool, the jingoism of Thor's use as a tool against the terrors of Red China and the unthinking defence and advance of democracy is as much a part of the comics as his epic battles against his brother Loki, god of mischief, and other foes.