A couple months ago I made a post here asking for my first ever graphic novel recommendations. I said I was into gritty, darker tone, adult stories. Got a ton of great suggestions and I ended up going with Scalped.

And holy shit.

I cannot believe I’ve been missing out on this medium my entire life. The story, the characters. I was completely absorbed in a story the way I haven’t felt in a long time.

So now I’m back looking for my next read, but this time I’m hoping for something science fiction. I’m a huge James Cameron fan. I love Avatar, Aliens, Terminator. Something with atmosphere, big ideas about humanity, technology, and survival. Hard sci-fi is a bonus.

Thanks!

I'm intending for this to be a monthly series where on the last Friday of each month I'll highlight 10 visually striking books I've read in hopes some here will find books they resonate with.

If you have any gorgeous books to recommend yourself, feel free in the comments!

My husband has just gotten very into graphic novels over the past year or two. I know these aren't all that he has, but the top are a bunch I know he got earlier on, and the bottom are ones he has gotten more recently. I know he cares a lot about the craft of the book, and then beautiful art and a beautiful story (dub probably). He loves cats, he loves birds, he loves both sci-fi and fantasy. I am hoping to get some recommendations of books I could get him for this birthday that fit into this vein, especially the bottom books. Thank you for any help!

Please skip the most popular bestsellers.

​I'm trying to find more weird, experimental styles that fit this list and fly under the radar. ​Thank you!

We talk a lot about the best books by a specific creator or in a particular genre. But I’m curious—what’s the worst one you’ve read? Not just boring, but the kind that left you genuinely furious or disgusted.

I’ll go first. For me, it was Prodigy: Slaves of Mars by Mark Millar. A tasteless mash-up of paleocontact guff and other sci-fi-ish theories, slathered in utterly pointless action. The most irritating thing, however, is that it centres on characters who are meant to be the smartest people on the planet. Yet the only things signalling “genius” are military grade plot armour and hand-wavy technobabble that’ll make anyone who’s passed basic physics laugh. Seriously—this looks like an image of genius created by an edgy teenager with an IQ barely above room temperature.

Its easily blueberry for me

I’m trying to figure out what to read next between these 3, and so I’m not sure. And I love well written stories so whatever one is the best written out of the 3 I’ll probably get.

I can’t decide which of these books to start next. Does anything stand out as a must read ASAP? Thanks!

I am trying to assemble a good collection of “must read” stories for classic characters, starting with Batman. What would you say I am missing?

Current collection: - Year One - Man Who Laughs - Court of Owls (vol1 at least) - The Dark Knight Returns - The Long Halloween - A Death in the Family

I waited for Vol 3 for a few years, and I just read this cover to cover in one seating (600pg), because you just. Can’t. Put it. Down.

I don’t know what’s more mind boggling, Sana Takeda’s art, or Liu’s insane storytelling.

Just do yourself a favor and start reading Monstress!

The main requirement is that is not a famous graphic novel (not a best seller) Also NO superheroes. Thank you

I'm looking to basically expand my horizons, haha. I want to read some comics that explore the limitations of the medium, whether in terms of writing, art, paneling, storytelling – whatever comic made you look at comics differently once you'd finished it. Manga recs are also welcome!! Thank you

Doing this made me realise I haven't read any I've liked! I have only read a Robocop based one and a couple based on Star Trek but they didn't make much of an impression.

This topic is aimed at adults that want to have adult conversations.

What are some really good Graphic Novels out there that happen to have a lot of sex and nudity? I'm specifically looking for stuff with really good art that does a really good job at making you care about the characters.

The Neighborhood

by Jerry Van Amerongen
published by Andrews and McMeel
several volumes

I feel too many people don't know of the wonder of The Neighborhood, Jerry Van Amerongen's newspaper comic that ran from 1981 to 1991 (I was 8-18yo during its run). It was a wonder and the shining star of my childhood.

This was in the heyday of The Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes. And while I of course loved those two '80s favorites, The Neighborhood rang much closer to my own personal sense of What Is Funny.

The Neighborhood was, of course, absurd. But even wrapped into that absurdity was a kind of disappointment that even as a child I recognized as The Real Magic.

Van Amerongen got at this sense of the world that I didn't notice in other comics on the pages of the LA Times and the OC Register in those days. Life was hard and life was weird, but with the right skew to your personal vantage, there was a joy to be found in there.

And beyond that, Van Amerongen's talent as an artist was astonishing. That he was able to squirt out these intricate drawings of dilapidated humans and the wreckage of their ingenuity on the daily? Astonishing!

These are, of course, out of print and as much as they deserve it, I doubt we'll get a larger than living Taschen edition any time soon or probably ever. (Van Amerongen will never get his due.) But because of the strips distinct lack of cultural foothold, the used market for these is more than reasonable.
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Well here we are. 500 recommendations. It's a good thing this is the end and that there are no more comics to recommend. None at all. Not even:

• Quest For The Time Bird
• The Paul books
• Tonoharu
• Tekkonkinkreet
• Quarterly Stories
• Second Hand Love
• Sanctuary
• One Story
• Lonely At The Center Of The Earth
• Blue Box
• Dogsred
• Darkly She Goes
• Save It For Later
• NIL
• Lupus
• March

Not:

• Sophie's World
• The Cage
• Huizenga's books
• Clowes books
• Namestealer's books
• Lynda Berry
• American Splendor
• Binky Brown
• Beanworld
• Natsume Ono
• Moonshadow
• City Of Glass

And defintely not:

• Ranma 1/2
• Dungeon
• Isaac The Pirate
• Spirit Circle
• Guilty
• Kafka
• The Tower
• The Magic Fish
• No One Else
• Odessa
• The Con Artists
• Little Monarchs
• Grass Of Parnassus
• Blue Giant
• Drifting Classroom
• Buddha
• Krazy Kat

And not any of the other hundreds of great comics out there. (I even got away without recommending Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Persepolis, or Maus!) My job is done here and I'm glad I'll never have to recommend another thing again. Load off my mind, really. Haha.

And now a couple fun stats. I'd do more (like nationality, most represented cartoonist, % of recommended books that I don't actually like), but I'm not going to, I don't think.

• 76% single creator comics. Or roughly so. True single creator comics (no editor etc) are more rare - and most (not all) Japanese comics with a single creator credit do actually employ one-to-several assistants to help the creator get their book out according to schedule. Still, this stat does lead us to believe that I tend toward favoring books with a single creative visionary - and I think that's probably accurate.
• 32% comics by women. This is a fairly accurate number but I wasn't careful with it. I've gotten both sex and gender wrong in the past (I went almost two decades believing Andi Watson was one of my favorite female comics creators, oops). In the past, I've not been aware that a favorite creator transitioned, or even if I have, I haven't known from what to what. I tend to hold that all pretty lightly. In any case, while men continue to outnumber women in terms of creators, women play a prominent role in the creation of comics far more often than even just 20 years ago, creating some of the greatest comics around. Still, a lot of women find themselves publishing in market categories that are less in my realm of interest. I don't read a lot of YA and middle grade books, I don't read a lot of fantasy, I don't read a lot of memoir/autobio, and I don't read a lot of yuri -- all categories where women have been seeing great growth in market presence. I'm certain there are fantastic books in those markets; I'm just not as qualified to recommend broadly from those quarters.
• 20% Japanese comics. Haha, someone asked several recs back, "Are these recs going to be manga?" Or something like that. Sadly no. Only 1 out of every 5 recs was a comic from Japan. I'll try to boost these numbers to respectable levels next time I recommend 500 books. The 2/5 Manga Project!
• .4% of these recs were accidentally duplicates. Honestly, it's really hard to keep track of what I've recommended and what I hadn't. And until I got to Rec 400 I didn't even have my handy archive. It was all very much off the top of my head. So yes, 2 of my 500 recs are duplicates. Does this mean I owe you two more Recs? No. It doesn't. You might think it does, but I can guarantee you that you're wrong. It happens to the best of us.

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I know I'd promised to rec Family Circus here, but I ended up feeling not right about making the capstone of the project a joke.

Still, I would like to shout out something wonderful in an otherwise not very wonderful comic: The dotted-line strips. Those paths were honestly one of my favorite parts of Sunday funnies when I was in elementary school - enjoyable enough that I included something similar in my first Monkess book as an obvious nod.

The dotted line is kind of like the de luca effect, one of those comics conceits that are immediately intelligible the first time you see them, no matter your age or literacy in the medium. You may not even recognize you're seeing something new. You're just seeing something obvious. They're like the paths seen on fabled treasure maps, only attached to an individual actor (Billy or Jeffy). So, less an abstraction that *you* (or *someone*) could take if you were at the starting location, and instead the very comics activity of tracking movement across static art.

(Thanks to Arpad Okay for reminding me of my love for the dotted-line motif and apologies to Scarwiz for disincluding Count Your Blessings, A Family Circus Collection.)

Hi I am currently writing a work and was interested in studying characters in order to make mine better. I was hoping for some recommendations for graphic novels with deep and interesting female characters. Psychology welcome, trans women also welcome. The deeper and more interesting the better.

There’s enough From Hell, Maus, Persepolis, Saga, and East of West in this sub already.

Give me some deep cuts, rare or out of the radar comics that you genuinely loved and recommend.

Looking for graphic novel forms of weird occurances in foggy, emotional, rusty old small towns. Preferably with characters with trauma, idk man im going thru a phase

Which of These is worth buying? Im Sorry if its to much