The best books that capture the breadth of graphic literature and why you must read them

This is a great story about a Muslim Pakistani high school student in Jersey City who suddenly body-morphs as she develops superhero powers. As Kamala discovers, being Ms Marvel is about following her faith’s call to help others regardless of who they are. Ms. Marvel’s engaging story educates readers on immigrant culture, debates, and shared values within Muslim families and communities and how closely aligned Islam is with the central tenets of superhero life to address wrongs while at the same time challenging Islamophobic ideas. 

Why is this comic important? It is a great way for teens, both inside and outside Islam, immigrants or not, to learn about this faith as one set of characters live it and to follow a character whose life is, in a variety of ways, not so different from their own. It’s also a series that invites readers to think about shared values and norms, to get insights into ways of life unlike their own, and to consider what being a hero really means. 

This queer memoir takes us to New York City to explore the unfolding queer life of a child of Bengali immigrants in her difficult decision to divest from parents, colleagues, and friends’ expectations for her life. After taking up architecture as a career and attending Harvard to the delight of her parents, Anjali realizes that her real interest lies in creating graphic literature. This coincides with another journey away from the expected future marriage and family toward exploring and affirming her sexuality and attraction to women. In often spare and simple settings with clean lines that let readers fill in the gaps – for example, with picture frames containing blank canvasses rather than pictures – Anjali creates her own pictures, both as a graphic artist and in imagining her own life. 

Love lies at the heart of this fictionalized memoir. A full recipe from Anjali’s father’s repertoire, a culinary interest shared by father and daughter as traditional dishes are reworked by the latter, becomes a final moment of grace and recognition. It offers a moving metaphor for finding one’s way outside one’s childhood world while recognizing where and how tradition nourishes and ties generations together. 

This compelling graphic novel adaptation captures Butler’s Afrofuturist science fiction in its dark-toned palette and relentless movements in and across panels, with pages crammed with characters traveling within and outside of an urban enclave surrounded by gangs and criminals. The red of apocalypse and the California desert saturate pages, signaling current and immanent violence and danger and a landscape in environmental crisis. Through it all, Lauren reflects on how a new vision is required to liberate the oppressed without reproducing the conditions that brought it about. Amidst the bleak and violent scenes, we read excerpts from her Earthseed journaling of an unfolding religion where God is Change.

A futuristic world portrays the ongoing struggles of Black Americans for equity, racial justice, and economic and cultural futures. Its spirituals and Black culture form a new platform for Lauren’s exodus to a new land, a journey fraught with danger and difficult decisions, but also a growing collection of individuals establishing new family structures and engaging with Lauren’s Earthseed religion. This novel challenges us to consider how to create a world of human and environmental justice where change is the only certainty.

This 4-volume serialized graphic novel tells the story of an Indigenous family across centuries and generations, stretching from Indigenous history before colonialism to ongoing colonial violence in Residential Schools until the present world of a Cree youth in existential crisis as he attempts to take his own life. His mother then guides him on a path of personal healing from his intergenerational trauma through stories about their history and traditions; Edwin’s journey takes him into the heart of ceremony and connection with his culture and history. He discovers his own strength to heal and then offers his father the opportunity to find his own healing path.

In this graphic novel, we are educated about Indigenous history through stories of struggle, resilience, and resurgence across the centuries. As Edwin, guided by his mother, meets with Elders, embraces his Cree identity, and pursues a path of healing through traditional teachings and practices, we see the strength of a people holding fast to their traditions and values against all odds. The story doesn’t soft-peddle intergenerational trauma or colonial history. Non-Indigenous people like me learn about Indigenous history and culture through the cruelty of colonialism but also the resurgence of Indigenous ways and the strengthening bonds of ceremony and connection. 

There are lots of graphic novels and memoirs with medical themes, but I want to shine a light on this unique collaboration by brothers who capture their shared experience of schizophrenia, one diagnosed with the condition and the other who accompanies him through difficult navigation of an inadequate health care system and the struggle of managing a disease that isolates individuals and families from their communities.

Each brother works side-by-side to tell their interrelated stories: Olivier is a visual artist, and Clem is an author and playwright. Olivier’s drawings are on the verso, in simple black and white sketches, often unframed, of family holidays, from picnics to Christmas, with obscuring smudges, stiff figures, and unsmiling faces that belie the sun, picnic baskets, and decorated trees of the settings.  He draws his world of meetings with doctors, attending group meetings, and struggling to get and hold jobs.

Using text on the recto, sometimes extended to fill the page, which contrasts especially with images such as Olivier’s single bottle of pills, Clem shares his own struggles as a brother and son trying to support his family while setting out on his own life journey. Clem also provides the larger political and social context of mental health care at that time in Alberta’s history, with statistics and information to show the inadequacy of mental health care. 

This collaborative memoir of honest pain, tenderness, wisdom, and insights is also a commentary on deep cuts by the government and their real effects on those struggling with mental health and those who care for them when the help and support they need are evaporating.