The best books that weave magnificent art into terrifying tales

In his classic, brutally brilliant graphic novel, frustrated New York cartoonist Art Spiegelman interviews his Jewish father, who had survived the atrocities of Hitler’s Holocaust only to lose his wife to suicide. Spiegelman’s commentary mixes angst with humor and deep despair; his artwork displays the Germans as cats, the Jews as mice, the Poles as pigs, the Americans as dogs, and the French as frogs. The state of Tennessee recently banned its use in public schools; what a tragic loss for all students of history.

Don’t worry; this gripping 534-page tale of mystery can sweep you through its pages in a single day, especially since its gritty-but-stunning brown and white artwork acts like a movie as it speeds you and a young orphaned boy through an underground train station and across the streets of Paris and up a clock tower in 1931. Why was the boy’s dead father obsessed with repairing a broken clock? And who is the mysterious angry old man anyway?

This wise and witty, tragic, and often politically oriented autobiography begins in Iran in 1980 after the Shah has been overthrown and a hardcore Islamic regime has taken its place. Using a black and white comic book format, Satrapi first introduces herself as a veiled, disgruntled 10-year-old schoolgirl upset by the new government’s strict Islamic rules. Have some fun as you follow her through her own coming-of-age stories via a great sense of humor. In the mix, she will pull you in and tell you more about history than most other media can ever portray.

High atop a cliff overlooking the sea sits the battered remains of a sailboat. But how did it get there? An old man insists that the waves had tossed it all the way up during a storm a very long time ago, although this clearly seems to be impossible. Or is it? In this magical tale of adventure, a young boy had aimed to prove that he was the most brilliant sailor his villagers had ever seen, so he set out to prove it. What happened when he was blown to a brand-new land, and did he survive? I have always enjoyed Chris’s artwork and you may have overlooked this particular book, so pick it up and check it out.

Destitute Jasper Ankle will pay any price to attend his beloved opera. But when its most famous diva chokes to death on an admirer’s candied violet, a hitherto unknown beauty named Ortenzia Caviglia takes her place, and as her star rises, everyone who might stand in her way conveniently drops dead. But as her fame and fortune increase, Jasper Ankle becomes more and more impoverished, and if you are familiar with Edward Gorey’s dreadfully terrifying tales and his delicate, elegantly devilish black and white penmanship, perhaps you can imagine what is happening herein. (By the way, Gorey is also dead but you can still get hold of his evil little books.)