69 books like Catwoman

I love Paper Girls because it’s a wild adventure with a great cast of dynamically written, queer girls. It’s a fantasy story that really grips the reader by the shirt collar and pulls them in. I definitely couldn’t put this one down because the story keeps you wanting MORE.

I have to again recommend this graphic novel for its gorgeous artwork and color palettes that really make it a feast for the eyes. 

Rafter, Benny, and Juanita protagonate (yep, that’s a word) in a bizarre amalgamated world that could have been dreamed up by Stan Lee, the Andy Griffith Show writers, and Beverly Cleary. Dreamed up as a joke. Abandoned with a good comeraderific laugh (also a word). Then picked up, dusted off, and polished by Marion Jensen. But that’s not what happened. Jensen created the whole adventurous, hilarious, uplifting, good-buddy superhero story with his own solitary brain. My kids and I have laughed at his story many times.

I’m recommending this book for how delightfully it considers the ill human body as a site of new possibilities. The Doom Patrol have never been well-known superheroes, perhaps because of the willingness of writers to confront the bodily trauma at the heart of their stories.

Morrison’s contribution to the series was to consider the Doom Patrol truly as freaks: people who could not fit into a society that demands gender, mental, and physical homogeneity. Mixing allegorical forms of illness—Cliff “Robotman” Steele’s fallible technological body—with more direct conditions like Kaye “Crazy Jane” Callis’ dissociative identity disorder.

Morrison, along with artistic collaborators, built a celebration of difference into a genre where most heroic bodies never break the mold.

Tom Strong is a throwback to classic pulp heroes, and the closest thing to a superhero you’ll find on my list. Tom is super strong, super smart, and super white, but that’s where comparisons to the heroes from which the author drew inspiration end! Tom’s Black wife and daughter are fully realized characters with thoughts and feelings of their own. Tom doesn’t punch out the bad guys, he doesn’t even believe in bad guys! Instead, he uses his intelligence to recognize that conflict arises not from malice, but from misunderstanding and incompatible needs and desires. With this in mind, Tom can use his super-intelligence to craft a compromise that reestablishes order. Far from preachy, eat-your-vegetables sermonizing, these stories are witty, layered, thought-provoking, and hilarious.

Deadpool is superhero comics', and perhaps literature in general’s, most consistently challenging fictional engagement with cancer. Deadpool’s healing factor prevents his cancer from ever being cured, which traps him in a never-ending cycle of remission and relapse.

Unlike a superhero who responds to a bodily transformation by self-sacrificingly upholding the status quo, Deadpool is a mercenary and anti-hero. In this collection, writer Joe Kelly creates much of the narrative infrastructure that eventually made the character one of Marvel’s most popular.

Kelly also crafts a story where Deadpool is offered a heroic transformation that—through personal weakness, history, bad luck, and supervillainous interference—tragically fails. This book establishes the template for Deadpool stories and digs into Deadpool’s cancer for the first time.

This is another masterful creation by Gene Luen Yang! After falling in love with American Born Chinese, this recent work of his did not disappoint. This story based on an old radio play is a tale of self-acceptance and standing up to hatred. Yang brilliantly intertwines the narrative of the Lee family and the issues of discrimination and violence they are faced with moving into a new suburban town along with the struggles of a younger, less experienced Superman coming to terms with being himself, an alien among humans.

This book contains a rare examination of HIV/AIDS in superhero comics. It’s much more likely a superhero story will deal with HIV/AIDS allegorically (see the recommendation above!) than directly.

Given the Hulk’s own fears about his blood contaminating his loved ones (his cousin Jennifer Walters became the She-Hulk after a transfusion of his blood), he is uniquely sympathetic to the illness of a friend who contracts HIV. As longtime Hulk writer David advances subplots (at this point, Bruce Banner and the Hulk have merged into a more-or-less well-adjusted form of the famous giant green rage monster), he builds space to linger on character details.

David himself has struggled with health issues in recent years, and this comic is also a reminder of one of the genre’s great writers.

Jonathan isn’t your typical tortured hero, as much of his brokenness is self-inflicted. But that doesn’t make his journey to redemption any less painful or heart-twisty. We follow his progress in real-time while simultaneously discovering everything he did to fall from grace in the first place. You equally love him and hate him in the most soul-crushing way. And if that little bit of catnip didn’t sway you, give five-year-old Maddie a chance.

The God: Thor

Marvel doesn’t always get it right, mythologically speaking, but this all-ages title was a fantastic introduction to the superhero version of everyone’s favorite Norse God, Thor. Romantic and full of adventure, with peeks at Thor’s goat chariot and guest appearances by a handful of other superheroes along the way, paired with the gorgeously expressive artwork of Chris Samnee, this is definitely a graphic novel worth gifting to both the young and young at heart in your life—if you can find it to give!