The most recommended comic strip books

Like all my previous choices this book is written and illustrated by the same person which I think allows a very subtle dance between words and pictures in the storytelling. 

Calico the Wonder Horse is a simple black and white comic strip, one or two frames per page, with changing background page colours. There are dramatic panoramas of canyons and mountains hideouts juxtaposed with close-ups of Calico, then Stewy Stinker, and his gang of Bad Men. Its graphic perspectives and cartoon ‘action’ marks make it exciting for kids. The Bad Men are soon brought undone by the heroine horse but it’s so heartening that they eventually redeem themselves in an unexpected way—which kids love too.

Six-year-old Calvin - along with his stuffed (?) tiger Hobbes - chafes against the ordinariness of his existence and ponders the meaning of life, often while strolling in the woods, or plummeting from a cliff edge in his little red wagon.

I first read Calvin & Hobbes when I was 12. Over the years, this brilliantly illustrated comic strip (which ran from 1985-1995) has only become richer and funnier and more poignant.

Bill Blackbeard was the Harry Smith of comics. Just as Smith’s landmark Anthology of American Folk Music helped launch a folk music revival, so did Blackbeard’s massive volume of old newspaper comics spark a new generation of comics fandom and scholarship. This was also the first book of old newspaper funnies I ever read, during a childhood Saturday afternoon in the Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana, when I discovered the magical “741.5” shelf that held books of comics. Other big, beautiful anthologies of old newspaper funnies have been compiled by comics creators like Jerry Robinson and Brian Walker, but Blackbeard is the granddaddy.

This book is a timeless classic that everyone should have. It follows Toffle, a little wallflower who's fearful of the world and too shy to speak to anyone. He goes through his journey, sad and alone, as he watches the joyful lives of others from afar. Until the day he finds a letter... Who Will Comfort Toffle? reminds the reader that isolation is never the solution and that even the most unfit of us can find a special someone.

If you’re a parent, Fowl Language comics are really relatable, almost too relatable.

I think that a lot of stuff on the internet coasts on just being relatable and nothing else, but Brian doesn’t simply present us with a familiar situation, he makes it funny.

The observation isn’t what’s unique, it’s the unexpected joke and comedic tone that makes Brian’s comics so great.

I love this book so much that I reread it every year. I read it in its original Swedish but the  English translation is good, too.

I grew up “on” Tove Jansson, genius creator of the  Moomintrolls. This book is for adults. It is gentle, yet piercing. An old woman and her granddaughter have small adventures and conversations about what matters, on a remote  Finnish island. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is magic. It features illustrations (by the author) which take you right to the soulful setting.

This is one of those books that makes you ponder life’s big questions, while being about everyday life. Highly recommend. It’s only  “second” on my list because I read and reread it, so it’s not a “find” to me, rather more like a bible? 

I wrote my undergrad thesis on the migration of visual tropes from traditional Japanese theatre (Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki) into modern art forms (Manga, Anime, Supakabuki/Anime Musicals), which was a rigorous exercise because I couldn’t just compare the tropes—I had to spend hours explaining them to my advisor. It was a fascinating (sometimes exasperating) lesson in learning to read one visual vocabulary, only to have to explain it to someone else in terms that they understood using another.

This blurred-xerox-translation-of-a-translation exercise is the central theme of Mangaman, where a Shojou-esque protagonist falls from a fantastical manga world into a comic. Visual conventions clash, where he walks the wrong way across panels, and where his speed lines accidentally stab people in the school hallway.

We can’t resist adding a historical first, published in German in 1865 by Wilhelm Busch, the father of countless other comics that present the pranks of naughty boys. And it features in Two Heads because it inspired psychologists, including ourselves, to study the remarkable ability to mindread. In a single panel Busch reveals that the reader can infer that what is in the mind of the terrible duo is different from what’s in the mind of Widow Bolte, and different from what’s in the mind of her dog. It allows us readers to get the contradictions between these different views and makes us laugh. So although this book doesn't set out to explain anything, it ends up doing a marvelous job of explaining the psychology of intention, interaction and reputation management - in the tradition of great comic strips from Crazy Kat to Peanuts to Calvin & Hobbes.

Now c’mon, was this guy Winsor fer-real? This stuff is off the charts other-realm, lucid sleeping material. His work was done as comic strips, but can now be found in book form in a variety of volumes. It may be the century between us, but these images and text make me feel a little tilted, off-center, and in the best way possible.

Warning: This book will make you build a new bookshelf. Like other oversized offerings from Peter Maresca’s Sunday Press Publishing, you need a tape measure, not a ruler, to determine its dimensions. This means that you can read this startling collection of strips from 1895 to 1915 in the grand size in which they first appeared in early newspapers, back when the colors and characters screamed off the page, reflecting and refracting the frenetic dawn of a new century. These old newspaper comics pages are where Americans first learned to laugh together. Society is Nix can be difficult to find but is well worth the effort.

With her father being a comic book nerd, he picked up a lot of Superhero-themed books from the time our daughter was an infant (bonus: My Dad is a Superhero is his favorite DC Comics board book).

As she’s moved out of board books, The Big Book of Girl Power has become the number 1 request for bedtime stories this year. If you have a superhero lover as well, this is a great one for learning both about some of the DC Superheroines and getting a good dose about how strong women can be.

Sometimes pencil and paper and a lot of scribbling can reveal a passion. As someone always searching for the right word, I love this book. Young Peter Roget became a word collector when he discovered that words “were powerful things.” With a passion to find the best word, the one that really fits, he made lists. At 8, he wrote his first book, but it was not a story. He wrote lists. Then he wrote more lists. A lifetime of lists. His efforts to create one place where everyone could find just the right word are illustrated scrapbook style in this book that is incredible, stunning, splendid, remarkable, and fun.   

Following on from the success of the picture book The Grumpy Monkey, we follow Jim’s adventures again as he tries to go on a peaceful walk. The fact that kids will recognize the characters and the familiar banter between them will be a positive for them as they migrate to an early reader/comic. 

This graphic novel literally illustrates many ways in which the average school day is challenging to introverts, from the bus, to school hallways, to the cafeteria, to navigating pre-class chatter. Emmie is very in tune with her feelings and able to focus on drawing no matter the noise all around, but still questions her own value: “Does anyone ever see me? Do I want them to?” When the author drew Emmie with a disappearing mouth to show how others view her as mute—ooh, I got goosebumps. I adore a book that makes me go back and read it again the moment I finish it. 

Unlike the other books on this list, this isn’t primarily a reprint collection of early-twentieth-century comics. Rather, Art Spiegelman (whose essential memoir Maus was the first comic to win a Pulitzer Prize), re-introduces old comics characters in a very personal story of the 9/11 attacks and the political fallout. Figures like the Happy Hooligan, Jiggs and Maggie, Little Nemo, and Krazy Kat and Ignatz float through these stories like New York City’s awakened ghosts. Spiegelman also adds a masterful essay on comics and curates a few selections of the original strips. No work better demonstrates how the early cartoonists can speak through the rubble of history with vitality and humor.

I bought this book in a charity shop to help me maintain my knowledge of French! I deliberately chose a children’s book because my level of French is modest, but I don’t really need a reason to pick up a Charlie Brown book. Charles M Schultz created an entire world of personalities with the peanut characters. They began life as a comic strip which makes it perfect for dipping in and out of, sometimes just for one joke! Beneath the humour and childlike simplicity, there are complex topics like mental wellbeing and self-esteem, all delivered via fiendishly clever punchlines. Like all the best illustrators, Schultz is able to convey emotion and energy with a few strokes of his pen. The Charlie Brown books are works of genius, in any language. 

Paul Tumey is one of our pre-eminent comics scholars, but like the cartoonists he honors in this work, he mainly wants to make you laugh. To this end, he’s assembled cartoons, comics, and old photos, mostly dating to the early 1900s, to build a case for a comics genre he calls Screwballism. It’s all a very funny read, and if the names of genius creators like Frederick Burr Opper and Gene Ahern aren’t yet household names, don’t blame Tumey.

I had aspirations of making comics for Marvel or DC, but could never get a handle on drawing realistically. So I found inspiration in newspaper comics, one in particular.

Calvin & Hobbes is a work of art, and the perfect representation of childhood creativity. But Calvin’s imaginary tiger is only the tip of the iceberg here. Between his life-sized dioramas of snowmen acting out, to cardboard transmogrifiers, Calvin’s wicked imagination just spoke to me. And Bill Watterson helped jet-propel me down my own artistic path.

Paul Levitz was a writer, editor, editor in chief, publisher, and president of DC Comics for decades. This oversized coffee table book is a treasure trove of his insights, memories, and analysis. It’s the definitive history of DC, which only he could write. And it’s full of fun colorful images, making it interesting to younger readers as well as a perfect gift to any pop culture or comics lover.

I’m a huge film fan. When I was younger, I didn’t read many books, but I love the stories in films and comics. The recent Marvel films have made me feel like a youngster again and I’ve loved how they have all become interconnected. I would have thoroughly enjoyed flicking through this encyclopedia when I was a child. It’s a book that you can open at any page and look through. You could even read it backward if you like! Full of dynamic pictures of all the Marvel characters with descriptions and facts. All in bite-sized chunks and it hardly feels like you are reading at all.