The most recommended comic strip books

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.

Virus Tropical is a Latin American Book, a Colombian book, an Argentinian Book, an Ecuadorian Book. Virus tropical talks about the nineties, if you are from Colombia you recognize the towns, the T-shirts, the music, the buses. So many peripheries mixed up and telling you about the coming of age of the main character. So many important things touched while touching on the most vapid-everyday things. The accents, the way the characters interact, I was able to identify with all of this while reading this graphic novel. Virus Tropical is a great book, I’m glad it was translated into English.

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.

Larry Tye brings a lifelong fan’s passion and a renowned journalist’s research skills to the ultimate biography of the Man of Steel. It’s comprehensive and full of amazing stories and facts that weren’t known before, but more impressively it’s entertaining to read, from start to finish. It’s a great book for anyone interested in Americana, pop culture, or Superman.

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.

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.   

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.

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. 

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.