A Contract with God
Four stories about the residents of a tenement building in the Bronx in the 1930s, including the title story, about a religious man who breaks his contract with God after the death of his…
Start with A Contract with God
The wider medium · 14 entries
Literary graphic novels
These are the books people mean when they say comics can be literature: memoir, history, journalism and fiction that stands comparison with the best prose, and that has won Pulitzers, Costa awards and a National Book Award along the way. They are for readers who arrive asking what is worth reading, and for anyone who still thinks comics are for children. Raymond Briggs, Posy Simmonds and Bryan Talbot give the section a British spine.
Maus
Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek, survived Auschwitz, and Maus tells his story, and the story of Spiegelman's difficult relationship with him, in a comic in which the Jews are mice, the…
Start with The Complete Maus
When the Wind Blows
Jim and Hilda Bloggs are an elderly couple living in a cottage in the countryside, and when they hear that nuclear war is coming, they follow the government's instructions, building a…
Start with When the Wind Blows
Ghost World
Enid and Rebecca have just finished high school, and they spend their days drifting around their nameless American town, mocking everyone they meet and trying to work out what to do with…
Start with Ghost World
Palestine
In 1991 and 1992 Joe Sacco spent two months in the West Bank and Gaza, interviewing Palestinians about their lives under occupation.
Start with Palestine
Ethel & Ernest
Raymond Briggs tells the story of his parents, Ethel, a former lady's maid, and Ernest, a milkman, from their first meeting in 1928 to their deaths in 1971.
Start with Ethel & Ernest
Jimmy Corrigan
Jimmy Corrigan is a lonely, awkward, middle-aged man who meets his father for the first time, and the story of their meeting is intercut with the story of Jimmy's grandfather, abandoned by…
Start with Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi grew up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq, and Persepolis is the story of her childhood, her teenage years in Vienna and her return to Iran as a…
Start with The Complete Persepolis
Blankets
Craig Thompson grew up in a strict evangelical Christian family in rural Wisconsin, and Blankets is the story of his childhood, his faith and his first love, a girl he meets at a church…
Start with Blankets: 20th Anniversary Edition
Fun Home
Alison Bechdel's father ran a funeral home ("Fun Home", as the children called it) in a small town in Pennsylvania, restored their Victorian house obsessively, and was secretly gay.
Start with Fun Home
The Arrival
A man leaves his wife and daughter to find work in a new country, and arrives in a strange, fantastical city, where he has to learn everything from scratch: the language, the food, the…
Start with The Arrival
Alice in Sunderland
Bryan Talbot sets out to prove that Lewis Carroll's Alice books owe a great deal to Sunderland and the north-east of England, and along the way he tells the whole history of the city, and…
Start with Alice in Sunderland
Tamara Drewe
Tamara Drewe is a young journalist who returns to the Dorset village where she grew up, having had her nose fixed, and she causes chaos among the writers at a retreat run by a famous…
Start with Tamara Drewe
Asterios Polyp
Asterios Polyp is an architect who is famous for designs that have never been built, and when his apartment burns down, he leaves New York and takes a job as a mechanic in a small town…
Start with Asterios Polyp