Nonfiction Graphic Novels
True stories of war, murder and life presented in an illustrated format.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
This breakout autobiography is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Her father is a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent and a closeted homosexual. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, readers are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic and redemptive.
A Treasury of Victorian Murder Series by Rick Geary
Geary has researched these books extensively and presents, with his own inimitable tongue-in-cheek style, these Victorian mysteries as told through journals of a fascinated Englishman of the day. Both factual and darkly funny, Geary's personal take on these stories shines an ironic light on the repressive society that spawned such monsters. Titles in the series include The Beast of Chicago, The Borden Tragedy, Jack the Ripper, and The Mystery of Mary Rogers.
Comanche Moon by Jack Jackson
This story recounts the last days of the war-loving Comanche tribe, their nomadic existence and their eventual concession to white settlers. Illustrated and written by noted underground cartoonist Jackson, whose previous works chronicled Texas's founding history, this work is a rare combination of historical writing and compassionate storytelling in the graphic novel form.
American Splendor: The Life & Times of Harvey Pekar by Harvey Pekar
Cleveland native Harvey Pekar is a true American original. A V.A. hospital file clerk and comic book writer, Harvey chronicles the ordinary and mundane in stories both funny and touching. His dead-on eye for the frustrations and minutiae of the workaday world mix in a delicate balance with his insight into personal relationships. Pekar has been compared to Dreiser, Dostoevsky and Lenny Bruce. But he is truly more than all of them – he is himself.
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Based on years of research and extended visits to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, Palestine is the first major comics work of political nonfiction by Sacco. Also try The Fixer and Safe Area Gorazde.
Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
This slight follow-up to Satrapi's acclaimed Persepolis books explores the lives of Iranian women, young and old. The book begins with Satrapi arriving for afternoon tea at her grandmother's house. There, her mother, aunt and their group of friends tell stories about their lives as women and, more specifically, the men they've lived with and through. One woman tells a story about advising a friend on how to fake her virginity, a scheme that goes comically wrong. Another tells of escaping her life as a teenage bride of an army general. Satrapi's mother tells an anecdote of the author as a child; still others spin yarns of their sometimes glamorous, sometimes difficult, lives in Iran.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny and heartbreaking two-part memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to 14, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.
Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
Told with chilling realism in an unusual comic book format, this is more than a tale of surviving the Holocaust. Spiegelman relates the effect of those events on the survivors' later years and upon the lives of the following generation. This is a complex book. It relates events that young adults, as the future architects of society, must confront, and their interest is sure to be caught by the skillful graphics and suspenseful unfolding of the story.