First off, I'd like to apologise to those that are fans of graphic novels. For years I have considered them weird and nerdish. However, last week I read my first graphic novel, Persepolis. I loved it and will read the sequel over the weekend.

I'm looking for recommendations. I wouldn't be too keen on superheroes - watching them on the big screen is enough for me. Other than that I'm pretty open minded. Bonus for those that could be found in a library.

Damn!

I'd best be brief before Ginger Yellow gets here!

Basically, a mate of mine used to work in a comic book shop for years and would recommend me things. Amongst those I enjoyed the most were:

'Elektra: Assassin' by Frank miller and Bill Sienkiewicz

'Blood - A Tale' by J.M. DeMatteis and Kent Williams

'Ed The Happy Clown' by Chester Brown

'Dracula - A Symphony in Moonlight and Nightmares' by Jon J. Muth

'Marshall Law: Fear & Loathing' by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill

'Black Orchid' by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

'Meltdown' by Walter & Louise Simonson and Jon J. Muth

...and loads of others I've forgotten at the moment.

Prepare for a deluge of suggestions. :-) I know you've said that you're not too keen on superheroes but with any comics recommendations I'm asked about I'm obliged to mention two books in particular that deal with superheroes in a way that no one had dealt with them before (or arguably since).

The White Album/Sgt. Peppers of graphic novels is widely considered to be Alan Moore's Watchmen which is set in an alternate-reality 1985 and deals with what the world would have looked like if superheroes had actually existed since the 1930s (when the first superhero stories were written). Not surprisingly, the world of the superhero turns out to be a not-very-pleasant-at-all reality. My descriptions could never do the book justice. All I can say is it's one of my favourite works of art and is comparable to any revered work of literature - it is in that class. Moore's work is generally excellent so you might also want to investigate V For Vendetta (ignore the film), From Hell (a fictional account of the Whitechapel murders) and The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

If Alan Moore is The Beatles of graphic comics, then Frank Miller is The Rolling Stones. His take on Batman, The Dark Knight Returns, is also considered a classic. It's the first real portrayal of Batman as an ageing, psychotic freak and it placed a full-stop to his story in the mid-80's allowing for the much darker reinvention of a rather absurd character that we've seen in Christopher Nolan's movie. 300, while ludicrously revisionist and biased, is a gripping account of The Battle Of Thermopylae. I've not read The Dark Knight Strikes again (sequel to the first book) but from what I've heard it's best avoided.

Right, that's superheroes out of the way.

Art Spiegelman's Maus is the third great acclaimed classic of comics. I've not read it but I've regularly seen the title listed in Greatest Comics/Books Ever polls so you might want to check that out. It deals with The Holocaust from the perspective of a family of Jews (portrayed by mice) being exterminated by the Nazis (portrayed by cats).

From there, I would recommend reading the Hellblazer graphic novels by multiple authors (my favourite), Preacher by Garth Ennis (not to everyone's tastes but good fun) and the works of Warren Ellis (no, not the guitarist from The Bad Seeds).

I envy you. You're about to embark on a great adventure.

Heh!

I deliberately left those three alone, so someone else could cover them and CV did so admirably.

Yeah, it's impossible to avoid superheroes, I'm afraid, but from my suggestions 'Blood','Ed the Happy Clown' and 'Dracula...' are the ones that do just that. 'Ed the Happy Clown' is also the funniest thing of any kind I have ever read.

Cheers, evilC ;-)

Of course, I forgot to mention the works of Neil Gaiman. Virtually anything by him is brilliant, be it the Sandman series (about the god of dreams), The Books Of Magic, Midnight Days or any of his runs on mainstream titles (Gaiman penned just one issue of the aforementioned Hellblazer but it's one of the best out of hundreds of issues).

I forgot to mention my favourite Batman novel: 'Arkham Asylum' by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean. That explores Batman's rather twisted sadomasochistic psyche.

For a while, Sienkiewicz, McKean, Muth, Williams, O'Neill and Steve Yeowell just ruled the graphic novels illustration world. It was always the artwork I was more interested in, really. Sienkiewicz did an excellent illustrated (though precis-ed) version of 'Moby Dick' too.

Edit: Actually, what I think I'll do is start up a separate thread on here dedicated to graphic novel artwork. That way, this discussion thread won't get swamped with images, hopefully. They do deserve a thread of their own, though.

From a quick look of my library's online catalogue they seem to have quite a few by Gaiman and Miller but not the ones recommended. Doesn't seem to have Watchmen either but has 3 or 4 of Alan Moore's work. It has Maus - I'll look out for that tomorrow.

I think you could easily read dozens of fantastic graphic novels without ever having deal with superheroes, nils.

However, there are many good suggestions - both superhero and non-superhero - made by evilC and CV. Just like best albums, there is a proliferation of lists of the 'best graphic novels ever' so you wouldn't be going wrong if you perused a few of these online and then went down to your local library and see what they had. Most local libraries have a pretty decent selection now. (And of course, borrowing then beats buying them, as graphic novels are notoriously quick to read and thus often not worth purchasing them unless you're a real fan or particularly like the artwork).

To add a couple more suggestions - Will Eisner was considered by many to be the father of the graphic novel form and his work of the 70s and 80s is definitely worth a look. He often bases them in and around the immigrant communities of New York.

Black Hole by Charles Burns is a great favourite of mine. Somone on the old board recommended it and it really was a fantastic read. Set in Seattle in the 1970s, it deals with a plague that takes over the town's teenagers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_graphic_novels:_Award-winning

Just found the above list which is good as it lists the graphic novels which actually won awards. However, there are many more lists like this so dive in and enjoy!

A little head up for a rather serious graphic novel from a chap from Geneva which won critical acclaim in the French speaking word and has now been translated into English, The Observer reviewer seems quite impressed...Of what I read in a French mag, there is quite a good little scene in French speaking Switzerland although very little of that superhero business.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/interviews/story/0,,2267473,00.html

And this list has some interesting pointers. I read a bit of "L'autoroute du soleil", a manga style road "movie" by a rather well known French cartoonist, it's very good.

http://www.indyworld.com/indy/summer_2004/european_gns/index.html

Here's the thing though. I find it quite irksome having to talk about graphic novels when really, 9 times out of 10 we're talking about comics.

Let's call a spade a spade for god's sake.

However, I do realise that many people are put off by the term comics and whoever coined the term 'graphic novel' should be given an award as some sort of a marketing genius as they are now reaching parts of public libraries, Waterstones and the broadsheets that the word 'comics' just couldn’t get to.

I’ll leave the last word to Neil Gaiman on this, in an interview from 1999:

“When I was in England four years ago I was at a literary party. It was one of these Christmas parties that magazines throw. I was invited and I went along and I got talking to a guy who turned out to be the literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph. He asked what I did. When I answered that I write comic books, he looked at me as if I had confessed to shoplifting or something. So we're standing there having a drink and he's looking uncomfortable, but before I can walk away he asked what kind of comic books I write. When I answered they were the Sandman series, he looks at me, says, "Hang on, I know you, you're Neil Gaiman. My dear fellow, you don't write comics, you write graphic novels."
So as far as I can tell, it's just a difference between being a hooker and a lady of the evening. Basically. The nice thing about calling them graphic novels is that people who can't quite cope with comic books can cope with them under the term "graphic novels.”

Same thing with sci-fi Jon, you better call it "speculative fiction" or "dystopian future novel" otherwise, that's it...

You'll probably want to read this thread at Comics Should Be Good on recommending non-superhero comics for a few pointers.

Besides the ones already mentioned, I thought I'd name a few to show you the range of the medium.

Joe Sacco's books, (you might want to start with Safe Area Gorazde or Palestine) use a comic form to do narrative, first person journalism. There are similarities to Spiegelman, but it's more outward looking.

Alice in Sunderland uses a dazzling array of aesthetics to talk about history and culture.

The Arrival tells an immigrant's tale with no words whatsoever.

Y: The Last Man, which has just finished its run, is a clasic (non-superhero) sci-fi dystopian future. Inidentally, you can't really go wrong with anything else written by Brian K Vaughan either.

If you do end up wanting to delve into superhero stuff (and I understand your reluctance) there's a wealth of well written stories that could possibly best be described as "revisionist", in the manner of Watchmen. Most obvious is Miller's Batman work, but there's also Bendis's Powers, a detective story where the perps and victims happen to have superpowers, and arguably Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon, which is X-Men like you've never seen it before.

Doesn't the disctinction between comics and graphic novels denote whether an ongoing series or a self-contained work is being referred to? Or is it just a case of "graphic novel" sounding posher (despite the fact that "novel" was once a dismissive term for serialised "amusements" ).

I'm not a comics/graphic novels person at all, but I finished Watchmen yesterday and From Hell a couple of weeks ago (they were the first things that caught my eye when I joined the library last month). Give those a go, Nil: Alan Moore's a fantastic writer who happens to make the most of a medium halfway between fiction and film. He's got a very mature sense of drama: his characters are complex - never 100% sympathetic or villainous - and always compelling.



Watchmen is a great read, and I can see why it was such a big deal when it came out. The crux of it is roughly: life is very, very complicated; how would a set of people who actually dress up and act as vigilantes really fare? They're placed very explicitly in the changing political context from WW2 to the mid-80s under the shadow of nuclear war. The artwork seems deliberately garish in the mould of your proper old superhero comics, which, paradoxically, emphasises the 'realistic' aspects even more.

I'd be interested to know how it was produced at the time. I got the impression that Moore might have been making it up as he went along, to some extent, as each issue came out: there seemed to be plenty of different directions he could have taken it, different characters he could have explored in more depth. The only element that fell slightly flat for me was the splicing of the pirate comic narrative with the present-day NY dystopia, just cause the former was a bit dull and not pertinent to present events beyond being about dire circumstances; but overall it's as good as everyone says.



The superhero-free From Hell ranks alongside my favourite novels and films ever, though. It's a staggering piece of work: integral to the facinating, always surprising plot are some great observations on gender politics, architecture, class, empire, sexuality, myth, William Blake, the media, justice, Freemasonry, the royal family's suspected mafia-style tactics . . . it's just an incredible piece of work. I heard it took 10 years to research and write, and I can well believe it.

In the appendices (if you'll pardon the term in relation to a book about a murderer who gutted his victims), Moore emerges as a sterling guy. Having only seen pictures of him with his doom-metal beard, and having the impression he was vaguely into magic or some shit, I'd assumed he might be an accidentally brilliant crank; but he's totally got his head screwed on, and has a great critical distance from all the crackpots and absurdities in the Jack The Ripper industry. He didn't want to touch the story with a bargepole originally.

I don't even want to think about how the films of those two have or will come out. I bet they're real stinkers.