Staff Picks: Book Collection: Graphic Novels and Comics

Recommended by Jasmine Rizer, Cataloging

"One of the subject headings assigned to this book is ""Generation Y--Comic books, strips, etc.,"" but my birth year places me firmly outside that demographic and I still found this collection awfully relatable. Introverts and those prone to overthinking every single thing* may especially find themselves thinking ""RELATABLE CONTENT"" on every single page; am I doing that newfangled meme thing right?

*I even overthought this mini-review blurb thing.

Recommended by Elizabeth Durusau, Music Library

Written in graphic novel form, this stark look at the Holocaust is a book everyone should read. Taken from the words of his own father, you see in turns how everyone thought that surely everything would be alright. Surely this isn't what they meant. Surely... the horror of the situation is by no means softened by the use of animals to represent different groups of people. In fact, it forces one to see the differences in people in even starker contrast.

Recommended by Jasmine Rizer, Cataloging Department

To compare this book to any other would probably be to suggest massive spoilers, and that would be dreadful. Told in photographs, mix CD playlists, and other documents and artifacts, it is a teenage love story, and the story of a piano prodigy headed for a nervous breakdown, and the last pages will have you increasingly muttering, "Wait, what?" until the gut punch of the ending, which will leave you wondering for some time, "Exactly what other kind of story it is I've just read?" Not for those who are uncomfortable with ambiguous endings, obviously.

Recommended by Jordan, UGA Press

A gorgeously illustrated look into love, longing, and the lives of two children bound together by circumstance and belief. Thompson is a master storyteller, filling his pages with beautiful drawings punctuated by inspired retellings of the common history of Christianity and Islam.

Recommended by Walter Biggins, UGA Press

Dreamy, strange, collage-and-charcoal memoirs and recollections, suffused with melancholy but also something sharp, spiky, and savory that I can’t define. Riveting & super-weird, in the best way.

Recommended by Walter Biggins, UGA Press

WHY ART? creates its own genre, somewhere between comics, illustrated novel, and philosophy. It doesn't exactly answer the question but it'll lead you to think about what it is for you. Really funny, really sad, and truly mesmerizing and hopeful, somehow.