Graphic Novel Reccomendations

One of my favorite graphic novels is Doug TenNapel's Creature Tech. I absolutely love his work despite his social media presence. I really recommend it for its amazing art alone.

I remember seeing Amulet around a lot when I was in middle school. In general I've heard of a lot of these.

I've always been fond of Gigi D.G.'s Cucumber Quest. I suppose that was my first exposure to webcomics! I own all the physical copies, though I'm not too sure where I put them. Was very influential on 11 year old me.

I highly recommend The Power Fantasy from Image Comics. I hadn't read western comics in the longest time mostly because I didn't think someone could reach this level of quality again. If you've read Watchmen it's kind of a leftist/more philosophical spin on that.

Definitely not kid-friendly, btw.

re: wickawick

dude, i haven't thought about Astronaut Academy in ages! i thought i was the only person to have ever heard of it... when i was a kid i didn't really get it, and it just made me sort of sad. maybe that kind of a book is good for a kid to read, though. the main character (whose name i can't remember) being a member of some voltron style giant robot team kind of went over my head cause at that point my only reference for anime stuff was like... yugioh. and there is no card-dueling in that comic, let me tell you!

as for a recommendation, i'll go in for Alan Moore's Supreme: The Story of the Year. supreme revives the puzzle-box superman stories of the silver-age; how will supreme think his way out of some impossible problem? in his secret identity, supreme is ethan crane, mild-mannered and bespectacled artist for dazzle comics. crane draws the adventures of omniman, whose adventures mirror supreme's real life. each issue also includes a flashback story set in supreme's past, mimicking the style of the era. it's a bit of a metacommentary then, like so much of Moore's work, but more of a loving parody/homage than stuff like Watchmen or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. metafiction isn't as novel now as it was then, but i think it all works because moore couches it in fun and inventive superhero stories. you see stuff like Supreme and wonder why every comic can't be that way...

anyways, as if this reply wasn't long enough, i just remembered i already did a write-up on supreme and why it's awesome at the start of this year:

I don't know if its a graphic novel per se, but I just recently finished Ghost World by Daniel Clowes and thought it was pretty good. It's more of a slice of life comic though.

On the opposite end of that extreme, I also really like Roy Thomas and P.Craig Russell's take on Elric of Melniboné. It has some of the best layouts I've ever seen in a comic.

Both are only graphic novels insofar as they're a bunch of 20 pages issues stapled together.

Oh!!

My own recommendations are the Warriors graphic novels, if anyone has been interested in the Warriors books these are great to read. They started releasing around a year or two ago and I believe there's plans to cover the whole series! The art in them are also just lovely.

And not sure if this counts exactly but the Vermis books by Plastiboo are great, more like art books of fake games that don't exist, and you learn the world and such as you read!

Bark Bark Girl by Michael Furler is a beautiful little book about a swiss girl who has lost her dog. Furler's art is so expressive + loose and between panels characters can have such a wide variance in how they're drawn without ever feeling off model. it's kind of magic. a beautiful airbrush shaded drawing with implied form feels just as good as a simple aliased-square brush drawing with dots for eyes. quite funny too!!

also just like, a nice physical object. printed on really nice paper, black and white and neon green.

highly recommend paper girls!!!

Kieron Gillen (writer), Jamie McKelvie (pencils/inks), Matt Wilson (colorist) and Clayton Cowles' (letterer) The Wicked + The Divine (plus stylization theirs) set a lot of internal bars for me when I read it as a teen. Its splashy depiction of modern magic megastar debauchery is what I imagine when I imagine early-Earth C gods in their popstar eras. Its consistent on-page depiction of the neverending coin flip of glory and despair helped sketch out my internal metric for the breadth between dreams and reality. Jamie McKelvie's career-defining work here (married to Wilson's jaw-dropping colours) is one of those things that just is the 2010s for me.

I found this one when I thought I was much too grown up for silly old Homestuck (💀), but they've got throughlines that run too parallel to dismiss. A set of kids plucked from the masses: loved, hated, sacrificial. The world's at their feet and they're at each others' throats. They burn bright, burn out, and the universe dances under the fireworks. Consider this the Britpop sleeper sister to That Webcomic's certified smash.

Also, I drew Laura and Lucifer (as in the blonde bi devil) as My Little Ponies and Gillen reblogged them to his Tumblr, which should be all the reassurance you need on the excellence of his taste.