The graphic novel is a fancy name people started using for comics. And comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures. These are a bunch of classic (or soon to be classic) nonfiction comics that we like.
"The homespun drawings and intuitive pacing capture both the dreariness and occasional splendor of this frozen world, with flashes of the author’s trademark humor in the banter between her crusty coworkers. Beaton makes a shattering statement on…
"Sacco ’s densely composed, meticulous black-and-white art has grown even more realistic and carefully observed in this work, though he still presents himself as a caricature with buckteeth and Coke-bottle glasses. He wisely withdraws his presence…
"Brown packs in dates and events and gives voice to every side of every issue while milking the story for maximum drama and interest—readers won't be able to turn the pages fast enough. Brown dedicates full pages of panels to the realization of a…
"A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story. If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn't try to elicit…
"A graphic narrative that clarifies a complicated series of international negotiations, making the story interesting even for those who don’t care about video games. An ambitious and accomplished illustrator, Brown streamlines a story that…
"Graph paper backgrounds create a sense of peeking into a diary consisting of Tomine ’s graceful drawings and precise lettering. Tomine reveals himself again a master of self-satire as his formidably healthy artist’s ego and attendant anxiety butt…
"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. Each scene…
"The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best. Bechdel presents her childhood as a "still life with children" that her father created, and…
"Like a millennial James Thurber, Brosh has a knack for seeding a small, choice detail that snowballs into existential chaos, such as when a bird’s mating dance leads her to question reality itself. Brosh’s spidery and demented digital portraits, a…
"When Chantler drops the exposition and lets the characters speak for themselves, his strengths as a visual storyteller show through. One highlight is an extended sequence in which a woman sits reading while the now elderly Law Chantler lies dying…
