Graphics for Grownups: Memoirs/Biographies

In the early twentieth century, travel writing represented the desire for the expanding bourgeoisie to experience the exotic cultures of the world past their immediate surroundings. Journalist William Buehler Seabrook was emblematic of this trend-participating in voodoo ceremonies, riding camels cross the Sahara desert, communing with cannibals and most notably, popularizing the term "zombie" in the West. A string of his bestselling books show an engaged, sympathetic gentleman hoping to share these strange, hidden delights with the rest of the world. He was willing to go deeper than any outsider had before. But, of course, there was a dark side. Seabrook was a barely functioning alcoholic who was deeply obsessed with bondage and the so-called mystical properties of pain and degradation.

An Age of License is a funny and charming account of a whimsical tour of the continent, as Knisley promotes her latest work. Taking in her many encounters with cute cats, occasional romantic endeavours and her trademark illustrations of the food she ate along the way. But it's not all kittens and crêpes: Knisley's experiences are coloured by anxieties, introspective self-enquiry and a series of revelatory experiences, made even more intense for occurring in an unfamiliar country.

In this moving graphic memoir, Eisner Award-winning writer and artist Michael Kupperman traces the life of his reclusive father--the once-world-famous Joel Kupperman, Quiz Kid. That his father is slipping into dementia--seems to embrace it, really--means that the past he would never talk about might be erased forever. Joel Kupperman became one of the most famous children in America during World War II as one of the young geniuses on the series Quiz Kids. With the uncanny ability to perform complex math problems in his head, Joel endeared himself to audiences across the country and became a national obsession. Following a childhood spent in the public eye, only to then fall victim to the same public's derision, Joel deliberately spent the remainder of his life removed from the world at large.

On September 10, 2001, Eddie Torres started his dream job at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The next morning, he said goodbye to his 7½-months-pregnant wife, Alissa, and headed out the door. In an instant, Alissa’s world was thrown into chaos. Forced to deal with unimaginable challenges, Alissa suddenly found herself cast into the role of “9/11 widow,” tossed into a storm of bureaucracy, politics, patriotism, mourning, consolation, and, soon enough, motherhood.

Lion Forge Comics is proud to present this amazing story of a man who turned a curse into a blessing. Written by 2014 Eisner Award-nominee Brandon M. Easton with gorgeous artwork by Denis Medri, this unprecedented biography of Andre the Giant charts his earliest days on his family's farm, to his enormously successful runs in Japan, to his heated feuds with the biggest wrestling stars of all time, to his memorable turns in Hollywood TV and cinema and to his darkest moments caused by excessive substance abuse. Based on testimony from Andre's friends and colleagues - including his daughter Robin - this is the story you've never been told about Andre "the Giant" Roussimoff.

In striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi's Libya, and Assad's Syria--but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation. Riad, delicate and wide-eyed, follows in the trail of his mismatched parents; his mother, a bookish French student, is as modest as his father is flamboyant. Venturing first to the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab State and then joining the family tribe in Homs, Syria, they hold fast to the vision of the paradise that always lies just around the corner. And hold they do, though food is scarce, children kill dogs for sport, and with locks banned, the Sattoufs come home one day to discoveranother family occupying their apartment. The ultimate outsider, Riad, with his flowing blond hair, is called the ultimate insultâe¦ Jewish. And in no time at all, his father has come up with yet another grand plan, moving from building a new people to building his own great palace. Brimming with life and dark humor,The Arab of the Future reveals the truth and texture of one eccentric family in an absurd Middle East, and also introduces a master cartoonist in a work destined to stand alongside Maus and Persepolis.

In Volume 2, Riad, now settled in his father’s hometown of Homs, gets to go to school, where he dedicates himself to becoming a true Syrian in the country of the dictator Hafez Al-Assad. Told simply yet with devastating effect, Riad’s story takes in the sweep of politics, religion, and poverty, but is steered by acutely observed small moments: the daily sadism of his schoolteacher, the lure of the black market, with its menu of shame and subsistence, and the obsequiousness of his fatherin the company of those close to the regime. As his family strains to fit in, one chilling, barbaric act drives the Sattoufs to make the most dramatic of changes.

In the third installment of the acclaimed series, the Sattouf family begins to implode under the pressure of Hafez al-Assad's regime and the suffocation of their rural Syrian village. The Arab of the Future is the widely acclaimed, internationally bestselling graphic memoir that tells the story of Riad Sattouf's peripatetic childhood in the Middle East. In the first volume, which covers the years 1978-1984, his family moves between rural France, Libya, and Syria, where they eventually settle in his father's native village of Ter Maaleh, near Homs. The second volume recounts young Riad's first year attending school in Syria (1984-1985), where he dedicates himself to becoming a true Syrian in the country of Hafez al-Assad. In this third volume, (1985-1987), Riad's mother, fed up with the grinding reality of daily life in the village, decides she cannot take it any longer. When she resolves to move back to France, young Riad sees his father torn between his wife's aspirations and the weight of family traditions.

The penultimate installment in the bestselling French graphic memoir series--hailed as "exquisitely illustrated" and "irresistible"--covering the years of Riad Sattouf's adolescence, from 1987-1992. In the fourth volume of The Arab of the Future, little Riad has grown into a teenager. In the previous books, his childhood was complicated by the pull of his two cultures--French and Syrian--and his parents' deteriorating relationship. Now his father, Adbel-Razak, has left to take a job in Saudi Arabia, and after making a pilgrimage to Mecca, turns increasingly towards religion. But after following him from place to place and living for years under the harsh conditions of his impoverished village, Riad's mother Clementine has had enough. Refusing to live in a country where women have no rights, she returns with her children to live in France with her own mother... until Abdel-Razak shows up unexpectedly to drag the family on yet another journey.

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Are You My Mother? is Alison Bechdel’s second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.

A serial murderer, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, is at large in West Yorkshire and the police are struggling to solve the case. As this national news story unfolds around her, Una finds herself on the receiving end of a series of violent acts for which she feels she is to blame. Becoming Unbecoming explores sexual abuse, gender violence, blame, shame and social responsibility. In graphic novel format, Una asks what it means to grow up in a culture where male violence goes unpunished and unquestioned,challenging a global culture that demands the victims of violence pay

A revelatory, visually stunning graphic memoir by award-winning artist Nora Krug, telling the story of her attempt to confront the hidden truths of her family's wartime past in Nazi Germany and to comprehend the forces that have shaped her life, her generation, and history. In this highly inventive visual memoir--equal parts graphic novel, family scrapbook, and investigative narrative--Nora Krug draws on letters, archival material, flea market finds, and photographs to attempt to understand what it means to belong to one's country and one's family. A wholly original record of a German woman's struggle with the weight of catastrophic history, Belonging is also a reflection on the responsibility that we all have as inheritors of our countries' pasts.

Only an outsider can change the system from the inside. As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders was surrounded by grinding poverty that turned families against each other as they scrimped and saved to pay their bills. Bernie saw politics as his chance to give a decent life to everyone, not just those born into wealth or the lucky few who hit it big. But the Democratic Party and the country overall were moving to the right. Bernie joined a tiny independent party from Vermont. He ran for mayor. As a socialist. And won. That was the beginning.

An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui.   This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

Poland, 1941. Sixteen-year-old Harry Haft is sent to Auschwitz. When he is forced to fight against other inmates for the amusement of the SS officers After negotiating the turmoil of postwar Poland, Haft immigrates to the United States and establishes himself as a professional prizefighter, remaining undefeated until he faces heavy­weight champion Rocky Marciano in 1949.

Visit Roz Chast's website for many more comics.
When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the “crazy closet”—with predictable results—the tools that had served Roz well through her parents’ seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.

A unique insight into an acclaimed cartoonist's travels through Europe and Morocco. Riding the international success of Blankets, Craig Thompson sets out on a tour across Europe and Morocco, promoting the various European editions of his book and beginning research for his next graphic novel, Habibi . Carnet de Voyage is a gorgeous sketchbook diary of his travels as he finds intellectual and spiritual stimulation during the day-to-day work of being an author. From wandering around Paris and Barcelona between events, to navigating markets in Fez and fleeing tourist traps in Marrakesh, we see glimpses of each place, rendered in Thompson's exquisite ink line. Carnet de Voyage is a casual yet intimate portrait of a celebrated cartoonist at a moment between works--surprisingly open and candid in his observations and revelations.

From Harvey- and Eisner-nominated cartoonist and editor Glenn Head comes Chicago, the hilarious and harrowing tale of a nineteen-year-old virgin who drops out of everything and into the unknown. Abandoning suburbia for art school and then the gritty streets, young Glenn finds himself fending off predators and fighting depression. A visit to Playboy offers entree into the world of underground comix and R. Crumb, but it's a chance encounter with Muhammad Ali that allows young Glenn to prove his mettle. Like Scorsese circa Mean Streets crossed with revealing autobiography like Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Chicago is an unforgettable tale of losing one's mind, finding one's identity, and discovering love where it's least expected.

An intimate, clever, and ultimately gut-wrenching graphic memoir about the daily decision women must make between being sexualized or being invisible In Commute, we follow author and illustrator Erin Williams on her daily commute to and from work, punctuated by recollections of sexual encounters as well as memories of her battle with alcoholism, addiction, and recovery. As she moves through the world navigating banal, familiar, and sometimes uncomfortable interactions with the familiar-faced strangers she sees daily, Williams weaves together a riveting collection of flashbacks. Her recollections highlight the indefinable moments when lines are crossed and a woman must ask herself if the only way to avoid being objectified is to simply cease to draw any attention to her physical being.

In this hybrid memoir, Alberto Ledesma wonders, At what point does a long-time undocumented immigrant become an American in the making? From undocumented little boy to "hyper documented" university professor, Ledesma recounts how even now, he sometimes finds himself reverting to the child he was, recalling his father's words: "Mijo, it doesn't matter how good you think your English is, la migra will still get you."

In a book that is part memoir, part travelogue and part family history, Knisley not only tries to connect with her grandparents, but to reconcile their past and present selves. She is aided in her quest by her grandfather's World War Two memoir, which is excerpted. Readers will identify with Knisley's frustration, compassion and fears, and her attempts to come to terms with mortality, as she copes with the stress of travel complicated by grandparents' frailty.

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beaton, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush--part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed. Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

Part memoir, part medical cautionary tale, Dumb tells the story of how an urban twentysomething copes with the everyday challenges that come with voicelessness. Webber adroitly uses the comics medium to convey the practical hurdles she faced as well as the fear and dread that accompanied her increasingly lonely journey to regain her life.

In Gabrielle Bell’s much anticipated graphic memoir, she returns from New York to her childhood town in rural Northern California after her mother’s home is destroyed by a fire. Acknowledging her issues with anxiety, financial hardships, memories of a semi-feral childhood, and a tenuous relationship with her mother, Bell helps her mother put together a new home on top of the ashes.

When she was a little girl, passing her summers in the heat of coastal Australia, Evie Wyld was captivated by sharks--by their innate ruthlessness, stealth, and immeasurable power--and they have never released their hold on her imagination. From the award-winning author of All the Birds, Singing, here is a deeply moving graphic memoir about family, love, loss, and the irresistible forces that, like sharks, course through life unseen, ready to emerge at any moment.

The legendary cartoonist aims his pen and paper towards his high school summer job. For three summers beginning when he was 16, cartoonist Guy Delisle worked at a pulp and paper factory in Quebec City. Factory Summers chronicles the daily rhythms of life in the mill, and the twelve-hour shifts he spent in a hot, noisy building filled with arcane machinery. Delisle takes his noted outsider perspective and applies it domestically, this time as a boy amongst men through the universal rite of passage of the summer job. Even as a teenager, Delisle's keen eye for hypocrisy highlights the tensions of class and the rampant sexism an all-male workplace permits. As the paper industry slowly begins to move overseas, Guy works the floor doing physically strenuous tasks. He is one of the few young people on site, and furthermore gets the job because of his father's connections, a fact which rightfully earns him disdain from the lifers.

A stunning illustrated journey through one young woman's year of feelings--from the saturated highs of early summer to the gray isolation of late winter. Enter Manjit Thapp's Feelings, where you'll find moods that change as quickly as the weather; the different shades of anxiety and hope that each new season brings; and the stages of joy and pain that fuel our growth. From the spark of possibility and jolt of creativity in High Summer, to the need for release from anxiety and pressure during Monsoon, to the desolation and numbness of Winter, Feelings implores us to consider the seasons of our own emotional journeys. Articulating and validating the range of feelings we all experience, this is a book that allows us to feel connected and comforted by the experiences that make us human.

From an award-winning artist, a memoir of life with a difficult, beloved dog that will resonate with anybody who has ever had a less than perfectly behaved pet .

A bold retelling of the life of the Their Eyes Were Watching God author Peter Bagge has defied the expectations of the comics industry by changing gears from his famous slacker hero Buddy Bradley to documenting the life and times of historical 20th century trailblazers. If Bagge had not already had a New York Times bestseller with his biography of Margaret Sanger, his newest biography, Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story, would seem to be an unfathomable pairing of author and subject.

Flying Couch, Amy Kurzweil’s debut, tells the stories of three unforgettable women. Amy weaves her own coming-of-age as a young Jewish artist into the narrative of her mother, a psychologist, and Bubbe, her grandmother, a World War II survivor who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto by disguising herself as a gentile.

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, 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 who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns,thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates,friends, and humans everywhere.

Glenn Gould was a Canadian pianist, a child genius who became a worldwide superstar of classical music remembered for, among others, his almost revolutionary interpretations of Bach. This graphic novel biography seeks to understand the eccentric personality behind the persona. Who is the mysterious Glenn Gould? Why did he abruptly end his career as a performing musician? Why did he become one of the very first of his peers to disappear from the public eye like J.D. Salinger?

Every young person knows that most of the matches one finds on tinder likely harbour some combination of dubious intentions, dubious life goals and dubious (if not absent) sources of income. The gods seem to want to prove this truism wrong when Moa - broke, depressed, and living with a group of transients above an old store - matches with a very famous celebrity on the popular hook-up site.

For native Brooklynite Roz Chast, adjusting to life in the suburbs (where people own trees!?) was surreal. But she recognized that for her kids, the reverse was true. On trips into town, they would marvel at the strange world of Manhattan: its gum-wad-dotted sidewalks, honey-combed streets, and "those West Side Story-things" (fire escapes). Their wonder inspired Going into Town, part playful guide, part New York stories, and part love letter to the city, told through Chast's laugh-out-loud, touching, and true cartoons.

Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation--and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

Saudi Arabia offers few prospects for the bright young Mohammed El-Gharani. With roots in Chad, Mohammed is treated like a second-class citizen. His access to healthcare and education are restricted; nor can he make the most of his entrepreneurial spirit. At the age of 14, having scraped together some money as a street trader, Mohammed seizes an opportunity to study in Pakistan. One Friday in Karachi, Mohammed is detained during a raid on his local mosque. After being beaten and interrogated, he is sold to the American government by the Pakistani forces as a member of Al-Qaida with links to Osama Bin Laden, but Mohammed has heard of neither. The Americans fly him first to Kandahar and then to Guantánamo Bay. In Guantánamo Kid, Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc tell the eye-opening, heart-wrenching story of one of Guantánamo's youngest detainees. Written in collaboration with Mohammed El-Gharani,Guantánamo Kid reflects as closely as possible his memories and experiences of life in the camp.

Gumballs dispenses an array of bright, candy-colored short comics about Erin's gender transition, anecdotal tales of growing up as a triplet, and fictional stories of a socially inept lovestruck teenager named Tobias. The wide-ranging series is filled with single-page gag cartoons, visual diaries of everyday life, funny faux personal ads, and real-life horror stories of customers at his day job. Gumballs offers a variety of flavors that will surely delight anyone with a taste for candid self-reflection and observations of humanity.

A candid and philisophical memoir tackling abortion and the complex decision to reprouceI Know You Rider is Leslie Stein's rumination on the many complex questions surrounding the decision to reproduce. Opening in an abortion clinic, the book accompanies Stein through a year of her life, steeped in emotions she was not quite expecting while also looking far beyond her own experiences. She visits with a childhood friend who's just had twins and is trying to raise them as environmentally as possible, chats with another who's had a vasectomy to spare his wife a lifetime of birth control, and spends Christmas with her own mother, who aches for a grandchild.Through these melodically rendered conversations with loved ones and strangers, Stein weaves one continuing conversation with herself. She presents a sometimes sweet, sometimes funny, and always powerfully empathetic account, asking what makes a life meaningful and where we find joy amid other questions--most of which have no solid answers, much like real life.Instead of focusing on trauma, I Know You Rider is a story about unpredictability, change, and adaptability, adding a much-needed new perspective to a topic often avoided or discussed through a black and white lens. People are ever changing, contradicting themselves, and having to deal with unforeseen circumstances: Stein holds this human condition with grace and humor, as she embraces the cosmic choreography and keeps walking, open to what life blows her way.

A gorgeous graphic memoir about loss, love, and confronting grief   When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and the sight of an abandoned mining town after his funeral marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places.

This is the renowned cartoonist's first long-form graphic work - a 200-page memoir that poignantly recounts his mother's secret life, which included an affair with a cartoonist and crime novelist in the 1950s and '60s. Invisible Ink unfolds like a detective story, alternating between past and present, as Griffith recreates the quotidian habits of suburban Levittown and the professional and cultural life of mid-century Manhattan in the 1950s and '60s as seen through his mother's and his own then-teenage eyes. Griffith puts the pieces together and reveals a mother he never knew.

Comedian and performer Andy Kaufman's resume was impressive--a popular role on the beloved sitcom Taxi, a high-profile stand-up career, and a surprisingly successful stint in professional wrestling. Although he was by all accounts a sensitive and thoughtful person, he's ironically best remembered for his various contemptible personas, which were so committed and so convincing that all but his closest family and friends were completely taken in.

Japan is a place of special fascination for the acclaimed international comics creator Igort, who has visited and lived there more than 20 times, and worked in the country's manga industry for more than a decade. In this masterful new book--part graphic memoir, part cultural meditation--Igort vividly recounts his personal experiences in Japan, creating comics amid the activities of everyday life, and finding inspiration everywhere: in nature, history, custom, art, and encounters with creators including animation visionary Hayao Miyazaki.

If you work hard enough, if you want it enough, if you're smart and talented and "good enough," you can do anything. Except get pregnant. Her whole life, Lucy Knisley wanted to be a mother. But when it was finally the perfect time, conceiving turned out to be harder than anything she'd ever attempted. Fertility problems were followed by miscarriages, and her eventual successful pregnancy plagued by health issues, up to a dramatic, near-death experience during labor and delivery. This moving, hilarious, and surprisingly informative memoir not only follows Lucy's personal transition into motherhood but also illustrates the history and science of reproductive health from all angles, including curious facts and inspiring (and notorious) figures in medicine and midwifery.

Life of Che is one of the most anticipated entries in Fantagraphics' The Alberto Breccia Library. Originally released as part of a graphic biography series in January 1969, it came out in Argentina only a year after Ernesto "Che" Guevara had died and reached an audience beyond comics readers. In the 1970s, the military government raided its publisher, destroying the means to reprint the book. It was a lost comic until a publisher in Spain restored it in 1987.

This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal—to establish unshakable logical foundations of mathematics—continues to loom before him. Through love and hate, peace and war, Russell persists in the dogged mission that threatens to claim both his career and his personal happiness, finally driving him to the brink of insanity.

A comedic memoir about fandom, fame, and other embarrassments from the life of the New York Times bestselling cartoonist. What happens when a childhood hobby grows into a lifelong career? The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Adrian Tomine's funniest and most revealing foray into autobiography, offers an array of unexpected answers. When a sudden medical incident lands Tomine in the emergency room, he begins to question if it was really all worthwhile: despite the accolades and opportunities of a seemingly charmed career, it's the gaffes, humiliations, slights, and insults he's experienced (or caused) within the industry that loom largest in his memory. Tomine illustrates the amusing absurdities of how we choose to spend our time, all the while mining his conflicted relationship with comics and comics culture. But in between chaotic book tours, disastrous interviews, and cringe-inducing interactions with other artists, life happens: Tomine fumbles his way into marriage, parenthood, and an indisputably fulfilling existence. A richer emotional story emerges as his memories are delineated in excruciatingly hilarious detail.

The early work of the pioneering feminist cartoonist plus her acclaimed new story "Dream House" Aline Kominsky-Crumb immediately made her mark in the Bay Area's underground comix scene with unabashedly raw, dirty, unfiltered comics chronicling the thoughts and desires of a woman coming of age in the 1960s. Kominsky-Crumb didn't worry about self-flattery. In fact, her darkest secrets and deepest insecurities were all the more fodder for groundbreaking stories. Her exaggerated comix alter ego, Bunch, is self-destructive and grotesque but crackles with the self-deprecating humor and honesty of a cartoonist confident in the story she wants to tell.

Jammed with cartoons, mad schemes, psychedelic portraits and notes from the road, Lovf is a travel journal and a mirror of the post-traumatic dream-world its author can't escape from, a Kerouacian meltdown of cross-hatching, spattered marker, crayons, glitter, tape, nail polish, white-out, finger-painting, rain, wine, stickers and word balloons.

Cartoonist Ellen Forney explores the relationship between crazy and creative in this graphic memoir of her bipolar disorder, woven with stories of famous bipolar artists and writers. Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity.

Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon, one of the key figures of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president.

Congressman John Lewis, an American icon and one of the key figures of the civil rights movement, continues hi saward-winning graphic novel trilogy with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, inspired by a 1950s comic book that helped prepare his own generation to join the struggle. Now, March brings the lessons of history to vivid life for a new generation, urgently relevant for today's world.

Welcome to the stunning conclusion of the award-winning and best-selling MARCH trilogy.

“I am Marzi, born in 1979, ten years before the end of communism in Poland. My father works at a factory, my mother at a dairy. Social problems are at their height. Empty stores are our daily bread.I’m scared of spiders and the world of adults doesn’t seem like a walk in the park.” Told from a young girl’s perspective, Marzena Sowa’s memoir of a childhood shaped by politics feels remarkably fresh and immediate. Structured as a series of vignettes that build on one another, MARZI is a compelling and powerful coming-of-age story that portrays the harsh realities of life behind the Iron Curtain while maintaining the everyday wonders and curiosity of childhood.

Mendoza was a poor Sephardic Jew from East London who became the boxing champion of Britain in 1789. As a Jew with limited means and a foreign-sounding name, Mendoza was an unlikely symbol of what many Britons considered to be their very own "national" sport.

In Munch, writer and artist Steffen Kverneland brings the story of one of the world's most influential painters to vivid life. This extraordinary, inventive graphic novel uses text drawn exclusively from the quotes of Edvard Munch and his contemporaries. Filled with authenticity and life, Munch debunks the familiar myth of the half-mad expressionist painter--anguished, starving, and ill-treated--and draws out his neglected sense of humor and optimism.

Noah Van Sciver is haunted by the house at 133 ____ Street, or as his brothers rechristened it "One Dirty Tree." This sprawling dilapidated New Jersey house was his first home and the site of formative experiences. Growing up in a big, poor, Mormon family--surrounded by comic-books, eight siblings, bathtubs full of dirty dishes--Noah's childhood exerts a powerful force on his present day relationship. Drawn in his inimitable style, written with wry wit and humor, One Dirty Tree is another reason why Noah Van Sciver is one of the best cartoonists of his generation.

In this achingly beautiful graphic memoir, Liana Finck goes in search of that thing she has lost--her shadow, she calls it, but one might also think of it as the "otherness" or "strangeness" that has defined her since birth, that part of her that has always made her feel as though she is living in exile from the world. In Passing for Human, Finck is on a quest for self-understanding and self-acceptance, and along the way she seeks to answer some eternal questions: What makes us whole? What parts of ourselves do we hide or ignore or chase away--because they're embarrassing, or inconvenient, or just plain weird--and at what cost?

In Poetry is Useless, Anders Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. Poetry is Useless reveals seven years of Nilsen's life and musings: beginning in 2007, it covers a substantial period of his comics career to date, and includes visual reference to his books, such as Dogs & Water, Rage of Poseidon, and the New York Times Notable Book Big Questions.

A lyrical exploration of the city and memory, as drawn by a Vice cartoonist Leslie Stein takes us on a sinuous urban stroll divorced from destination, glimpsing New York City through her open eyes. While she is closing up a bar late at night, she is also an adolescent at a rave in the mountains, an adult grappling with her grandfather's fading memory or at one of her first waitressing jobs. Stein is a master storyteller, an urban explorer, and a loyal guide through dark days and simple, blissful encounters.

The first book to appear in English by the acclaimed Belgian artist Dominique Goblet, Pretending is Lying is a memoir unlike any other. In a series of dazzling fragments--skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black and white--Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, Guy Marc; with her daughter, Nikita; and with her parents. The result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma--a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics.

From the author of My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, a new graphic memoir brimming with black humor, which explores the ultimate irony: the author's addiction to 12-Step programs. David Heatley had an unquestionably troubled and eccentric childhood: father a sexually repressed alcoholic, mother an overworked compulsive overeater. Then David's parents enter the world of 12-step programs and find a sense of support and community. It seems to help. David, meanwhile, grows up struggling with his own troublesome sexual urges and seeking some way to make sense of it all. Eventually he starts attending meetings too. Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous. Debtors Anonymous. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. More and more meetings. Meetings for issues he doesn't have. With stark, sharply drawn art and unflinching honesty, David Heatley explores the strange and touching relationships he develops, and the truths about himself and his family he is forced to confront.

Hart uses the graphic form to articulate his and his wife's on-going search for meaning in the aftermath of Rosalie's death, exploring themes of grief, hopelessness, rebirth, and eventually finding hope again. Hart creatively portrays the solace he discovers in nature, philosophy, great works of literature, and art across all mediums in this expressively honest and loving tribute to his baby girl. Rosalie Lighting is a graphic masterpiece chronicling a father's undying love.

To John Lewis, the civil rights movement came to an end with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But that was after more than five years as one of the preeminent figures of the movement, leading sit–in protests and fighting segregation on interstate busways as an original Freedom Rider. It was after becoming chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and being the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. It was after helping organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the ensuing delegate challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. And after coleading the march from Selma to Montgomery on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” All too often, the depiction of history ends with a great victory. But John Lewis knew that victories are just the beginning.

From Nate Powell, the National Book Award-winning artist of March, a collection of graphic nonfiction essays about living in a new era of necessary protest In this anthology of seven comics essays, author and graphic novelist Nate Powell addresses living in an era of what he calls "necessary protest." Save It for Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest is Powell's reflection on witnessing the collapse of discourse in real time while drawing the award-winning trilogy March, written by Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, this generation's preeminent historical account of nonviolent revolution in the civil rights movement. Powell highlights both the danger of normalized paramilitary presence symbols in consumer pop culture, and the roles we play individually as we interact with our communities, families, and society at large.

Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.

Carol Tyler chronicles her fraught relationship to her father, Charles, a WWII veteran, and how the war affected lives through both childhood and adulthood. You'll Never Know is also a tribute to servicemen and women, dramatising the traumatic effects of the war on the Greatest Generation and those who followed. Her father's memories are woven into her own, which span her Catholic, Midwestern childhood; her troubled marriage; her daughter's struggles and her efforts to care for her aging parents.

New York Times-bestselling graphic memoirist Lucy Knisley (Relish) writes about her adorable DIY wedding! In 2010, Lucy and her long-term boyfriend John broke up. Three long, lonely years later, John returned to New York, walked into Lucy's apartment, and proposed. This is not that story. It is the story of what came after: The Wedding.

An intimate graphic memoir by a New York Times-bestselling writer about his semester abroad in Beirut as he grows close to a crowd of mostly LGBTQ students, and suffers a mental breakdown while the city erupts into revolution. Illustrated in beautiful and intricate detail, Spring Rain is an absorbing and poignant graphic memoir of a young man's attempt to gain control over his life as well as a portrait of a city and a nation's violent struggle to define its future.

One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had throat cancer and was expected to die. Small, a prize-winning children's author, re-creates a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. Readers will be riveted by his journey from speechless victim, subjected to X-rays by his radiologist father and scolded by his withholding and tormented mother, to his decision to flee his home at sixteen with nothing more than dreams of becoming an artist.

This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam war as seen by a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. Visually powerful and emotionally potent, Such A Lovely Little War is both a large-scale and intimate study of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of the Vietnamese: a turbulent national history intertwined with an equally traumatic familial one.

A highly personal collection documenting the early months of artist Julia Kaye's gender transition.   Instead of a traditional written diary, Julia Kaye has always turned to art as a means of self-reflection. So when she began her gender transition in 2016, she decided to use her popular webcomic, Up and Out, to process her journey and help others with similar struggles realize they weren't alone.   Julia's poignant, relatable comics honestly depict her personal ups and downs while dealing with the various issues involved in transitioning--from struggling with self-acceptance and challenging societal expectations, to moments of self-love and joy.

Aneurin (Nye) Wright hasn't been on good terms with his father for a long time. When he receives a call on his birthday from his father, Neil, he isn't quite sure how to react. Neil has been diagnosed with emphysema and is "certified for hospice," a six-month death sentence. He needs help. Newly unemployed, Nye is free to move into the trailer park where his father lives and assume the role of caregiver. Neither Nye nor Neil is particularly enthralled by the situation. Things to Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park documents Nye's reconciliation with his father as he cares for him in hospice. Their daily schedule of pill counting and medical checks unfolds in an extraordinary world where the protagonist is a minotaur and his father a rhinoceros, social workers are sea turtles, and mobile homes move atop gigantic elephants.

A boldly drawn, unforgettable memoir about trauma and the barriers to gender affirming health care In the winter of 2004, a shy woman named Emma sits in Toby's office. She wants to share this wonderful new book she's reading, but Toby, her therapist, is concerned with other things. Emma is transgender, and has sought out Toby for approval for hormone replacement therapy. Emma has shown up at the therapy sessions as an outgoing, confident young woman named Katina, and a depressed, submissive workaholic named Ed. She has little or no memory of her actions when presenting as these other two people. And then Toby asks about her childhood . . . As the story unfolds, we discover clues to Emma's troubled past and how and why these other two people may have come into existence. As Toby juggles treating three separate people, each with their own unique personalities and memories, he begins to wonder if Emma is merely acting out to get attention, or if she actually has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Is she just a troubled woman in need of help? And is "the third person" in her brain protecting her, or derailing her chances of ever finding peace? The Third Person is a riveting memoir from newcomer Emma Grove. Drawn in thick, emotive lines, with the refined style of a comics vet, Grove has created a singular, gripping depiction of the intersection of identities and trauma. The Third Person is a testament to the importance of having the space to heal and live authentically.

With gorgeously detailed yet minimal art, cartoonist Yeon-Sik Hong explores his move with his wife to a small house atop a rural mountain, replacing the high-rent hubbub of Seoul with the quiet murmur of the country. With their dog, cats, and chickens by their side, the simple life and isolation they so desperately craved proves to present new anxieties. Hong paints a beautiful portrait of the Korean countryside, changing seasons, and the universal relationships humans have with each other as well as nature, both of which are sometimes frustrating but always rewarding.

Visit Gabrielle Bell's blog for comics and more.
The Voyeurs is a real-time memoir of a turbulent five years in the life of renowned cartoonist, diarist, and filmmaker Gabrielle Bell. It collects episodes from her award-winning series Lucky, in which she travels to Tokyo, Paris, the South of France, and all over the United States, but remains anchored by her beloved Brooklyn, where sidekick Tony provides ongoing insight, offbeat humor, and enduring friendship.

An American artist witnesses the Quebec spring 2012 student strike on the streets of Montreal. The brutal police response and their violent tactics trigger an exploration of urban planning and its hidden connections to military strategies. Marshal Bugeaud’s urban warfare tactics in Algeria, Haussmann’s plan for Paris, planning and repression in the New World; theory and personal experience collide into an ambitious and poetic cartoon memoir.

Margaret Sanger was a noted twentieth-century birth-control activist, as well as an educator, a nurse, a mother, and a founder of Planned Parenthood. Woman Rebel follows Sanger from her impoverished childhood in rural New York to her brief formal education, from her work in the Lower East Side tenements to her involvement with the burgeoning birth-control movement.

One family's quest to survive the devastation of the Khmer Rouge Year of the Rabbit tells the true story of one family's desperate struggle to survive the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seizes power in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Immediately after declaring victory in the war, they set about evacuating the country's major cities with the brutal ruthlessness and disregard for humanity that characterized the regime ultimately responsible for the deaths of one million citizens. Cartoonist Tian Veasna was born just three days after the Khmer Rouge takeover, as his family set forth on the chaotic mass exodus from Phnom Penh. Year of the Rabbit is based on firsthand accounts, all told from the perspective of his parents and other close relatives. Stripped of any money or material possessions, Veasna's family found themselves exiled to the barren countryside along with thousands of others, where food was scarce and brutal violence a constant threat.