KDL Recommends

Jonathan A. is a boozed-up, coked-out, sexually confused, hopelessly romantic and, of course, entirely fictional novelist who bears only a coincidental resemblance to real-life writer Jonathan Ames. For the fictional Jonathan, writing and drinking come easy. The hard parts of life are love and hope.

With stunning black-and-white illustrations, a noted cartoonist chronicles growing up with an epileptic older brother.

Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and funny, readers are drawn into a daughters complex yearning for her father. Apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned “fun home,” the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books.

The story of Jeffrey Brown’s evolution as a cartoonist, from his youthful obsession with superhero comics to his disillusionment with fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Seattle teenagers of the 1970s are suddenly faced with a devastating, disfiguring, and incurable plague that spreads only through sexual contact.

Presents an offbeat tour of the sleepy Midwestern town of Ice Haven and its unusual inhabitants, including Random Wilder, the narrator and would-be poet laureate of the town; his arch-rival Ida Wentz; the lovelorn Violet Van der Plazt and Vida Wentz; andMr. and Mrs. Ames, a detective team.

A visual self-assessment by the creator of “A Contract With God” and “The Plot” evaluates his life as a writer, a professional, and an artist, in a collection of autobiographical tales that includes “The Dreamer,” “To the Heart of the Storm,” and “The Name of the Game.”

Things in England become chaotic after Queen Elizabeth’s death, and Nicholas Fury, Otto Von Doom, and the other superheroes must decide whether to stay in England or emigrate to America with a young girl and her Indian protector.

In 1986, Afghanistan was torn apart by a war with the Soviet Union. This graphic novel/photo-journal is a record of one reporter’s arduous and dangerous journey through Afghanistan, accompanying the Doctors Without Borders.

The Walking Dead is centered on Rick Grimes a small-town police officer from Cynthiana, Kentucky, his family, and a number of other survivors who have banded together in order to survive after the world is overrun with zombies.

The triumphant return of one of comics’ greatest talents. Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when he moves to a small town in America’s heartland after his New York City apartment goes up in flames.

Graphic novels offer a collection of intertwined stories stemming from corruption, revenge, and the criminal underworld in a city so brutal it is known as “The Town Without Pity.”

Features the Victorian era adventures of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, comprised of Captain Nemo, Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man, Wilhelmina “Mina” Murray, Detective Thomas Sawyer, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

A stunning graphic novel that makes plain both the undeniable horrors and humanitarianism triggered by Hurricane Katrina. “A.D.” follows six New Orleanians from the hours before Katrina strikes to its aftermath.

Three shadows stand outside the house – and Louis and Lise know why the spectral figures are there. The shadows have come for Louis and Lise’s son, and nothing anyone can do will stop them. Louis cannot let his son die without trying to prevent it, so the family embarks on a journey to the ends of the earth, fleeing death.

Frederik meets Cati and falls in love, but the two face many obstacles to happiness because Cati is HIV positive, as is her three-year-old son.

Talks about Harvey Pekar’s teen years. When he failed to impress, whether on the football team, in math class, in the Navy or on the job, Pekar simply gave up. This novel presents the tale of a young man’s search for himself through the frustrations, redemptions and complexities of ordinary life.

Chronicles the adventures of Neven, who leads journalists to stories during the Yugoslav War.

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood chronicles her Tehran childhood, which was first overshadowed by the Iranian Revolution, then cut short by war with Iraq.

It’s a Bird is a Superman story that doesn’t feature Superman at all. Rather, this unique graphic novel explores what the icon of Superman means to the world.

In a mid-twenty-first-century nation devastated by civil war, botanist professor Paulie Panther researches a strange plant at the high school of an experimental forest town and discovers its telepathic properties, a finding that singles him out as a brash individualist in a community of conformists.

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, the fourteen-year-old had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. Stitches re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka.

The adventure starts when cousins Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone are run out of Boneville and later get separated and lost in the wilderness, meeting monsters and making friends as they attempt to return home.

It is the story of Vladek Speigelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity.

In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself and his family.

This drama began on the eve of World War II with three men named Adolf. The fate of Adolf Hitler, the dictator of the evil Third Reich, we know, but Tezuka’s series continued after the war, following the other two Adolfs—one the son of a baker, a German Jew; the other the son of a gentile German diplomat.

Wrapped in the landscape of a blustery Wisconsin winter, Blankets explores the sibling rivalry of two brothers growing up in the isolated country, and the budding romance of two coming-of-age lovers. A tale of security and discovery, of playfulness and tragedy, of a fall from grace and the origins of faith. A profound and utterly beautiful work.

A graphic novel of remarkable power and beauty in the tradition of “Persepolis” and “Fun Home, American Widow” is the very personal story of how one woman dealt with and overcame a very public tragedy.

In the spring of 2003, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during an American bombing raid, roaming the streets in a desperate struggle for their lives. “Pride of Baghdad” raises questions about the true meaning of liberation—can it be given or is it earned only through self-determination and sacrifice?

When a plague of unknown origin instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome, unemployed and unmotivated slacker Yorick Brown suddenly discovers that he is the only male left in a world inhabited solely by women.

In this new incarnation of the 1960s comic strip, a thirty-first century group of teenagers rebel against their parents and their super-utopian society to form the Legion of Super-Heroes and fight crime, in homage to the heroes of the twentieth century.

A graphic novel chronicles four generations of the Corrigan men, from 1893 to 1983.

Traveling in Arabia as an Ambassador from the exiled FABLES community, Snow White is captured by the local sultan who wants to marry her (and then kill her). But the clever Snow attempts to charm the sultan instead by playing Scheherazade, telling him fantastic stories for a total of 1001 nights.

Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to participate in the popular culture.