Tuesday 2 August 2011

5 Graphic Novels

Since I've been living in Canada I have taken full advantage of the well-stocked graphic novel section in Waterloo Public Library, today I got out five that I have never read before...
Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
- I had been meaning to read this one for a while because I'd heard so much about it's depiction of a Holocaust survivor but with mice and cats standing in for humans, it is also the only comic-book to have won a Pulitzer Prize.

Fray by Joss Whedon
- I've been reading Season 8 of Buffy (which directly follows on from the end of the tv series) and while I wait for Volume 5 to come in I thought I'd check out this as I'm a huge Whedon fan and Fray (a Slayer in the distant future) had appeared in Volume 4 due to some time-travel shenanigans involving Buffy.

Tank Girl: Visions of Booga by Alan C. Martin
- I also recently started going through the Tank Girl series (created by Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz fame) and having finished off three volumes of the collected TG comics I saw this one on a different shelf (since Hewlett wasn't involved) and liked the look of the artwork by the bizarrely named Rufus Dayglo.

The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way
- Yes, that is the Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance (a band I am not overly familiar with) but I had heard good things about this graphic novel (it won the 2008 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series) so thought it was worth a shot.

100% by Paul Pope
- The other day I finished off a Batman: Black & White collection and one of the artists had stuck out to me, with a rather manga-esque look to his depiction of Batman, so straight away I had to look up to see what else he had done and reserved two more graphic novels that he'd worked on (100% being ready for collection today). Incidentally, Paul Pope has won the Eisner Award three times throughout his career and the manga look to his work is in part down to working for Japan's leading manga publisher for 5 years.

Finally: Today over dinner I read When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs which was rather brilliant and another one that I had heard about for quite a while now but not got round to checking out, it's a sad but sweet tale of an elderly couple preparing for a war that's just about to start, reminiscing about how it was during the other World Wars and dealing with which instructions to follow to build a bomb shelter, the Local Council's or the Governments?!

What are you reading at the moment?
Any more suggestions on what I should get next?