Smile (2010)

If you want to know why so many of the decade's comics readers were ten years old, start with Raina Telgemeier's autobiographical Smile. It began as a webcomic and arrived from Scholastic's Graphix imprint in February 2010, then refused to leave the charts: by early 2017 the paperback had spent 240 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Its story of ordinary middle-school embarrassment, told in clean, warm color, proved that comics about everyday life could outsell capes, and the middle-grade graphic novel became one of publishing's busiest shelves.