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Items18
1
Isaac the pirate (2003)
Published
2002 winner: Isaac the Pirate, volume 1 (Les Amériques)
The first winner of the reunited prize follows a poor young painter who signs on with a captain who turns out to be a pirate, drawn by Christophe Blain in a loose, quick line that makes sea spray and bad weather feel physical. It is adventure comics with a melancholy undertow, and the jury picked the opening album. NBM's first English volume, To Exotic Lands, collects it together with the second, so that is the book to buy.
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Jimmy Corrigan (1999)
6.9/10on Open Library
Published
2003 winner
Chris Ware's saga of lonely Corrigan men, spanning four generations, was written in English, so there is no translation question here, only the challenge of reading it. Its diagram-like pages, tiny lettering and exacting layouts reward slow attention, and the story of a shy middle-aged man meeting the father who left him is quietly devastating. It is the clearest sign on this shelf that the Angoulême jury looks well beyond French-language comics.
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Ordinary victories (2005)
Published
2004 winner: Le Combat ordinaire, volume 1
Manu Larcenet's photographer Marco has panic attacks, a therapist he is trying to quit and a father who is slipping away, and the book finds both comedy and real ache in that ordinary mess. The cartoony figures sit against gorgeous painted countryside, which is part of its charm. The prize went to the first volume, which appeared in English as Ordinary Victories; it is the right place to start a series that only deepens.
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Chicken with Plums (2006)
Published
2005 winner: Poulet aux prunes
Marjane Satrapi's follow-up to Persepolis is short, sad and often funny: a celebrated musician in 1950s Tehran, his beloved instrument broken, takes to his bed and decides to die. Over the days that follow, flashbacks and flash-forwards fill in the life and the family around him. It reads in an evening, and it is the better choice if you already know Persepolis and want Satrapi at her most concentrated. The English edition is Chicken with Plums.
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Notes for a War Story (2007)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
2006 winner: Appunti per una storia di guerra
Gipi's three teenage boys live in an unnamed country at war, drifting into crime and the taste of power that comes with it. No battle scenes and no named conflict: the war is weather, always there, and the book is about what it does to boys with nothing to do. The washed, sketchy art feels like reportage. In English it is Notes for a War Story, a lean read that lingers long after.
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NonNonBa (2012)
Published
2007 winner
The first manga to take Angoulême's Best Album prize is Shigeru Mizuki's memoir of a boyhood spent listening to an elderly woman, NonNonBa, who filled his head with yokai, the spirits and monsters of Japanese folklore. Those creatures later made Mizuki famous, and here you see where they came from, drawn against richly detailed village backgrounds. Drawn & Quarterly's English edition is a warm, generous first stop for readers new to manga.
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The Arrival (2006)
9.6/10on Open Library
Published
2008 winner: Là où vont nos pères
Shaun Tan's immigrant story has no words at all, which makes it the easiest winner on this list to read in any language. A man leaves his family for a strange new country of invented alphabets, odd creatures and baffling customs, so the reader feels as lost as he does. The sepia pages look like an old photo album. It is also a rare winner that works for older children and adults alike.
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Pinocchio (2008)
Published
2009 winner
Winshluss turns Collodi's puppet into a silent robot and sends him through a grimy, violent, very adult world, with a cockroach version of Jiminy Cricket living inside his head. It is almost wordless, apart from wordy black-and-white interludes that follow Jiminy, and swings between slapstick and genuine cruelty. Knockabout and Last Gasp published it in English in 2011 as a handsome hardback. Not one for children, whatever the title suggests.
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5,000 km per second (2016)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
2011 winner: Cinquemila chilometri al secondo
Manuele Fior follows Piero and Lucia from a teenage crush in Italy through years spent apart in different countries, and each stretch of their lives is painted in its own watercolor palette, so you feel time passing in the color before anyone says a word. It is a book about distance and missed chances rather than grand events. Fantagraphics published it in English as 5,000 km Per Second, and it is the romance to pick from this shelf.
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Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012)
Published
2012 winner: Chroniques de Jérusalem
Guy Delisle spent a year in Jerusalem as the stay-at-home parent while his partner worked for an aid organization, and he records it the way he recorded Pyongyang and Burma: school runs, checkpoints, baffled curiosity and a lot of dry humor. Its value is the street-level view of a divided city from someone who admits what he does not understand. The English edition, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, is a long but easy read.
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Weapons of Mass Diplomacy (2014)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
2013 winner: Quai d'Orsay, volume 2
Christophe Blain's second Angoulême win, co-written with Abel Lanzac, is a political comedy set inside the French foreign ministry: a young speechwriter tries to keep up with a whirlwind minister whose restless energy fills every page and who wants every speech rewritten. The jury honored the second volume, but the story is best read from the start; in English, look for Weapons of Mass Diplomacy. Funny, fast and surprisingly sharp about how policy gets made.
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The Arab of the future (2015)
7.0/10on Open Library
Published
2015 winner: L'Arabe du futur, volume 1
Riad Sattouf draws his own early childhood, moving between France, Gaddafi's Libya and his father's village in Syria, seen through the eyes of a small blond boy who notices everything and judges nothing. The comedy is sharp and the portrait of his father, a pan-Arab dreamer, gets darker as it goes. The prize went to the first volume; the English series continues the story across further books, so this opener is an easy commitment.
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Here (2014)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
2016 winner: Ici
Richard McGuire's book never leaves one corner of one room, yet it covers billions of years, with small panels from different dates opening inside each page like windows. A family argument sits beside a prehistoric swamp and a far future. It grew from a six-page strip McGuire published in 1989, and the full-color book version is the one the jury honored. Readers who like a puzzle will return to it often.
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My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, vol 1 (2017)
9.7/10on Open Library
Published
2019 winner
Emil Ferris draws her novel as the ballpoint-pen diary of ten-year-old Karen Reyes in late-1960s Chicago, a girl who imagines herself as a werewolf and sets out to solve the death of her upstairs neighbor. Every page looks like lined notebook paper filled with cross-hatching and pulp-horror pastiche. It was written in English, so you are reading the original. The prize honored the first volume; a second volume followed in 2024.
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The Hunting Accident (2017)
Published
2021 winner
David L. Carlson's script and Landis Blair's dense black-and-white ink tell the true story of Matt Rizzo, a blind Chicago man who told his son he lost his sight in a hunting accident. The truth involves prison and a friendship with fellow inmate Nathan Leopold, of Leopold and Loeb, and with it a long conversation about guilt, poetry and second chances. First Second published it in English in 2017, years before the French edition won.
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Listen, Beautiful Márcia (2023)
Published
2022 winner: Écoute, jolie Márcia
Marcello Quintanilha's Márcia is a nursing assistant in a Rio favela trying to keep her defiant daughter Jaqueline out of trouble, until the girl's choices draw the family toward gangsters and corrupt police. It is a tense family drama rather than a crime thriller, told in vivid color and in dialogue that keeps the rhythm of the street. Fantagraphics brought it to English in 2023 as Listen, Beautiful Márcia, the Brazilian artist's first book in English.
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From Above (2025)
Published
2023 winner: La Couleur des choses
Martin Panchaud tells a London teenager's story entirely in pictograms and map-like diagrams, like a sat-nav with feelings, and somehow it is gripping. Simon is a bullied 14-year-old when a fortune teller's prediction and a huge win at the races change everything. Panchaud's dyslexia shaped the style. Abrams published it in English in 2025 as From Above, the newest translation on this list.
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Monica (2023)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
2024 winner
Daniel Clowes's Monica follows one woman's search for the parents who left her, told in chapters that jump between war comics, horror, romance and cult paranoia, each in a different classic genre style. It is Clowes at his most ambitious, and the shifts make a strange, haunting whole rather than a gimmick. It was written in English, so there is no wait for a translation, and it is the natural book to read after Jimmy Corrigan.
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