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Items16
1
The Photographer
Look for the moment a strip of actual photographs gives way to a drawing. The photographs come from Lefèvre’s 1986 trip with Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan. Guibert’s panels carry the story through moments when there’s no photograph, and the change in medium lets you see which kind of evidence you’re looking at.
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Understanding Comics (1993)
8.4/10on Open Library
Published
Start with the white space between panels. McCloud shows you an action beginning in one panel and its consequence in the next, then asks you to consider what you supplied between them. He gives you a way to read the gaps in any of the books here.
More about Understanding Comics3
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Beaton takes in the size of the Alberta oil sands operations and then brings you back to a conversation among workers. Those changes in scale help explain the draw of a job far from home and the costs that a paycheck leaves out. Pick this up for a view of the industry from inside a work camp.
More about Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands4
In Waves (2019)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
Sepia pages follow surfing history, including Duke Kahanamoku’s life in Hawaii. Blue-green pages return to Dungo and his partner Kristen, who also surfed. You can tell which story you’ve entered at a glance and see what the two strands share through the way Dungo draws people in the water.
More about In Waves5
The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change
Try the section on putting a price on carbon. Cartoon scenes put a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade program side by side, so you can see which starts by fixing a price and which starts by fixing the amount of emissions allowed. It’s a handy place to start if news stories use the two terms interchangeably.
More about The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change6
Unflattening (2015)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
One page arranges a year’s changing seasons along a winding path like a board game. You can take in the whole shape at once or follow the small pictures in order. That page is a good way into Sousanis’s larger argument about what pictures let us hold in mind together.
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The Complete Maus
Notice when Spiegelman shows himself wearing a mouse mask. The image makes the book’s animal figures feel like a choice the cartoonist has made, and it asks you to consider what that choice can convey. The interviews with his father let you follow how a son tries to draw a history he inherited.
More about The Complete Maus8
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
In an early schoolyard scene, children play with the veils they’ve just been required to wear. The narration gives you the change in the rules, and the drawings show how children turn a confusing new requirement into a game. It’s an early example of Satrapi letting her younger self’s perspective shape what you see.
More about Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood9
March. Book One (2013)
8.9/10on Open Library
Published
The book moves between Lewis as a congressman on Barack Obama’s inauguration day and his youth, including the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins. Watch the way Powell draws the students sitting together. Their stillness puts the discipline of nonviolent protest on the page.
More about March. Book One10
They Called Us Enemy
Look at how young George and his parents react to the same journey after his family is forced from their home. Becker can draw the boy’s curiosity and his parents’ worry in the same scene. Takei’s adult account gives you the political context the child couldn’t have known.
More about They Called Us Enemy11
The Best We Could Do (2017)
8.9/10on Open Library
Published
Bui opens with the birth of her son before turning to her parents’ lives in Vietnam and their escape. The shift gives you a reason to follow the different generations. You see a daughter trying to understand her parents just as she begins to learn what it means to be one herself.
More about The Best We Could Do12
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
Neufeld draws wide views of New Orleans and then follows seven people through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Pay attention to the changes in color between chapters. They help carry the emotional shift as the book moves from what happened across the city to what it felt like in one household.
More about A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge13
Paying the Land (2020)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Sacco moves between drawn interviews with Dene people and scenes that show their relationships with the land in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The portraits let you keep track of who is speaking when views on extraction and employment diverge. Read this for a sense of what those choices mean to people with different experiences of the same place.
More about Paying the Land14
Mom's cancer (2006)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Fies borrows the look of the game Operation for a page about his mother’s cancer. The visual joke makes room for a frightening moment and the family’s frustration with what they can control. It’s an example of how a patient’s experience can come through in the form of the page itself.
More about Mom's cancer15
Primates
Watch how Wicks draws the chimpanzees Jane Goodall was observing when she discovered that they make and use tools. The book puts that work alongside Dian Fossey’s research on gorillas and Biruté Galdikas’s research on orangutans.
More about Primates16
Grass (2019)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
The black ink drawings bring you back to Lee Ok-sun in conversation with the artist as well as to events she remembers from her youth. Those returns make space for a survivor’s present-day voice in a history of Japanese military sexual slavery. The interview scenes give you time to take in the difficult pauses between words.
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