Book picks similar to
Bad Island by Stanley Donwood


graphic-novels
graphic-novel
comics
fiction

I Will Bite You! and Other Stories


Joseph Lambert - 2011
    The comics here are sophisticated, unusual narratives about animal musicians, mischievous children, cavemen and heavenly bodies.

Alex + Ada, Vol. 2


Jonathan Luna - 2015
    Alex took a huge risk to unlock Ada and it seems to have paid off - Ada can now think for herself and explore life as a sentient android. As Alex and Ada spend more time together, they become closer. But as restrictions tighten on androids, Ada feels unsure about her place in Alex's life and the world. Collects Alex + Ada #6-10.

To Kill a Mockingbird: A Graphic Novel


Fred Fordham - 1960
    Scout, Jem, Boo Radley, Atticus Finch and the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, are all captured in illustrations by artist Fred Fordham.

Lady Mechanika Vol. 1: The Mystery of the Mechanical Corpse


Joe Benítez - 2015
    Having no memory of her captivity or her former life, Lady Mechanika eventually built a new life for herself as an adventurer and private investigator, using her unique abilities to solve cases the proper authorities couldn't or wouldn't handle. But she never stopped searching for the answers to her own past. Set in a fictionalized steampunk Victorian England, a time when magic and superstition clashed with new scientific discoveries and inventions, Lady Mechanika chronicles a young woman's obsessive search for her identity as she investigates other mysteries involving science and the supernatural. This volume collects the entire first Lady Mechanika mini-series The Mystery of the Mechanical Corpse, including its prequel chapter The Demon of Satan's Alley, plus a complete cover art gallery.

Thoreau at Walden


John Porcellino - 2008
    In this graphic masterpiece, John Porcellino uses only the words of Thoreau himself to tell the story of those two years off the beaten track. The pared-down text focuses on Thoreau's most profound ideas, and Porcellino's fresh, simple pictures bring the philosopher's sojourn at Walden to cinematic life. For readers who know Walden intimately, this graphic treatment will provide a vivid new interpretation of Thoreau's story. For those who have never read (or never completed!) the original, it presents a contemporary look at a few brave words to live by.

A Cat Story


Ursula Murray Husted - 2020
    Cilla and Betto are two friends who need a place to call home. The docks in Valletta are too wet, and the scraps of food too scarce. The city’s streets are too busy, and the humans too unreliable.But what about the quiet garden from old kitten tales—a place where all cats are welcome, and the humans are always kind? Could the stories really be true?As Cilla and Betto embark on a grand adventure to find out, they begin to spin a tale of their own—one that will take them through the art and stories of many journeyers who came before, and that will bring them to a surprising destination.

Dead End


Thomas Ott - 2002
    release, following hot on the heels of early 2002's Greetings from Hellville. Like Hellville, Dead End consists of Ott's trademark storytelling: wordless, stark, black-and-white scratchboard horror stories with twist endings, rendered beautifully with fish eye perspectives that create a vertiginous anxiety. Parts Twilight Zone, O. Henry, and Kafka, Ott's work evokes a visual history of literary suspense and horror; it reads like Dante's Inferno done as an issue of Tales from the Crypt, drawn by original Inferno illustrator Gustave Dore.The two stories in Dead End focus literally and figuratively on the circle. In the first short story, entitled "The Millionaires, " mysterious suitcase of money creates a cycle of death spurred by greed and lust; yes, another contemporary-updating of the tried "Monkey's Paw" variety, but in Ott's inimitable hands the story becomes less a morality play for children than a menacing reality check for adults. "Washing Day, " the collection's secon story, follows the path of an assassin on the trail of a former magician; the assassin quickly learns that there are perils in following a white rabbit.

My Last Summer with Cass


Mark Crilley - 2021
    For years, while spending summers together at a lakeside cabin, they created art together, from sand to scribbles . . . to anything available. Then Cass moved away to New York.When Megan finally convinces her parents to let her spend a week in the city, too, it seems like Cass has completely changed. She has tattoos, every artist in the city knows her. She even eats chicken feet now! At least one thing has stayed the same: They still make their best art together.But when one girl betrays the other's trust on the eve of what is supposed to be their greatest artistic feat yet, can their friendship survive? Can their art?

Over Easy


Mimi Pond - 2014
    After being denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret finds salvation from the straightlaced world of college and the earnestness of both hippies and punks in the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking group she encounters at the Imperial Café, where she makes the transformation from Margaret to Madge. At first she mimics these new and exotic grown-up friends, trying on the guise of adulthood with some awkward but funny stumbles. Gradually she realizes that the adults she looks up to are a mess of contradictions, misplaced artistic ambitions, sexual confusion, dependencies, and addictions.   Over Easy is equal parts time capsule of late 1970s life in California—with its deadheads, punks, disco rollers, casual sex, and drug use—and bildungsroman of a young woman who grows from a naïve, sexually inexperienced art-school dropout into a self-aware, self-confident artist. Mimi Pond’s chatty, slyly observant anecdotes create a compelling portrait of a distinct moment in time. Over Easy is an immediate, limber, and precise semi-memoir narrated with an eye for the humor in every situation.