Book picks similar to
Get a Life by Philippe Dupuy


comics
graphic-novels
graphic-novel
fiction

Deogratias, a Tale of Rwanda


Jean-Philippe Stassen - 2000
    He is an ordinary teenager, in love with a girl named B�nigne, but Deogratias is a Hutu and B�nigne is a Tutsi who dies in the genocide, and Deogratias himself plays a part in her death. As the story circles around but never depicts the terror and brutality of an entire country descending into violence, we watch Deogratias in his pursuit of B�nigne, and we see his grief and descent into madness following her death, as he comes to believe he is a dog.Told with great artistry and intelligence, this book offers a window into a dark chapter of recent human history and exposes the West's role in the tragedy. Stassen's interweaving of the aftermath of the genocide and the events leading up to it heightens the impact of the horror, giving powerful expression to the unspeakable, indescribable experience of ordinary Hutus caught up in the violence. Difficult, beautiful, honest, and heartbreaking, this is a major work by a masterful artist.

Solutions and Other Problems


Allie Brosh - 2020
    Allie Brosh returns with a new collection of comedic, autobiographical, and illustrated essays.Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie Brosh’s childhood; the adventures of her very bad animals; merciless dissection of her own character flaws; incisive essays on grief, loneliness, and powerlessness; as well as reflections on the absurdity of modern life.This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features all-new material with more than 1,600 pieces of art.

Peepshow: The Cartoon Diary


Joe Matt - 2003
    Utterly shameless and completely self-absorbed, Joe Matt writes with an exhibitionist's enthusiasm for his favorite subject, himself.The first incarnation of Peepshow was these one-page strips in which Joe shows off virtuosity for shocking self-revelation. He is an immature, womanizing, cowardly, cheap, porn freak. He also has crack comic timing and a remarkable gift for (self) caricature.The books of Joe Matt provokes this confession from guys over beer: Oh my god, he's just like me. I think those things but I never say them because my girlfriend would leave me.This diary collection made Joe Matt the hero he is today.

The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic


Emma - 2018
    Most women carry some form of mental load--about their work, household responsibilities, financial obligations, and personal life, but what makes up that burden and how it's distributed within households and understood in offices is not always equal or fair. In her strips, Emma deals with themes ranging from maternity leave (it is not a vacation!), domestic violence, the clitoris, the violence of the medical world on women during childbirth, and other feminist issues, and she does so in a straightforward way that is both hilarious and deadly serious. Her comics also address the everyday outrages and absurdities of immigrant rights, income equality, and police violence.

Strange Planet


Nathan W. Pyle - 2019
    Pyle comes an adorable and profound universe in pink, blue, green, and purple. Based on the phenomenally popular Instagram of the same name, Strange Planet covers a full life cycle of the planet’s inhabitants, including milestones such as:The Emergence DayBeing Gains a SiblingThe Being Family Attains a BeastThe Formal Education of a BeingCelebration of Special DaysBeing Begins a VocationThe Beings at HomeHealth Status of a BeingThe Hobbies of a BeingThe Extended Family of the BeingThe Being Reflects on Life While Watching the Planet RotateWith dozens of never-before-seen illustrations in addition to old favorites, this book offers a sweet and hilarious look at a distant world not all that unlike our own.

Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures


Yvan Alagbé - 1995
    In the stories gathered in Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures—drawn between 1994 and 2011, and never before available in English—he uses stark, endlessly inventive black-and-white brushwork to explore love and race, oppression and escape. It is both an extraordinary experiment in visual storytelling and an essential, deeply personal political statement.With unsettling power, the title story depicts the lives of undocumented migrant workers in Paris. Alain, a Beninese immigrant, struggles to protect his family and his white girlfriend, Claire, while engaged in a strange, tragic dance of obsession and repulsion with Mario, a retired French Algerian policeman. It is already a classic of alternative comics, and, like the other stories in this collection, becomes more urgent every day.

A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting


Guy Delisle - 2013
    Whether he's playing practical jokes on his son or trying to trick his daughter into eating sugary cereal, Delisle's comic timing and wry wit are delightfully showcased in these vignettes.

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale


Belle Yang - 2010
    The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents.In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations—and of possibilities for reconciliation.Forget Sorrow demonstrates the power of storytelling and remembrance, as Belle—in telling this story—finds the strength to honor both her father and herself.

The Professor's Daughter


Joann Sfar - 1997
    they love each other.19th-century London. She is the lovely daughter of renowned Egyptologist Porfessor Bowell, he the dashing mummy Imhotep IV, owned by the professor and awake for the first time in thirty centuries. They stroll through London arm-in-arm and find their way into an abiding love, but everything seems to be getting in the way of it. Murder, adventure, mystery kidnapping, Queen Victoria tossed into the Thames—what more could you ask for? And yes, love conquers all in this rare gem from two of the most inspired graphic creators of our time.

The Heartbreak Diet


Thorina Rose - 2008
    After marrying young, living in New York, and settling in San Francisco, Rose and her husband start a family. When he begins an affair with his "running partner," Rose must find a way to rebuild her life with her two young sons, navigating her own inner doubts, the chorus of advice from well-meaning friends, and coping mechanisms close at hand: retail therapy and pet adoption (not so useful); leaning on friends and travels with gay men (very useful). With humor and insight, The Heartbreak Diet is a moving and entertaining meditation on fidelity, family, and finding one's way.

Waves


Ingrid Chabbert - 2017
    Their relationship is put to the test as they forge ahead, working together to rebuild themselves amidst the churning tumult of devastating loss, and ultimately facing the soul-crushing reality that they may never conceive a child of their own.Based on author Ingrid Chabbert’s own experience, coupled with soft, sometimes dreamlike illustrations by Carole Maurel, Waves is a deeply moving story that poignantly captures a woman’s exploration of her pain in order to rediscover hope.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength


Alison Bechdel - 2021
    Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others. A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.

Us


Curtis Wiklund - 2017
    The result is this collection of adorable illustrations depicting the tender, true moments the couple shares. From winter walks to end-of-day cuddles, inside jokes to impromptu forts, this dreamy art has already captured the hearts of thousands of fans around the world. Now in book form, Us delights as a gift and a keepsake.

Special Exits


Joyce Farmer - 2010
    Set in southern Los Angeles (which makes for a terrifying sequence as blind Rachel and ailing Lars are trapped in their home without power during the 1992 Rodney King riots), backgrounds and props are lovingly detailed: these objects serve as memory triggers for Lars and Rachel, even as they eventually overwhelm them and their home, which the couple is loathe to leave. Special Exits is laid out in an eight-panel grid, which creates a leisurely storytelling pace that not only helps to convey the slow, inexorable decline in Lars' and Rachel's health, but perfectly captures the timbre of the exchanges between a long-married couple: the affectionate bickering; their gallows humor; their querulousness as their bodies break down.Though Lars and Rachel are the protagonists of Special Exits, Farmer makes her voice known through creative visual metaphors and in her indictment of the careless treatment of the elderly in nursing homes. Special Exits gracefully deals with the hard reality of caring for aging loved ones: those who are or who have been in similar situations might find comfort in it, and those who haven't will find much to admire in the bravery and good humor of Lars and Rachel. Joyce Farmer, best known for co-creating the Tits 'n Clits comics anthology in the 1970s, a feminist response to the rampant misogyny in underground comix, spent 11 years crafting Special Exits, a graphic memoir in the vein of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home or Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner, and Frank Stack's Our Cancer Year, about caring for her dying father and stepmother.

Zahra's Paradise


Amir Khalil - 2010
    What’s keeping his memory from being obliterated is not the law. It is the grit and guts of his mother, who refuses to surrender her son to fate, and the tenacity of his brother, a blogger, who fuses tradition and technology to explore and explode the void in which Mehdi has vanished. Zahra’s Paradise weaves together fiction and real people and events. As the world witnessed the aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent elections, through YouTube videos, on Twitter, and in blogs, this story came into being. The global response to this gripping tale has been passionate—an echo of the global outcry during the political upheaval of the summer of 2009.   Zahra’s Paradise is a first on the internet, a first for graphic novels, and a first in the history of political dissidence. Zahra’s Paradise is being serialized online at zahrasparadise.com.   Zahra’s Paradise is a Publishers Weekly Best Comics title for 2011.