The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: A Graphic Novel


Nunzio DeFilippis - 2008
    Scott Fitzgerald declared it "the funniest story ever written" and "one of my two favorite stories." It's the strange tale of a man who is "born" 70 years old and mysteriously ages in reverse. This stunning graphic novel adaptation illustrates Benjamin Button's many adventures: He falls in love, starts a family, and runs a successful business. In his later years, he goes to war and attends Harvard University. As an old man, he resembles a newborn baby and returns to the care of a nurse.Complete with Fitzgerald's original text, dazzling watercolor illustrations, and an afterword describing the story's origins and critical reception, this edition offers a fresh look at a literary masterpiece.

Stitches


David Small - 2009
    A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children’s illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David—a highly anxious yet supremely talented child—all too often became the unwitting object of his parents’ buried frustration and rage.Believing that they were trying to do their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son’s respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David’s cancer. Elizabeth, David’s mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden.Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen—with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist—will resonate as the ultimate survival statemen.

Promethea, Vol. 1


Alan Moore - 2000
    Sophie Bangs was a just an ordinary college student in a weirdly futuristic New York when a simple assignment changed her life forever. While researching Promethea, a mythical warrior woman, Sophie receives a cryptic warning to cease her investigations. Ignoring the cautionary notice, she continues her studies and is almost killed by a shadowy creature when she learns the secret of Promethea. Surviving the encounter, Sophie soon finds herself transformed into Promethea, the living embodiment of the imagination. Her trials have only begun as she must master the secrets of her predecessors before she is destroyed by Promethea's ancient enemy.

The Undertaking of Lily Chen


Danica Novgorodoff - 2014
    Which means that Deshi must find him an eligible body before the week is up. Lily Chen, sweet as a snakebite, needs money and a fast ride out of town. Haunted by the gods of their ancestors and the expectations of the new world, Deshi and Lily embark on a journey with two very different destinations in mind.They travel through a land where the ground is hard and the graves are shallow, where marriage can be murder and where Lily Chen is wanted—dead and alive.

Brain Camp


Susan Kim - 2010
    And yet, here they both are at Camp Fielding, settling in with all the other losers and misfits who've been shipped off by their parents in a last-ditch effort to produce a child worth bragging about. But strange disappearances, spooky lights in the woods, and a chilling alteration that turns the dimmest, rowdiest campers into docile zombie Einsteins have Jenna and Lucas feeling more than a little suspicious...and a lot afraid.

Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant


Tony Cliff - 2011
    Using the skills she's picked up on the way, Delilah's adventures continue as she plots to rob a rich and corrupt Sultan in Constantinople. With the aid of her flying boat and her newfound friend, Selim, she evades the Sultan's guards, leaves angry pirates in the dust, and fights her way through the countryside. For Delilah, one adventure leads to the next in this thrilling and funny installment in her exciting life. A little bit Tintin, a little bit Indiana Jones, Delilah Dirk is a great pick for any reader looking for a smart and foolhardy heroine... and globetrotting adventures.

Space Battle Lunchtime Vol. 1: Lights, Camera, Snacktion


Natalie Riess - 2016
    on a spaceship... and her alien competitors don't play nice! Does Peony really have what it takes to be the best cook in the Galaxy? Tune in and find out!

Asterios Polyp


David Mazzucchelli - 2009
    An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait. Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about? As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.

Little Fish: A Memoir from a Different Kind of Year


Ramsey Beyer - 2013
    Written in an autobiographical style with beautiful artwork, Little Fish shows the challenges of being a young person facing the world on her own for the very first time and the unease—as well as excitement—that comes along with that challenge.

Mooncop


Tom Gauld - 2016
    Whatever were we thinking...? It seems so silly now."The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. A young girl runs away, a dog breaks off his leash, an automaton wanders off from the Museum of the Moon.

Swamp Thing: Twin Branches


Maggie Stiefvater - 2020
    One is quiet and the other is the life of any party, but they are inseparable. For their last summer before college, the two leave the city to live with their rural cousins, where they find that the swamp holds far darker depths than they could have imagined. While Walker carves their names into the new social scene, Alec recedes into a summer school laboratory, because he brought something from home on their trip—it’s an experiment that will soon consume him. This season, both brothers must confront truths, ancient and familial, and as their lives diverge, tensions increase and dormant memories claw to the surface.

Teen Titans, Volume 1: It's Our Right to Fight


Scott Lobdell - 2012
    seeks to capture, kill or co-opt super-powered teenagers. As Red Robin, he's going to have to team up with the mysterious and belligerent powerhouse thief known as Wonder Girl, the hyperactive speedster calling himself Kid Flash and few more all-new teen super-heroes to stand any chance at all against N.O.W.H.E.R.E. But as Superboy meets them for the first time, the Titans have to wonder, is he a friend - or foe?Collecting: Teen Titans 1-7

The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks


Max Brooks - 2009
    They’ re coming. They’re hungry.Don’t wait for them to come to you! This is the graphic novel the fans demanded: major zombie attacks from the dawn of humanity. On the African savannas, against the legions of ancient Rome, on the high seas with Francis Drake . . . every civilization has faced them. Here are the grisly and heroic stories–complete with eye-popping artwork that pulsates with the hideous faces of the undead. Organize before they rise!Scripted by the world’s leading zombie authority, Max Brooks, Recorded Attacks reveals how other eras and cultures have dealt with–and survived– the ancient viral plague. By immersing ourselves in past horror we may yet prevail over the coming outbreak in our time.

Heart in a Box


Kelly Thompson - 2015
    But you never die from these things; you just want to. In a moment of weakness, she wishes her broken heart away and a mysterious stranger—who may or may not be totally evil—obliges. But emptiness is even worse than grief, and Emma sets out to collect the seven pieces of her heart spread across the country, a journey that forces her to face her own history and the cost of recapturing it, and leads inevitably to a confrontation with the Man with No Name himself!

Lola: A Ghost Story


J. Torres - 2009
    No one except his ailing grandmother—a woman who used her visions to help those living in her small town... the same rural community in all the scary stories Jesse's heard as a child. Man-eating ogres in trees. Farmhouses haunted by wraiths. Even pigs possessed by the devil. Upon his grandmother's passing, Jesse has no choice but to face his demons and whatever else might be awaiting him at grandma's house.