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What is the best graphic novel you have read
SolitaireRose
Posts: 1,445
I saw this on Reddit, and honestly, I was hard to narrow it down to just one. FAVORITE? That's easy (The Invisibles), but the best?
I went with Moonshadow, beautiful art, a touching fantasy story and a book that seems quite timeless.
You?
I went with Moonshadow, beautiful art, a touching fantasy story and a book that seems quite timeless.
You?
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Favorite: Zot! - Scott McCloud. It's been said of the Velvet Underground that everyone who heard them went out and started a band. I feel like Zot! is my Velvet Underground. It's a world I want to be in. It has humor, sadness, goodness, evil, beauty, and ugliness. It makes me wish I could create worlds as complex and beautiful as Scott did, and I strive to every time I set down to the word processor.
Best: Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud. I consider it the "best" because it does more to further the industry as a whole, gives us ammunition when people try to dismiss comics as "kiddie stuff" and explains so much of the science and thinking behind them. Once read, you never look at funnybooks the same way again. You realize they're part of something that's been around since the dawn of man, and you'll never undervalue them again.
Favorite: Blankets by Craig Thompson. God this book kicked my ass when I first read it. I know it wasn't liked by some on the show, but the book hit an emotional chord with me like nothing before and actually shaped the way I am. I think the fact that I read it when I was 16 also makes it that much more impacting to me.
Best: Understanding Comics- Scott McCloud. Astounding work of art here. Nuff said
I've got many favorites though.
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Though it didn't do as much, formalistically, as Watchmen, it tackled major themes, wove an intriguing story, and utilized historical facts and theories to create this fiction brilliantly. Couple that with Eddie Campbell's scratchy linework, which evoked the pitch-perfect feeling necessary for such a "seedy" story, and it gets my vote.
Honorable Mentions:
Asterios Polyp
Maus
chris
I'd give Blankets a nod for the emotional punch, but I don't think it was the best.
IF SETH EVER GETS THE DAMN THING DONE!!!!!
I'll add The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch to the best of discussion.
The same with Bone. Jeff Smith always envisioned the story to be read as one single volume, but it took many years to produce and he had bills to pay, so it had to be serialized for practicality’s sake. But he designed it so that, once he removed one small logo on the title page, no other editing needed to be done for the collection. (Though he did go back and redraw certain figures, panels, and pages that he wasn’t happy with.)
With Alan Davis’ Killraven mini-series, he didn’t even bother placing the cliffhangers and traditional beats of a 22-page comic in the usual places. The end of one issue led right into the beginning of the next, with no filler for exposition. He wrote the story as a single volume and not with serialization at the forefront of his mind.
The tricky part these days is that writers typically write with both serialization and the inevitable collection informing their scripts. That’s why Marvel uses the opening page “What happened before...” which they can easily remove when putting the collection together. It lets the writer off the hook for having to keep the casual reader up on where the story is and makes for a more seamless collection. It also blurs the line between “graphic novel” and “collection.”
But if you're going to use that criteria, then I'm switching my nomination for best graphic novel to Cerebus - 300 issues comprising a single graphic novel detailing the life of a single character and his impact on the world around him.
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As for Cerebus, I look at it more as a series of graphic novels, each focusing on a defined space of time in the character’s life, much like Harry Potter is a series of novels telling one story one year at a time or Essex County is a trilogy of graphic novels, each focusing on a certain aspect in the family’s history. I think a case could be made for Cerebus as a single graphic novel, but its sheer size makes it hard for me to call it such.