We often think of picture books, comics, and graphic novels as something for children or young adults - to help them start reading and develop a love of reading for pleasure.
Graphic novels for adults are having a real resurgence, and there is an amazing range of topics, genres, and drawing styles available.
Our librarians are big champions of graphic novels for adults, and we've been enjoying the current resurgence in their popularity. We're excited to share some of our current favourites with you, all available to borrow from Queenstown Lakes Libraries.
This book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny tale, illustrated with Bechdel's gothic drawings. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heart-breaking and funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home" as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic - and redemptive.
Explore community through a common, often overlooked object: the park bench.
A moving and unforgettable tale, inspired by real-life stories of courage and perseverance during the Dust Bowl of 1930s America. United States, 1937. In the middle of the Great Depression, 22-year-old photographer John Clark is brought in by the Farm Security Administration to document the calamitous conditions of the Dust Bowl in the central and southern states, in order to bring the farmers' plight to the public eye. When he starts working through his shooting script, however, he finds his subjects to be unreceptive. What good are a couple of photos against relentless and deadly dust storms? The more he shoots, the more John discovers the awful extent of their struggles, and comes to question his own role and responsibilities in this tragedy sweeping through the center of the country.
Retells, in graphic novel format, Homer's epic tale of Odysseus, the ancient Greek hero who encounters witches and other obstacles on his journey home after fighting in the Trojan War.
Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray's niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties -- Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn't fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew.
Anthony "Ant" Stevenson isn't sure when he stopped being a virgin. Or even if he has. The rules aren't always very clear when it comes to boys who like boys. In fact, relationships of all kinds feel complicated, even with Ant's oldest friends. There's Charlie, who's both virulently homophobic and in a secret physical relationship with Ant. Then there's drama kid Jack, who may be gay and has become the target of Charlie's rage. And, of course, there's big, beautiful Freddie, who wants Ant to ditch soccer, Charlie's sport, and try out for the rugby team instead. Ant's story of loneliness and intimacy, of unexpected support and heart-ripping betrayal, is told forthrightly with tongue-in-cheek black-bar redactions over the language that teenagers would actually use if, you know, they weren't in a story. Award-winning author Patrick Ness explores teen sexuality, friendship, and romance with a deft hand in this structurally daring, illustrated short novel.
Intimately set within the walls of a family home, this book is an incredible artefact of the historic year we have all lived through. We travel from the depths of despair but not without hope; the mundane details contained within four walls becomes our sanctuary. This is a gift in commemoration of a time and place, of a world wide pandemic, of loss and of the murder of George Floyd. It is a reminder of how, in uncertain times, we can cling to the simple things for respite, for hope. A reminder of how comforting books and artworks are in times of extreme stress.
A beautiful and faithful graphic novel adaptation of Richard Adams's beloved story of a group of rabbits on an epic journey in search of home. 'Every rabbit that stays behind is in great danger. We will welcome any rabbit who joins us.' Watership Down is a classic tale of survival, hope, courage, and friendship that has delighted and inspired readers around the world for more than fifty years.
Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, Habibi tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them. We follow them as their lives unfold together and apart; as they struggle to make a place for themselves in a world (not unlike our own) fueled by fear, lust, and greed; and as they discover the extraordinary depth-- and frailty-- of their connection. At once contemporary and timeless, Habibi gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.
With her characteristic wit and dazzling drawings, celebrated graphic novelist Penelope Bagieu profiles the lives of these feisty female role models, some world famous, some little known. From Nellie Bly to Mae Jemison or Josephine Baker to Naziq al-Abid, the stories in this comic biography are sure to inspire the next generation of rebel ladies.
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.
In 2016, acclaimed cartoonist and illustrator Eleanor Davis documented her cross-country bike tour as it happened. The immediacy of Davis' comics journal makes for an incredible chronicle of human experience on the most efficient and humane form of human transportation.
In this graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women: her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself. Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong with her young daughter, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival -- then promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Growing up, Tessa watches her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi's unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother's smothering fear, Tessa leaves home and travels to the farthest, most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, her roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away, so she returns to face the history that shaped her family.
Gaza is the first genocide to be captured in real-time images on devices we hold in our hands. Two days after October 7, the Lebanese comic artist Mazen Kerbaj began drawing in reaction to what was appearing in his phone. This powerful and original book brings together that work. Produced from Berlin, a city where the repression of Palestinian support has been particularly fierce, Mazen's drawings raise fundamental questions about seeing as an act of solidarity when those in power seek to suppress news of what is happening. Haunted by the live-streamed images, we dread seeing more when we open our phones. By representing them in simple cartoons, Mazen allows us to scrutinize and reflect on the horrors we have witnessed. The result is an extraordinary sequence of images and messages that ask us to pause for a moment, to stop, look, mourn, and summon the resolve to head out and join the fight for the living, for life, for justice.
A whirlwind graphic history of Black life in America, from the award-winning political cartoonist Ben Passmore.
On September 13, 2022, a young Iranian student, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the morality police in Tehran. Her only crime was that she wasn't properly wearing the headscarf required for women by the Islamic Republic. At the police station, she was beaten so badly she had to be taken to the hospital, where she fell into a deep coma. She died three days later. A wave of protests soon spread through the whole country, and crowds adopted the slogan 'Woman, Life, Freedom', words that have been chanted around the world during solidarity rallies. In order to tell the story of this major revolution happening in her homeland, Marjane Satrapi has gathered together an array of journalists, activists, academics, artists, and writers from around the world to create this powerful collection of full-color, graphic-novel-style essays and perspectives that bear witness. Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrates that this is not an unexpected movement, but a major uprising in a long history of women who have wanted to affirm their rights. It will continue.
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including the cartoonist Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled to fit into the homogenous Swedish culture and was continually told to suppress the innate desire to know her origins. 'Be thankful', she was told; surely her life in Sweden was better than it would have been in Korea. Like many adoptees, Sjöblom learned to bury the feeling of abandonment. In Palimpsest, an emotionally charged memoir, Sjöblom's unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child. When she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents, she realizes her own history may not match up with the story she's been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background. As Sjöblom digs deeper into her own backstory, returning to Korea and the orphanage, she finds that the truth is much more complicated than the story she was told and struggled to believe. The sacred image of adoption as a humanitarian act that gives parents to orphans begins to unravel. Sjöblom's beautiful autumnal tones and clear-line style belie the complicated nature of this graphic memoir's vital central question: Who owns the story of an adoption?
From Adam and Eve to pussy hats, people have punished, praised, pathologised, and politicised vulvas, vaginas, clitorises, and menstruation. In this graphic nonfiction book, drawn in chunky, punky pen, Swedish cartoonist Liv Stromquist traces how different cultures and traditions have shaped women's health and beyond.
Not a graphic novel, but a great title if you want to learn how a graphic novel is created and have a go yourself!
Learn how to develop plots, characters, and storylines, create storyboards to organize your work, and how to creative effective visuals to support the narrative. You'll progress from basic drawing skills to more advanced techniques specific to graphic storytelling. Get recommendations for using digital tools, and work through exercises to help jumpstart your creativity and develop your style as a graphic novelist. Plus, an 8-page color insert offers a mini-graphic novel within the book, so you can see all the stages of writing, illustrating, and development of a graphic novel in any genre, from initial concept to completion.
