22 of the Best Graphic Novels of All Time

Soon to be a show on Disney Plus, with the award-winning cast of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the intersecting stories of Jin Yang, the Monkey King, and Danny and his cousin Chin-Kee provide an extremely fun read. The imaginative art and unexpected storytelling elevate this book to comics greatness.

Priyanka wants to know more about India, but her mom refuses to answer any of her questions. When she finds a pashmina, she wraps it around herself and is transported to India. Though it’s the place she’s always wanted to know, there are more mysteries she has to discover in the land she’s found through the pashmina.

Freddy is going through the classic teenage experience of love: she is devoted to Laura Dean, a popular girl who is sweet sometimes and cold just as often. Freddy goes to see a psychic named Seek-Her for advice, and she has to figure out if she’s going to keep going back to Laura or break the cycle.

Two teenage girls, who seem to only be able to stand each other, wander around their town and look forward to growing up. Leaving behind what they know presents a host of new fears. They’re both slowly in the process of realizing that actions have consequences. It’s a great portrait of the difficulties of adolescent friendship.

My friends and I started reading Kate Beaton through her amazing comics website. Her deep knowledge of history and literary figures led to this beautiful, irreverent collection of comics that pokes fun at everyone from the Brontës to Charles Darwin. It’s the perfect book to open to any page for a good laugh.

Even before the complete global domination of the Netflix adaptation, Heartstopper had amassed a fandom as a webcomic so large that Oseman self-published the first novel, and then got a publishing deal for the rest. It’s a beautiful, honest portrayal of the process of coming out and the difficulties of young queer life. Nick and Charlie are hugely appealing, and they have an excellent cast of characters around them as well. Probably thanks to Oseman, the show included the comic’s iconic floating leaves.

Starting in 1910 on New York City’s Lower East Side, we follow sisters Esther and Fanya from their immigration to the city as young girls to their adulthood struggles. It’s an excellent exploration of the immigrant community in Manhattan in the early 1900s, and the struggle of making a life for yourself.

Tiến grew up in a Vietnamese immigrant family, and processes his emotions through reading fairy tales. While he’s dealing with burgeoning feelings for his friend Julian, we also learn about his family history and the stories they tell each other to make up for their past struggles.

Malaka Gharib grew up caught between multiple cultures — her Filipina mother in California and her Egyptian father in Cairo and other cities. When she was young, she tried to fit in at her American school and while navigating her parents’ expectations. Gharib is a great memoirist with a highly distinct style.

Spiegelman’s most famous work was in the news recently because it was banned in a Tennessee school district, but it deserves attention regardless of its banned status. Spiegelman presents a realistic, unvarnished look at survival and trauma by telling his father Vladek’s story. Vladek grew up in a Jewish family in Poland and was sent to Auschwitz with Art’s mother.

Art Spiegelman pushes the form of a graphic novel though these large-scale panels documenting his mental struggles after the events of September 11, 2001. He saw the “glowing bones” of the towers before they fell, and dealt with major anxiety after the event. He also critiques the nationalist fervor of the Bush administration after the attacks. This is a great book to read after Maus because you can get a better sense of Spiegelman’s more stylized, cartoon-y comics that show up throughout the rest of his work.

A towering figure in American political history, John Lewis started his political life as an activist alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights movement. Starting from Lewis’s youth in Alabama, we see how he got involved in the movement and participated in some of the most important events in American history.

Kabi Nagata’s manga memoir is one of the best about dealing with your sexuality, mental health, and stresses of adulthood. Once you figure out aspects of who you are, the process of coming to terms with yourself and the many changes you go through is always difficult. The relatability of Nagata’s writing about her experience is truly fascinating.

Marjane Satrapi was a child in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution. It’s one thing to read about these events in history books, and entirely another to contextualize them through the eyes of a child. Marjane shows how she and her friends have desires and problems similar to all children during the political turmoil. Persepolis was featured on the ALA’s list of Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2014 because it was described as “politically, racially, and socially offensive.” You should definitely read it to see what all the fuss was about.

Marjane gives us a window into the sex lives of Iranian women with this excellent parlor room conversation in comic form. Her grandmother, mother, aunt, and their friends provide lively stories about their lives as women and opinions on sex and relationships. The book itself is a stunning rebuke to the idea that older women simply have less full lives than modern women: sex and various illicit activities are not a contemporary phenomenon, and these women tell the whole, unvarnished truth.

Lucy Knisley is another consistent comics memoirist, but this might by my personal favorite. She tells the story of her relationship with her husband, and how they got engaged and chose to plan their wedding themselves. She struggles with the many moving pieces of planning a wedding, and her identity as a bisexual woman getting married to a man. Her expressive cartoony style is always engaging to read.

Phoebe Gloeckner began her artistic career as a medical textbook illustrator, and you can tell in some of the immensely detailed illustrations throughout this book. Minnie Goetz is a 15-year-old in San Francisco obsessed with comics, and also “in a relationship with” (in reality: being abused by) her mother’s boyfriend. The clash between wanting to be an adult and still feeling like a child is explored beautifully.