Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel.

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Alison Bechdel, best known for her comic strip, has taken on a serious biographical graphic novel here with beautifully drawn, often poignant results.  As a librarian, I’ll always be a fan of DTWOF — one of the main characters recently finished library school — as well as this book.  “This work is as forcefully felt a memoir as any yet published in comics, but more than this, it has a strong claim to being the single most culturally sophisticated work yet produced in this genre.” – Minneapolis Star-Tribune

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Maus : A Survivor’s Tale I : My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman

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Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and ’70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel. By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form–the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs–Spiegelman compels the reader to imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew. — amazon.com

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Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

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If you appreciate graphic novels by Art Spiegelman and Lynda Barry, you’ll love Persepolis, soon to be a major motion picture, a visceral and visual way to learn about one girl’s life experience of Iran’s cultural revolution.  If you like Persepolis, don’t miss Persepolis 2, which would make great companion reading for Reading Lolita in Tehran. – R. Kutler

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