When I began writing about graphic novels a decade ago, I remember worrying slightly about the supply line: would I really be able to find a good one to review every month? And it was tricky, sometimes. But what a difference 10 years has made. I’m now in the awful business of running a beauty pageant: I have too many darlings, not too few. This year, especially, has been a bumper one. Memoirs, novels, biographies, reissued classics: if there isn’t something to suit everyone on the bulging list that follows, I’ll eat my copy of Persepolis.
First, memoir. It seems sometimes to be taking over, and this is as true in the world of graphic books as elsewhere in literature. Regular readers will know that I was waiting anxiously for the second volume of The Arab of the Future (Two Roads £18.99), Riad Sattouf’s series of comics about his childhood in France and the Middle East, and when it arrived, it did not disappoint. But aAnyway, a reminder: it’s truly great. Picking up the story in 1984, when Riad is six, the Sattoufs are now back in Ter Maaleh, Syria, a situation that seems not to be making any of them very happy. Funny, dark and occasionally revelatory, this and its predecessor are my graphic memoirs of the year.
In no particular order, I also loved Notes on a Thesis (Jonathan Cape £16.99) by Tiphaine Rivière, a hilarious, consistently clever account of the author’s struggle to complete her PhD; Stan and Nan (Jonathan Cape £16.99), Sarah Lippett’s lovely elegy for her beloved grandparents and the lost England they represent (one for fans of Raymond Briggs’s Ethel & Ernest); and Saving Grace (Jonathan Cape £17.99) by Grace Wilson, which relates with immense wit its young author’s seemingly impossible quest to find a room she can afford to rent. While we’re on the subject of life writing, Munch by Steffen Kverneland (SelfMadeHero £15.99) is a satisfyingly fat and digressive biography of the badly behaved Norwegian artist.
What about fiction? The most sumptuous and captivating graphic novel of 2016 is surely The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg (Jonathan Cape £18.99), a feminist fairytale, which I recommend particularly (though not exclusively) if you’re looking for a Christmas present for a teenage girl. Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, this book returns us to Early Earth, the magical land to which we were first introduced in Greenberg’s bestselling debut. High-born Cherry and her maid, Hero, are secretly and happily in love. But their bliss is about to be interrupted. A friend of Cherry’s husband, a boor and a bully, has bet him he can seduce her over the course of 100 nights (the complacent husband will be away). What will the women do? Hero, like her creator, puts her faith in storytelling, distracting him with fable after fable. A wondrously intricate book, and a witty attack on the patriarchy, this is an instant classic, to be loved and kept for all time.
Special mentions, too, for Patience (Jonathan Cape £16.99), Daniel Clowes’s first graphic novel for five years, a tale of (what else?) time travel, murder, wrongful conviction and obsessive love; Hubert by Ben Gijsemans (Jonathan Cape £16.99), a book about loneliness in the big city that comes with some of the most delicately gorgeous illustrations I’ve seen in years; Irmina by Barbara Yelin (SelfMadeHero £16.99), a lovely, rather old-fashioned novel of imperilled ideals in 1930s Oxford and Nazi Germany; and The Return of the Honey Buzzard by the award-winning Dutch artist Aimée de Jongh, which is about a failing bookshop and its troubled owner (SelfMadeHero £14.99). I also press on you In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, Stéphane Heuet’s deft retelling of Marcel Proust, whether you have already read him or not (Gallic Books £19.99).
If you like the idea of graphic short stories, you could do worse than invest in Spanish Fever, Fantagraphics’ new best-of anthology (ed Santiago García; trans Erica Mena) of work by contemporary Spanish cartoonists, while Last Look (Jonathan Cape £16.99) is – just a reminder – Charles Burns’s magnificently creepy X’ed Out trilogy (X’Ed Out, The Hive, Sugar Skull) in one volume for the first time. A great gift. Burns, of course, is strong meat, and genuinely mind-bending at his best. Much gentler, if we’re talking sci-fi, is Tom Gauld’s lovely Mooncop (Drawn & Quarterly £12.99), the plangent story of a policeman who lives and works on the moon. The twist here is that, the moon having long been populated (there is even a coffee shop), people are now leaving it and returning to Earth, for which reason this slim book would make a neat companion, present-wise, for Hubert. The cook in your life, meanwhile, might enjoy Hot Dog Taste Test (Drawn & Quarterly £16.99), Lisa Hanawalt’s ribald graphic skewering of foodie culture, which is funny, weird and definitely not one for the clean-eating brigade. The day she spends shadowing Manhattan’s most famous molecular gastronomist, Wylie Dufresne, is priceless.
Cheap Novelties: the Pleasures of Urban Decay by Ben Katchor, a recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur grants and a cartoonist for the New Yorker, was first published in 1991 in an unassuming paperback. Twenty-five years on, and now widely considered a classic, Drawn & Quarterly has reissued it in a beautiful hardback edition (£14.99). It chronicles, in black and white, the wanderings of Julius Knipl, a tramping old-school “real estate photographer”, through the merchandise district of New York – a landscape since changed beyond all recognition by gentrification and the rise of the chain store. A world of lost diners, derelict canneries and cheap souvenirs, read this one only if you can bear the melancholy that will undoubtedly sweep over you.
New York Review Books’ recent move into comics is also yielding results, classics-wise. From its small but excellent list, I recommend the lost-for-decades Soft City (£20), an epic vision of a single day in a dystopian world by the Norwegian pop artist Hariton Pushwagner, republished with an introduction by Chris Ware; and What Am I Doing Here? by Abner Dean (£13.99), a forgotten innovator of American comics from the 40s. Dean draws single-frame gags with a difference: being so deeply odd and more or less unexplainable, they’re too disquieting to be funny. Certainly, you wouldn’t say his work is exactly throbbing with Christmas cheer: “Will the three wise men please step forward!” shouts one of his solitary naked everyman figures through a loud-hailer into a black void. But in these uneasy, topsy-turvy times, paradoxically, this might just be the book that winds up consoling you more than any other.
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