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Photo credit: Beao, CC BY 2.0
Frank Miller established himself in the comics industry in the 1980s with the Daredevil series. His 1986 Batman reboot The Dark Knight Returns was a major breakthrough, and remains a landmark in the graphic novel medium. Miller's 300 and the Sin City series have spawned movie blockbusters as well. His raw storytelling and evocative film noir-influenced drawing style have made a major impact on American comics.
The Dark Knight Returns by 
Sin City (The Hard Goodbye) by 
Daredevil by 
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in "drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust" (The New York Times). Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century's grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.
A rich and colorful French graphic novel that has become a word-of-mouth sensation and transformed the way hundreds of thousands of people think about climate change. There is no green energy. Nor pink, nor black. Nor clean nor dirty, for that matter. In this intelligent, eye-opening, and witty international bestseller, an eminent climate expert takes a graphic novelist on a journey to understand the profound changes that our planet is experiencing. The scientist, Jean-Marc Jancovici, explains the workings of superpowers and history; oil and climate; ecology, economics, and energy flows. He describes, in short, the world we live in today--a world whose future is deeply uncertain. The artist, Christophe Blain, intently listens and draws. As the pair come face to face with global warming, they--along with Mother Nature and a cast of others--create a picture of what the solution to our predicament actually looks like. It's not just about switching to renewable energy sources. It's about rethinking everything: our energy supply, our economies, and our whole world. We're left with a vision of the future in which food, education, housing, transport, and communities--in other words, all of us--come together and, with a few technological fixes, work to create a world without end.
