Graphic Novels

The graphic novelist on conspiracy theories, writing depressed characters, and telling a story for our times. 

Featuring selections by Justin Taylor, Shelly Oria, Mary Walling Blackburn, Kevin Killian, Barry Schwabsky, John Freeman, and more.

New titles and reissues highlighted by Justin Taylor, Chelsea Hodson, Paul La Farge, Emmalea Russo, Alexandra Kleeman, Ted Dodson, Dan Sheehan, Kristen Radtke, Daniel Saldaña París, Marjorie Welish, Tobias Carroll, Jonathan Lee, Scott Esposito, and Lauren LeBlanc

Kristen Radtke is the managing editor of Sarabande Books and the film and video editor of TriQuarterly magazine. She lives in New York. Imagine Wanting Only This is her debut book, out in mid-April from Pantheon.

There’s never been a richer time for graphic novels in all their genre-bending permutations: memoirs and literary adaptations, documentaries and short-form collections, histories and abstract pieces.

“A lot of times I end up turning on the camera on my computer and playing something out, and pausing it and seeing what tonal or emotional nuances are there that I can work with.”

America is still probably the strangest, funniest, and saddest thing to appear in a Daniel Clowes story, but the hero of his new graphic novel, The Death-Ray, comes close.

Daniel Clowes, renowned comics artist, talks about his newly reissued The Death-Ray and his distaste for superheroes and wrestling.

In the new Brooklyn Babylon, graphic novelist Danijel Zezelj harmonizes with composer Darcy James Argue to make art in the round, as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival.

The Library of America, doing what it does best, offers six of Ward’s groundbreaking woodcut novels from the 1930s in a beautifully printed two-volume set.

Tales of Woe by John Reed is a shamelessly unpleasant collection of non-fictional accounts of people caught in horrible, gut-wrenching situations. Approximating the look a graphic novel or pulp trade paperback, Tales of Woe contains illustrations of real-life horror stories from eleven different artists, which enhance the horrific, hilarious, unbelievable stories.

For the last five years, Robert Crumb, the father of underground comix, has been laboring over a graphic retelling of the first book of the Bible. 

Montana Wojczuk reports on the advance screening of WATCHMEN and photographer Clay Enos’s new book, WATCHMEN: Portraits.

“What exactly are ‘comics’?” asks a resident of the town of Ice Haven, who functions as a kind of meta-guide on our descent into the underworld of Daniel Clowes’s latest imagining.

Marjane Satrapi’s wry and matter-of-fact memoir, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood(Pantheon Books, 2003), was met with great acclaim throughout Europe, the United States, and the world—everywhere, that is, except her native Iran.

Ben Katchor is a recorder of vanished and vanishing places, a poet of the vast metropolis of New York. He notices, crucially, what others walk by, fail to see and generally disregard—a man living in the mosaic while seeing its details. 

Archie Rand discusses his Diaspora Paintings and what it means to make Jewish art.