Graphic Novels, Animation, and Manga at MSU

MacArthur Genius and National Book Award-winner T- Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me) takes the helm, confronting T'Challa with a dramatic upheaval in Wakanda. When a superhuman terrorist group that calls itself The People sparks a violent uprising, the land famed for its incredible technology and proud warrior traditions will be thrown into turmoil. If Wakanda is to survive, it must adapt - but can its monarch survive the necessary change? Collecting: Black Panther 1-4

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series (1989-1996) is widely considered one of the best regular-running comic book series ever published. The series follows Dream, a demi-god who rules the dream realm, who at the beginning of the series is stripped of his power and imprisoned for 60 years. Over the course of the series, Dream must regain his lost kingdom and right the wrongs committed by people under his authority in his absence. Literate, intricate, and beautiful, this seminal series is required reading for serious fans and scholars of graphic narratives.

This compelling and beautifully drawn space opera from fan-favorite Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples is one of the most highly-acclaimed modern comic-book series currently being published. The series follows Alana and Marko, members of two different alien species engaged in galactic war, as they flee the war and attempt to raise their baby daughter, Hazel, who narrates the series. High concept sci-fi and emotionally resonant family drama combine wonderfully in this space saga that has won numerous sci-fi and comic book awards, including a Hugo Award and 14 Eisner Awards.

Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is one of the most popular modern non-superhero comics currently running, and the source material for the hit AMC series of the same name. The thrilling and gruesome series follows a group of survivors after a zombie apocalypse. 2nd floor.

The comics masterpiece Batman: the Dark Knight Returns is back in hardcover, with a new cover designed by Chip Kidd.The Batman has not been seen in ten years, some now consider him more myth than reality, but crime and violence have continued in Gotham City. Bruce Wayne had reached a point in his life where he can no longer silence the voice of his vigilante side aching to break free. The Dark Knight must return

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is considered one of the best mainstream (i.e., superhero) comics ever written. In the mid-1980s it, along with The Dark Knight Returns, ushered comic books into the modern era, proving that comics could be literary, symbolic, and deep, while still retaining the thrilling storytelling that drew readers to comics as kids. At its core, Watchmen is a detective story, following the investigations by the crime-fighter Rorschach into the death of a peer, the mercenary-for-hire The Comedian. It explores and subverts ideas about superheroes, comic books, storytelling, identity, power, and authority.

Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties for Ray's niece Nessie. Their bi-weekly playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in daily lives that ping-pong between familial tensions and isolation. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron turn to repair their broken family ties. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up to their respective sisters and learns that they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew.

Inspired by West African folklore and stories handed over centuries, this unique graphic novel follows the adventures of Mansour Keita, last prince of a dying kingdom, and Awa Kouyaté, his loyal Djeli, or 'royal storyteller' as they journey to meet the great wizard who destroyed their world and then withdrew into his tower, never to be seen again.

The Hernandez brothers, Gilbert, Jamie, and occasionally Mario, write the alternative comic Love and Rockets, one of the pinnacles of the alternative comics movement. Each brother contributes his own storyline, following his own characters. Gilbert is best known for his Palomar stories, which are set in a fictional Latin American town called Palomar, and contain magical realist and fantastical elements comparable to Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Jamie’s primary story is LOCAS, which follows Latina characters in the punk scene in 1980s California. The Hernandez brothers’ stories often feature Hispanic and Mexican-American characters, and explore themes of cultural and national identity, race, sex, and family.

Lynda Barry is a cartoonist whose work has blead into many different literary forms, including novels, poetry, plays, and music. Her work is often impressionistic and cartoonish (in the best sense of the word), and plays with ideas and representation of images, memory, truth, race, and family. In the fall of 2015, Lynda Barry visited MNSU as part of the Good Thunder Reading Series.

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive. In fall of 2012, Alison Bechdel visited MNSU as part of the Good Thunder Reading Series.

Persepolis is a memoir about Marjane Satrapi’s life growing up in Iran, her time studying abroad at a French school in Austria, and her return to Iran as an adult, where she witnesses the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. Satrapi’s book is BD (French-language comics), and was first published by the French publishing house L’Association before being translated into English. Her book was also adapted into an animated film of the same name, which Satrapi co-directed.

Fax from Sarajevo was inspired by Joe Kubert’s sporadic communication with the comic publisher and agent Ervin Rustemagić, who was trapped in Sarajevo during the Serbian siege of the city in 1992 and whose only method of communication to the outside world was through faxing. The book tells the story of Rustemagić and his family surviving in Sarajevo during the siege.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a memoir about Spiegelman’s relationship with his father and his father’s experience in the Holocaust, is one of the crowning achievements of modern graphic narrative. The story was serialized from 1990-1991 in Raw, a seminal alternative comics magazine Spiegelman co-edited with his wife Françoise Mouly. In 1991 Maus was collected and published in two volumes, and in 1992 was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in the category Special Awards and Citations – Letters, the only graphic narrative ever to have won the award.

American Splendor is the series that sparked a revolution in comics and brought graphic novels to the attention of post-adolescent readers everywhere. Harvey Pekar was a major figure in the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 70s, best known for his collaboration with Robert Crumb, who drew the comics Pekar wrote scripts for.

Joe Sacco’s journalism mixes personal narrative and historical research. In Footnotes in Gaza, he draws from interviews, historical accounts, and his own experience in the Gaza Strip to tell the story of Rafah, a small town at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip, where, on a single day in 1956, 111 Palestinians were shot by Israeli soldiers. This bloody event is only a small footnote of the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but its aftermath has left a mark on the small town that is still felt today.

A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

Experience the riveting, powerful story of the Native American civil rights movement and the resulting struggle for identity told through the high-flying career of West Coast rock 'n' roll pioneers Redbone.

Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour de force that tells the story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall's efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record.

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Then e created Gender Queer. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fan fiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.

Lynd Ward was an early 20th century artist who made illustrative woodcuts that formed wordless graphic narratives. The six books collected in these two volumes are considered to be forerunners to the modern graphic novel by modern comic writers like Art Spiegelman, who edited these collections. Ward’s work is dark, impressionistic, and symbolic, and is stylistically comparable to German impressionism. Ward’s stories demonstrate how sequential art can tell moving, meaningful stories, even without words.

In 1978, Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit and one of the most influential comic artist of all time, revolutionized the comics field with the publication of A Contract with God, the first modern graphic novel. Drawing on his memories of growing up in the Bronx in the 1930s, Eisner created a series of moving, thematically related stories exploring the immigrant experience and their struggle with life in new nation.

Dave Sim’s Cerebus series ran 300 issues from 1977 to 2004, the longest creator-owned comic ever published. The story started as a parody of sword-and-sorcery comics like Conan the Barbarian, staring an anthropomorphic aardvark named Cerebus. Within the first few years of its run, however, it morphed into a social satire played out on an epic scale that took on everything in modern culture from religion, economics, war, romance, and gender identity. High Society is the 2nd collection of Cerebus comics but the first arc that Sim considered a “graphic novel” with a self-contained story. Over the course of the comic, he would tell nine more novel-length stories in fourteen subsequent volumes. Alan Moore (Watchmen) wrote in a letter to Dave Sim, which was later published in the comic, “Cerebus, as if I need to say so, is still to comic books what Hydrogen is to the Periodic Table.”

Terry Moore’s long-running (1993-2007) Strangers in Paradise has come in and out of many genres—romance, political thriller, melodrama—but at the heart is a relationship between three friends, Francine, Katchoo, and David. The series was mostly self-published during its run, supported by a huge fanbase, proving that modern comic book artists can publish popular, serialized stories that aren’t about superheroes.

The Ghost World film, based on Clowes hit graphic novel of the same name, was released by MGM/UA in the Autumn of 2001. Written by Clowes and Terry Zwigoff, the story of Enid, (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlet Johansson) has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted screenplay - a fact which is sure to attract media and public interest to the original comic book.

Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is a milestone in modern graphic narratives. His art is both intricately detailed and simple, featuring cartoonishly simple characters set against geometrically perfect backgrounds. His characters are often overwhelmed and confused by the world they inhabit, no one more so than the graphic novel’s titular character, Jimmy Corrigan. The story follows Jimmy as he reconnects with his long-lost father, as well as Jimmy’s grandfather as he visits the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The novel explores themes of fear, family, and fate.

David Mazzucchelli is a mainstream/alternative crossover artist who drew for Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Batman runs in the 1980s and moved to more alternative work in the 90s, illustrating the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s postmodern detective City of Glass novels, among other things. Asterios Polyp is the story of an architecture professor named Asterios Polyp who has never built any physical building, and who abandons his academic life for a blue-collar one after the disillusion of a long-term relationship. Mazzucchelli’s playful use of color and style evoke multiple meanings of this narrative that is, at its heart, a deeply resonant love story.

Brandon Graham’s work is sharp, funny, and genre-bending, mixing traditional American comic storytelling with the fluidity and playfulness of Japanese manga. The story’s plot is impossible to describe without it seeming ludicrous, but it involves cats, aliens, drugs, and urban life. Creativity gushes from his pages as you read them, with an abundance of wordplay, visual puns, humor, and even puzzles and games for the reader to complete.

Hergé’s Tintin series is one of the quintessential French-language comics. Tintin is a young Belgian reporter whose globetrotting investigations take him to exotic locations on his adventures. Hergé’s art is known for its artful combination of cartoons and realism, with an emphasis on color and line. In this story, Tintin meets Professor Alembick, an expert with a very rare royal seal in his collection-the seal of King Ottokar the IV of Syldavia. Tintin joins the professor on his trip to the fictional Balkin country Syldavia.

Marguerite Abouet is a French-language writer from the Ivory Coast best known for her Aya series, which follow the eponymous character Aya and her life in Yop City in the Ivory Coast. This graphic novel is the story of the studious and clear-sighted nineteen-year-old Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors. It's a wryly funny, breezy account of the simple pleasures and private troubles of everyday life in Yop City. Clément Oubrerie's warm colors and energetic, playful line connect expressively with Marguerite Abouet's vibrant writing.

David B. is a French comic writer and co-founder of L’Association, a major French publishing house for comics. David B., born Pierre-François, grew up in a small town near Orléans, France, and spent an idyllic early childhood playing with the neighborhood kids and, along with his older brother, Jean-Christophe, ganging up on his little sister, Florence. But their lives changed abruptly when Jean-Christophe was struck with epilepsy at age eleven. In search of a cure, their parents dragged the family to acupuncturists and magnetic therapists, to mediums and macrobiotic communes. But every new cure ended in disappointment as Jean-Christophe, after brief periods of remission, would only get worse. Angry at his brother for abandoning him and at all the quacks who offered them false hope, Pierre-François learned to cope by drawing fantastically elaborate battle scenes, creating images that provide a fascinating window into his interior life. An honest and horrifying portrait of the disease and of the pain and fear it sowed in the family, Epileptic is also a moving depiction of one family's intricate history.

Canales and Cuarnido are a Spanish writer-artist team who publish their comics in the French market. Blacksad is a neo-noir detective series that follows the anthropomorphized cat John Blacksad, a private eye, who is up to his feline ears in mystery, digging into the backstories behind murders, child abductions, and nuclear secrets. Guarnido's sumptuously painted pages and rich cinematic style bring the world of 1950s America to vibrant life, with Canales weaving in fascinating tales of conspiracy, racial tension, and the 'red scare' Communist witch hunts of the time.

Around the time of the 2005 French riots, anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin spent fifteen months observing up close the daily life of an anti-crime squad in one of the largest precincts in the Paris region. His unprecedented study, which sparked intense discussion about policing in the largely working-class, immigrant suburbs, remains acutely relevant in light of all-too-common incidents of police brutality against minorities.

How do you find the answers to all the questions you have about yourself, about your identity, and about your body? Let's Talk About It provides a comprehensive, thoughtful, well-researched graphic novel guide to everything you need to know. Covering relationships, friendships, gender, sexuality, anatomy, body image, safe sex, sexting, jealousy, rejection, sex education, and more.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to itsknees. When we weren't sheltering in place, we were advised to wear masks, wash our hands, and practice social distancing. We watched in horror as medical personnel worked around the clock to care for the sick and dying. Businesses were shuttered, travel stopped, workers were furloughed, and markets dropped.And people continued to die. Amid all this uncertainty, writers and artists from around the world continued to create comics, commenting directly on how individuals, societies, governments, and markets reacted to the worldwide crisis.

Takes readers across the microscopic battlefield to get to know the critters behind history's worst diseases. We delve into the biology and mechanisms of infections, diseases, and immunity, and also the incredible effect that technology and medical science have had on humanity's ability to contain and treat disease.