The Graphic Novel Renaissance

Twenty-five years after ‘Maus’ put graphic novels on the map, the art form is exploding.

From a post on the Daily Beast...

Zahra’s Paradise joins a cluster of new graphic books out this fall. Habibi by Chris Thompson (the American author of Blankets, an award-winning 2003 graphic novel about growing up in an Evangelical Christian family) is a love story revealing common ground between Christianity and Islam through lavish, black-and-white drawings partly inspired by Arabic calligraphy. Billy, Me & You, by British first-time author Nicola Streeten, chronicles family grief at the death of a child. Inspired by BD, yet breaking the comics mold, is Bye-Bye Babylon, a graphic memoir by Paris-based painter Lamia Ziadé of growing up in 1970s Beirut. Text and drawings are separate, as childhood treats give way to guns in a compelling inventory of civil-war memories.

1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, also out this fall, spans almost two centuries, yet half the entries were published after 1990. Its editor, Paul Gravett, says that after decades of being “stuck in genres and formulae,” comics have broken free. Successes stretch from dark revisionist superheroes, as in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982), to Logicomix (2009), which traces philosopher Bertrand Russell’s quest for mathematical truth, by a Greek team led by Apostolos Doxiadis. A surprise bestseller, it has been a hit in 25 countries. While conventional superhero sales have plummeted—partly with the rise of cinematic CGI and computer games—many more women are reading and creating graphic novels. Memoir is thriving with the rise of graphic auteurs who both draw and write. Persepolis (2000), Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, was a seminal success and a hit film.