Comics are getting more popular, sure, but there are still all sorts of people that don’t read them. Here are twelve books for those that think comics are only for kids or nerds in the basement.

Louis Riel
by Chester Brown

Billed as “a comic-strip biography,” Brown was awarded a grant from the Canadian Council for the Arts to work on the story of one of Canada’s famous revolutionaries. Riel, a metis man living in what was at the time an undeveloped territory, helps found the province of Manitoba, leads to revolts against the government, is elected to the House of Commons (though he never serves as he was on the run), becomes a religious prophet, and is eventually educated. Brown’s book, in a style similar to Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, charts Riel’s many ups and downs with pathos and a surprising level of objectivity. The entire thing is backed by pages and pages of annotations and bibliographies examining everything from the historical disagreements to his own artistic process.
Recommended for: history buffs, Canadians

Kabuki: The Alchemy
by David Mack

While this is the latest volume of Mack’s most personal work, never fear. As Kabuki says on the opening page, “All you need to know is that there is a scar on my face, I’m starting a new life, and I have a friend who is helping me.” Mack finishes divorcing his characters from the dystopian, media-saturated setting that started the series and paints a struggle for self-actualization through art and personal genius. His style contains watercolor, traditional cartooning, collage, children’s book art, photographic mash-ups, and tonal pencil work. This book has a good chance of destroying your opinions of what a comic is.
Recommended for: artf%&ks, aestheticians, right brainers, soul searchers

The Black Order Brigade
written by Pierre Christin
art by Enki Bilal

When an aging newspaperman randomly comes across a photo that takes him out of his life and back to his time in the Spanish Civil War. The photo is of a soldier from the other side, a member of a terrorist cell that no one ever caught, and so the man begins gathering his old troops together again in order to finally track down the opposition. Naturally, things aren’t the same, and as the retired soldiers, now writers, philosophers, and retirees, try to resume their old positions and dynamics, The Black Order Brigade stops being a war story and becomes a tale of aging and the attempts, usually in vain, to recapture a lost youth.
Recommended for: fans of war stories, old people, fans of old people

Y the Last Man
written by Brian Vaughan
art by Pia Guerra & more

Yorick Brown and his monkey are the last male mammals in the world, somehow surviving the bloody extinction of the Y chromosome. Across sixty issues, he’s torn between his remaining family, his missing fiancée, and his responsibility as the only surviving male. If this were a movie, it would be a disaster flick where, in the end, a cure is found. Instead, Vaughan and his conspirators make it a story about love, growing up, and personal responsibility, all the while doing some hefty worldbuilding. Also, major props to Guerra for her consistent clarity of storytelling. This is my mom’s favorite comic. She read the first eighteen issues or so and was mad that I didn’t have the rest; of course, this was in the past, when the rest didn’t exist.
Recommended for: fans of Showtime original series, my mom

Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud

There’s the novelty of this being a comic about comics, but past that, McCloud’s text on sequential art is one of the clearest and most complete books explaining how comic books work, how they are read, and how they are built. McCloud’s cartooned self talks history, definition, abstraction, panel transitions, and page construction. There’s not much more I can say about Understanding Comics past the fact that I think it should be required reading for anyone that wants to read comic books.
Recommended for: left-brainers, literary theorists, people who feel like they don’t get comics, people who feel like they get comics, everyone

Scott Pilgrim
by Bryan Lee O’Malley

A worthless twenty-something is in a band and thinks it’s awesome that he’s dating a high-schooler. Things don’t last, though, as he falls in love with a mysterious delivery girl, only to find out that, to be with her, he’ll have to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends. The concept always sounded a little goofy to me, maybe a little lame, but when I finally gave the first volume a read, I was quickly swept up in things. O’Malley mixes video game and musical techniques into his storytelling, freeing himself from a lot of the tropes of teenage romance in the process and ending up with a fun, surprising, and interactive comic. (At one point, as the high school girlfriend is watching Scott’s band practice, O’Malley provides the chords to the song and invites readers to play along; don’t worry, they only use three chords because they’re not very good.) The final scene of the book, a massive brawl set to the participants’ singing, is one of the strangest things I’ve read in awhile.
Recommended for: gamers, people concerned with pirates vs. ninjas, guys who hate their lover’s exes and probably vice versa

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
written by Howard Chaykin
(adapted from the stories of Fritz Leiber)
art by Mike Mignola

Leiber’s series of novels and stories that serve as the basis of this book seem to have been swept under the rug, historically speaking. A number of fantasy fans that I’ve met are unaware of his work; fellow MEGATONik writer Andrew Swan thought they were based on a Dungeons & Dragons setting. In fact, Leiber wrote the stories through the ’40s and ’50s, working as a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft and R.E. Howard. Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser are easily his most popular creations, the first a red-bearded Norseman, the latter a small sneak and con man. While these sound like stereotypes, they are partly so because of Leiber’s work with them. His writing was witty, engaging, original, and moved along at a beautiful pace. He never wrote a 400-page tome, never invented languages, but each of his stories was packed dense with new ideas, pitch perfect characterization, and fresh, surprising and satisfying plots that poked fun at modern ideas of mercantilism, religion, and morality. These adaptations, done in 1990 by Marvel’s Epic imprint, have finally been collected in a great book edition by Dark Horse Comics. Chaykin does a great job of keeping all of Leiber’s wit intact while Mignola’s art seems to effortlessly pull Leiber’s descriptions into view. Read the novels, read the comics, and realize what a forefather Leiber is to fantasy.
Recommended for: fantasists, satirists, people tired of dwarves and elves

It’s a Bird…
written by Steven Seagle
art by Teddy Kristiansen

Even people who don’t read comics participate in the argument of, “Who’s cooler, Batman or Superman?” Most people pick Batman for a variety of reasons: he’s more human, he’s easier to relate to, he’s devoted all of his time to becoming better, while Superman is none of these. This is the semi-autobiographical story of Steven’s struggle with all of those issues, only he has to deal with them quick because he’s been asked to write the Superman comic. There’s a lot more going on, though, because this is also the story of where a writer gets his ideas, and its the story of what fiction means to real life. While he’s struggling with finding a point to Superman, Steven’s also dealing with a family dysfunctionality and genetic disease. Kristiansen’s paintings wrench the feeling from the script and splashes it across every page.
Recommended for: writers, process junkies

I Killed Adolf Hitler
by Jason

What do you expect from this cover? A war story? A moral examination of murder? What Jason actually shows in this 48-page novella is a love story that stretches across ages. In the future, assassination is entirely legal and hired assassins wait behind every corner, hired by your ex, the employee you fired, the couple in the apartment below you, or the kid you cut off driving home from work. After getting dumped, one of the world’s top assassins is hired by a scientist to go back in time and kill Hitler. The attempt is botched, however, and the story becomes one of a search, a search for Hitler, for purpose, for love, and all of these threads are tied neatly together in story that you never knew you wanted to read but won’t be able to forget.
Recommended for: no idea

The Filth
written by Grant Morrison
art by Chris Weston & Gary Erskine

This is the story of Greg Feely, whose life is taken up with TV, newsstand porn, depression, and taking care of his sick cat. This is the story of Ned Slade, an operative in an uncanny organization that fights to preserve Status: Q and who has been overwhelmed by fictional personality “Greg Feely,” given to him as a vacation. This is the story of the fight to keep your world and your body clean and free to operate the way it should, whether that takes drugged-up space chimps, trashtalking dolphins, weaponized sex toys, or the amphibious remains of Richard Nixon. The Filth is, to me, Morrison’s ultimate boiling-down of the themes that have permeated his other works, a psychedelic circular narrative that Morrison has prescribed to readers in order to deal with all the trash that culture heaps up in our systems.
Recommended for: anarchists, authoritarians, patients suffering from depression, ennui, brainclouds, and existential terror

Epileptic
by David B

American Splendour bores me; sorry, Mr. Harvey Pekar, I loved your film, but the comics just don’t offer anything to me. I feel the same about Crumb’s work; the art is great, but I could care less about his personal fetishes. So just when I was feeling like autobio comics were going to be my sole sequential art bias, something like Epileptic comes along. Easily taking a place with the much-lauded Maus and Persepolis, David B’s story of growing up with an epileptic brother skirts the easy route of melodrama and TV biography that many works on the same topic might have used to stand themselves up. Instead, Epileptic relies on strong storytelling, beautiful art, and a natural narrative that just happens to include struggles with disease. Especially impressive is David B’s mix of art representing realism and metaphor, often in the same panel; the sight of epilepsy crawling from his brother as a black and curling dragon is an image that you will carry.
Recommended: fans of autobio, those interested in mental illness, symbolists

Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft
written by Joe Hill
art by Gabriel Rodriguez

Horror is a difficult genre in comics. Cartoonists can’t rely on shock and surprise without hiding revelations behind a page turn since a whole page’s action is always there to be seen. Because of this, comic book horror has to rely on gore, mood, or a slow build to psychological terror. Hill, requisitely abetted by Rodriguez, works through all of these modes to set up a story that stitches together a number of horror genres (from slasher films and scary kids to ghost stories and ancient Lovecraftian evils) into a seamless terror that stands on the strengths of immanently relatable characters and pitch-perfect dialogue.
Recommended for: horror fans, Stephen King readers