Ten of the Best Graphic Novels
Clive Barnes chooses his top ten graphic novels.
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‘Here’s a list that‘s a mixture of the best of the current crop of graphic novels and some older ones that stick in my mind. There’s fiction and non-fiction, original material and adaptations and retellings, reflecting the range of material available in this format. And they’re all in print.’
In the Night Kitchen
Maurice Sendak, Red Fox, 978 0 09 941747 7, £5.99 pbk
I remember using this for story times as a young librarian. What drew me to it was its dreamlike quality, enhanced by its chanting text. Naked Mickey falls out of his bed into a vast kitchen, where three Oliver Hardy-like bakers persuade him to climb a giant milk bottle so that they can mix ‘Milk in the batter. Milk in the batter. We bake cake and nothing’s the matter.’ Sendak renders the story largely in comic strip panels, a technique that gives the bizarre business a cinematic reality, and somehow makes it even more disorienting. A jaw dropper. (3+)
The Snowman
Raymond Briggs, Puffin, 978 0 14 050350 0, £6.99 pbk
Arguably, Raymond Briggs first showed the potential of the comic strip format for the picture book, later picked up by fellow luminaries like Quentin Blake and Shirley Hughes. It’s a hard choice among his many titles but why not this wordless wonder, which shows the capacity of pictures alone to tell a story and whose mixture of humour and pathos, embodied in the clumsy and vulnerable solidity of the Snowman himself, is so brilliantly realised, not least in the moment that the Snowman effortlessly and joyfully takes to the night sky hand in hand with his boy creator. (3+)
The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung Fu Cavemen from the Future
Dav Pilkey, Scholastic, 978 1 407 12388 2, £8.99 hbk
The new time travelling series from the Captain Underpants team continues the under-the-desk-lid cartooning of its
8 Books for Keeps No.185 November 2010
predecessor. Only when faced with 20 or so graphic novels whose techniques derived from superhero comics, did I realise how refreshingly unpretentious,
inventive,
funny and reader friendly Pilkey is. The unsophisticated black and white illustrations not only give budding comic writers grounding in the basics, they demonstrate that you don’t need great drawing skills to have a lot of fun with the format. (8+)
Slog’s Dad
David Almond, ill. Dave McKean, Walker, 978 1 4063 2290 3, £8.99 hbk
This second collaboration between Almond and McKean features a gem of a short story, once more about the loss of a father. McKean’s separate parallel pictorial narrative, which opens and closes the book and appears
in sections throughout, sometimes anticipating Almond’s text, gives the reader an access to Slogger’s grief and his means of seeking reassurance and hope that the narrator of Almond’s story, sympathetic but matter-of-fact Davie, never can. McKean’s empathy with the story is remarkable, enhancing the reader’s experience and taking it in new directions. The result is stunning. (9+)
Good Dog, Bad Dog
Dave Shelton, David Fickling Books, 978 0 385 61825 0, £9.99 hbk
The canine combination of diminutive detective Bergman and massive McBoo blunder their way through a series of capers that gleefully ransack every cliché of police and detective fiction and cinema. This is only one of the DFC Library, which originated with the late lamented DFC comic
and which the irrepressible (thank the lord) David Fickling has now published in separate volumes. Amongst the pile of new graphic novels which I received, the six titles in the DFC Library, while very different from each other in style and content, stood out for their originality, illustration and production. Don’t miss any of them. (9+)
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