Greenburgh Public Library Blog

Comics: Quick and Engaging Reads!

With Book Bundle services here at GPL, patrons provide librarians with information about the types of books they like to read. Many patrons select comments like “I have limited time to read” or “I need books to engage me quickly”. Enter the Graphic Novel. Fast paced, colorful illustrations with a wide array of genres make comics an excellent option for a quick engaging read. To be clear, comics and graphic novels are a medium not a genre. They are a means in which information is conveyed. As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”; with graphic novels a single panel has the potential to convey more information than several pages of writing. This is one of the reasons why I’m such a big fan and advocate of comics. When well written and illustrated, comics can be very efficient and in today’s time with everyone looking for a little escapism, comics are a worthy option to explore.

Comics really are for everyone. They can be a very quick, light, easy read or they can be quite dark and dense. Below is a list of a few of our new graphic novels for you to explore.

The Black Panther Party - A bold and fascinating graphic novel history of the revolutionary Black Panther Party. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a radical political organization that stood in defiant contrast to the mainstream civil rights movement. This gripping illustrated history explores the impact and significance of the Panthers, from their social, educational, and healthcare programs that were designed to uplift the Black community, to their battle against police brutality through citizen patrols and frequent clashes with the FBI, which targeted the Party from its outset. Using dramatic comic book style retellings and illustrated profiles of key figures, The Black Panther Party captures the major events, people, and actions of the party, as well as their cultural and political influence and enduring legacy.

Aspara Engine - By turns fantastical and familiar, this graphic short story collection is immersed in questions of gender, the body, and existential conformity. The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality. A woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforeseen past, and a non-binary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak. Painted in rich, sepia-toned water colors, Apsara Engine is Bishakh Som's highly anticipated debut work of fiction. Showcasing a series of fraught, darkly humorous, and seemingly alien worlds, which ring all too familiar, Som captures the weight of 21st century life as we hurl ourselves forward into the unknown.

 

Killadelphia - When a small town beat cop comes home to bury his murdered father, the revered Philadelphia detective James Sangster Sr., begins to unravel a mystery that leads him down a path of horrors and shakes his beliefs to their core. The city that was once the symbol of liberty and freedom has fallen prey to corruption, poverty, unemployment, brutality...and vampires. But the mystery goes even further when Jimmy's investigation leads him to uncover the source of the outbreak is long-thought dead President of the United States, John Adams, a man secretly biding his time as he builds an undead army to start a new and bloodier American revolution.

 

 

Paying the Land - From the "heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman" (Economist), a masterful work of comics journalism about indigenous North America, resource extraction, and our debt to the natural world. The Dene have lived in the vast Mackenzie River Valley since time immemorial, by their account. To the Dene, the land owns them, not the other way around, and it is central to their livelihood and very way of being. But the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories are home to valuable resources, including oil, gas, and diamonds. With mining came jobs and investment, but also road-building, pipelines, and toxic waste which scarred the landscape–and alcohol, drugs, and debt which deformed a way of life. In Paying the Land, Joe Sacco travels the frozen North to reveal a people in conflict over the costs and benefits of development. The mining boom is only the latest assault on indigenous culture. Sacco recounts the shattering impact of a residential school system that aimed to "remove the Indian from the child"; the destructive process that drove the Dene from the bush into settlements and turned them into wage laborers; the government land claims stacked against the Dene Nation; and their uphill efforts to revive a wounded culture. Against a vast and gorgeous landscape that dwarfs all human scale, Paying the Land lends an ear to trappers and chiefs, activists and priests, to tell a sweeping story about money, dependency, loss, and culture–recounted in stunning visual detail by one of the greatest cartoonists alive.

 

Cheeky: A Head-to-Toe Memoir - The funny, exuberant, inspiring antidote to body shame, a full-color graphic memoir celebrating the imperfections of the author's female body in all its glory. Too tall. Too short. Too fat. Too thin. The message is everywhere. We need to pluck, wax, shrink, and hide ourselves, to not take up space, emotionally or literally; women are never "just right." Well, Ariella Elovic, feminist and illustrator extraordinaire, has had enough. In her full-color graphic memoir Cheeky, she takes an inspiring and exuberant head-to-toe look at her own body self-consciousness, and body part by body part, finds her way back to herself. How does Ariella learn not to see herself as a never-finished DIY project, but to accept and even love the physical attributes society taught her to hide? How does a mirror go from a "black hole of critique" to a "who's that girl" moment? Essential to her journey is her posse of girlfriends, her "yentas." Together, they discover that sharing "imperfections" and some of the gross and "unsightly" things our bodies produce can be a source of endless laughs and deep bonding. It helps to have a team with some outside perspectives to keep our inner bullies in check. Charming and hilarious, full of empathy and candor, and gorgeously illustrated, Cheeky aims to inspire all of us to embrace our bodies, flaws and all, as well as our bodies' needs, desires, and inherent power.

 

Solutions and Other Problems - For the first time in seven years, Allie Brosh--beloved author and artist of the extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller Hyperbole and a Half, returns with a new collection of comedic, autobiographical, and illustrated essays. Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie Brosh's childhood, the adventures of her very bad animals, merciless dissection of her own character flaws, incisive essays on grief, loneliness, and powerlessness, as well as reflections on the absurdity of modern life. This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features all-new material with more than 1,600 pieces of art. Solutions and Other Problems marks the return of a beloved American humorist who has "the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian". (Bill Gates) 

 

For a full list of our newest adult graphic novels available at the library click here. If you prefer to read your comics online, check out our our eComics collections on RB Digital Comics and Hoopla. To search for a specific comic or graphic novel, feel free to use our online catalog. 

 

So, the next time you submit your Book Bundle for a quick and engaging read, let us know you'd like to try a graphic novel and we can include it in your bundle. Need a recommendation? Let us know and we'll look for the right graphic novel just for you. Take care and stay safe!