If you only know comics from superhero films, these books will surprise you. They are memoirs, histories, love stories and science fiction, and they do things that neither a novel nor a film can do.
Every book here won one of the comics world's major prizes: the Eisner Awards, the Harvey Award for Book of the Year or the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Together they make a fine starting shelf, and any one of them makes a gift that gets talked about.
Winner1992
Art Spiegelman
Great for anyone, once in their life
Art Spiegelman's account of his father's survival of Auschwitz, with Jews drawn as mice and Nazis as cats, and of his own difficult relationship with his father. Together with the first volume, one of the most important books ever made in comics. Give both volumes together.
1992 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: Reprint winner
Winner2007
Alison Bechdel
Great for a reader of literary memoirs
Alison Bechdel's memoir of growing up above her family's funeral home with a father who was an English teacher, a perfectionist and, she later learned, a closeted gay man. Funny, literary and devastating. It became a Tony-winning Broadway musical.
2007 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work winner
Winner2004
Craig Thompson
Great for a romantic
Craig grows up in a strict evangelical family in snowy rural Wisconsin and falls in love for the first time at a church winter camp. A long, tender book about first love and faith, with some of the most beautiful snow ever drawn.
2004 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New winner
Winner2023
Kate Beaton
Great for a reader of serious nonfiction
To pay off her student loans, Kate Beaton leaves Cape Breton to work in the oil sands of northern Alberta, in camps where women are few and the isolation is crushing. Honest, funny in places and very hard in others. Won both the Eisner and the Harvey.
2023 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Memoir winner
Winner2010
David Mazzucchelli
Great for a design lover
On his fiftieth birthday, an arrogant architecture professor watches his New York apartment burn and leaves the city with almost nothing. A brilliant book about a marriage and a life, where every color and line style means something.
2010 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New winner
Winner2018
Damian Duffy and John Jennings
Great for a science fiction reader
An adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's classic novel. Dana, a Black writer in 1970s Los Angeles, is suddenly pulled back in time to a plantation in Maryland before the Civil War, again and again. Gripping and unforgettable.
2018 Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium winner
Winner2018
Emil Ferris
Great for an art lover
Ten-year-old Karen Reyes lives in 1960s Chicago, draws herself as a werewolf and sets out to solve the death of her upstairs neighbor, a Holocaust survivor. Drawn entirely in ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper. Unlike anything else.
2018 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New winner
Winner2025
Tessa Hulls
Great for a reader who loves family sagas
Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women: her grandmother, a journalist in Shanghai who fled to Hong Kong, her mother, and herself. A huge, ambitious memoir about history, mental illness and what families pass down.
2025 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Memoir winner
Brian K. Vaughan
Great for a fan of Star Wars and Game of Thrones
Two soldiers from opposite sides of an endless galactic war fall in love and have a baby, and now both sides want them dead. Space opera with heart and humor, written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Fiona Staples. For adults: it is explicit in places.
2013 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic winner
Winner2013
Chris Ware
Great for someone who has everything
Not one book but a box of fourteen: booklets, newspapers and a board, telling the lives of the people in one Chicago apartment building. You can read them in any order. A beautiful object and a small masterpiece by Chris Ware.
2013 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New winner
Maus, Fun Home and Ducks are three of the most widely loved. All three are true stories and read like great memoirs.
The Eisner Awards are the best-known prizes in American comics, given every summer at Comic-Con International in San Diego.
Saga is written for adults and includes sex and violence. Older teens often read it, but check before giving it as a gift.
See every award-winning book for adults