Graphic Novel Bucket List

Marjane Satrapi's comic-book childhood in revolutionary Iran, animated in black and white.

Two soldiers from warring planets raise their daughter on the run; Vaughan and Staples.

Two boys at an English grammar school fall in love; the webcomic that became a Netflix series.

Marv hunts the men who killed Goldie; Miller's black-and-white noir.

Three cousins lost in a valley of dragons and rat creatures; a Disney-drawn Lord of the Rings.

Every male mammal dies except Yorick and his monkey; sixty issues of what comes next.

Rick Grimes wakes in a hospital to the zombie apocalypse; 193 issues in black and white.

John Difool, a class-R detective, and a crystal that can save the universe; Moebius and Jodorowsky.

A Toronto slacker must defeat seven evil exes; O Malley's manga-styled indie epic.

A sailor adrift in the Pacific on the eve of 1914; Hugo Pratt's literary adventurer.

Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf in exile in New York; Willingham's fairy-tale noir.

Bruce Wayne's first year and Jim Gordon's; Miller and Mazzucchelli's crime comic.

A dystopian 2013 where Sentinels rule and Kitty Pryde goes back to stop it; Claremont and Byrne.

Joe Sacco in Gaza and the West Bank in 1991; comics journalism begins.

Four stories of a Bronx tenement; Will Eisner coined the term graphic novel for it.

A lonely man meets the father who abandoned him; Chris Ware's diagrams of sadness.

A demon raised by the army fights Rasputin and frog monsters; Mignola's shadows.

A first love and a fundamentalist childhood in a Wisconsin winter; Craig Thompson's 600 pages.

A sexually transmitted plague mutates 1970s Seattle teenagers; Charles Burns in ink black.

Jack the Ripper as a royal conspiracy, with 40 pages of footnotes; Moore and Campbell's Victorian London.

Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter Thompson of the future, against the City; Warren Ellis.

The Joker's possible origin and Barbara Gordon shot; one bad day.

Morpheus, lord of dreams, escapes seventy years of captivity; Gaiman's ten volumes of myth.

Marjane Satrapi grows up through the Iranian revolution, in black and white.

Retired vigilantes in a 1985 with Nixon still president; the graphic novel that made comics grow up.

Alison Bechdel's father, a closeted funeral director, and her own coming out; the comic that became a musical.

The Marvel universe seen from a photographer on the pavement; Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross.

Harari's human story redrawn as a comic; the same argument in pictures.

John Lewis's civil rights years, from Nashville lunch counters to Selma, in three books.

Scott McCloud explains how comics work, as a comic; the textbook of the form.