Read Persepolis

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

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

Spiegelman's father in Auschwitz, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the only comic with a Pulitzer.

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

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

Enid and Rebecca after high school in a suburb of nowhere; Clowes' teenage bible.

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

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