Milan’s List: Graphic Novels
Milan Hulsing. Photo by Robin Schouten.
Looking for a good graphic novel to immerse yourself in? TWoA asked graphic artist Milan Hulsing for a few recommendations. Milan is a graphic novelist from Dutch/Czech descent. He is best known for his literary adaptations Stad van Klei (based on the Egyptian novel El Khaldiya by Mohamed el Bisatie) and De Aanslag (based on the novel by Harry Mulisch). Works by him have been translated into French, Spanish and Arabic. He has lived and worked in Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan and has currently settled in the Dutch town of Delft with his wife Tessa and their two children.
Masterpieces are to be celebrated but they also take up space for other titles less often mentioned so I'm getting the following two off my chest before continuing with my personal 5:
Maus - Art Spiegelman
A lot of graphic novels are drawn in an artful style to seduce the reader but this important classic - an 'oral history' of the holocaust through the author's father - shows that it's the story that matters most.
Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
The movie is one of the very best in the genre so it's interesting to read and see both the book and the movie to compare what works best in which medium. I think the movie is one of the rare examples where the movie is even better than the book, but that's up to you!
Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
Drily funny, ironic but also moving, this is a meandering tale about two teenage friends who outgrow each other and resist to fit into the mould of expectations, from each other and from society.
The Green Hand and Other Stories - Nicole Claveloux
Story is probably most important, but the graphic novel is also a visual medium. The author can present to you a world that is aesthetically singular, beguiling and surreal and give you sensations like no other medium can. Is it literature? Is it art? It's a graphic novel!
Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story - Peter Bagge
Peter Bagge is the author of several rather coarse but hilarious underground comics. In this book, however, his riotous tone works very well to tell the story of the life of the black folklore researcher and writer Zora Neale Hurston in the USA at the time of the civil rights movement.
The Arrival - Shaun Tan
There doesn't have to be text in a graphic novel. Shaun Tan has been constructing a whole world of his own, but touching on modern day themes like immigration, which is magical and dark at the same time.
Exit Wounds - Rutu Modan
A person searching for her father in a graphic novel in which the characters feel like actual human beings.
Bonus:
The Ballad of the Salty Sea - Hugo Pratt
A poetic adventure story (reminding of Robert Louis Stevenson) by the famous Hugo Pratt who was one of the first adventure authors to tell his stories from a post-colonial, multi-cultural perspective (having travelled and worked all over the world himself). There's an island, there's a poetically inclined pirate, there's a voodoo priest, there's (post-) colonial politics. There's also a shark! It's my favourite comic (they didn't call it graphic novels yet back then) and I'd be curious if young adults today would find it as stimulating.