Here are 9 books that Don't Go Where I Can't Follow fans have personally recommended once you finish the Don't Go Where I Can't Follow series.
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I am from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I have always had a passion for art and literature. I started drawing at a young age and never stopped. Constantly drawing on scrap papers from my father’s graphic arts business. Always pulling from my imagination and the world around me for inspiration. Books were a major outlet for my creativity. Graphic novels in particular were always my favorite form of expression. To be able to tell a story using pictures and share my own personal feelings with others was a means of communication for me. I began to study illustration in school and college. I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Marywood University. I currently work as a graphic designer and illustrator.
First I want to say how much I love The Divine Comedy Dante’s Inferno and this graphic novel adaptation by Seymour Chwast is a wonderful version of the tale. If you don’t already know the story I highly suggest you read it in its original text but also be sure to grab this copy as it will really bring the levels of hell to a more comical light. I particularly love the black and white bold art style and humor brought to life here.
The founding partner of Push Pin Studios puts his own artistic spin on this graphic adaptation of Dante Alighieri's 1321 epic poem chronicling his journey through the afterlife and visiting both Heaven and Hell.
I am from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I have always had a passion for art and literature. I started drawing at a young age and never stopped. Constantly drawing on scrap papers from my father’s graphic arts business. Always pulling from my imagination and the world around me for inspiration. Books were a major outlet for my creativity. Graphic novels in particular were always my favorite form of expression. To be able to tell a story using pictures and share my own personal feelings with others was a means of communication for me. I began to study illustration in school and college. I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Marywood University. I currently work as a graphic designer and illustrator.
This book was a hidden gem for me. I found this on a dusty shelf in an old bookstore and was instantly in love with its whimsical drawings. The simplicity of color use and a narrative are told only through its illustrations. Intended for young adult readers, however, this book really is for all dreamers of ages.
Salamander Dream is a young girl's journey within a magical forest. As the year's pass, she finds herself changing, which in turn, changes her friendship with Salamander.
I lived an isolated and sometimes nomadic adolescence. My struggling single mother had untreated paranoid schizophrenia and believed herself to be a prophet. The world, as she saw it, was a strange and scary place, and she raised me and my sister to believe as she did. But being an avid reader and artist, I would escape into my own fantasy worlds to find hope and meaning. Now, as an adult, I use my art and writing to make sense of trauma, and I hope my stories can inspire and empower the people who read them.
A powerful memoir of first love and moving past religious trauma. Craig’s journey as a young evangelical who wants to be an artist was incredibly relatable to me and helped me feel brave enough to give voice to some of my own secret pains in my graphic novel.
The black and white ink work throughout the book is exquisite, and the honesty of the story is brave and moving.
"Quaint, meditative and sometimes dreamy, blankets will take you straight back to your first kiss." --The Guardian
Blankets is the story of a young man coming of age and finding the confidence to express his creative voice. Craig Thompson's poignant graphic memoir plays out against the backdrop of a Midwestern winterscape: finely-hewn linework draws together a portrait of small town life, a rigorously fundamentalist Christian childhood, and a lonely, emotionally mixed-up adolescence.
Under an engulfing blanket of snow, Craig and Raina fall in love at winter church camp, revealing to one another their struggles with faith and their dreams of…
I am from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I have always had a passion for art and literature. I started drawing at a young age and never stopped. Constantly drawing on scrap papers from my father’s graphic arts business. Always pulling from my imagination and the world around me for inspiration. Books were a major outlet for my creativity. Graphic novels in particular were always my favorite form of expression. To be able to tell a story using pictures and share my own personal feelings with others was a means of communication for me. I began to study illustration in school and college. I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Marywood University. I currently work as a graphic designer and illustrator.
Not only is Rutu Modan one of my favorite illustrators she is also an extremely talented story writer and Exit Wounds is no exception. This was also one of the first graphic novels I had ever read and was so captivating. Her unique art style and writing are truly amazing. I love her color pallet and how it really keeps you engaged from panel to panel. Without giving away spoilers this book is based on real-life events and really gives you a greater sense of life in other countries can be like for better and for worse.
I love all of Rutu Modan’s books but this one really hit home for me.
Set in modern-day Tel Aviv, Exit Wounds is the first graphic novel to be published in Britain by one of Israel's best-known cartoonists.
A young man, Koby Franco, receives an urgent phone call from a female soldier. Learning that his estranged father may have been a victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera, Koby reluctantly joins the soldier in searching for clues. His death would certainly explain his empty apartment and disconnected phone line. As Koby tries to unravel the mystery of his father's death, he finds himself not only piecing together the last few months of his father's life,…
When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.
I have probably read this book more than twenty times. Maybe thirty. Maybe more.
I was six or seven the first time I read it and in my mid-forties the last time. And it has only gotten richer and more profound to me in that time. On the surface it is, like any other Tintin book, a children’s adventure comic, and if that’s all you want it’s a brilliant example of the genre.
Funny, exquisitely drawn, a cliffhanger on every page. But you don’t have to dig very far below the surface to find a deep, complicated meditation on friendship and loyalty, on determination in the face of doubt and adversity, and on discovering that the world is more mysterious and remarkable than we are accustomed to think.
The classic graphic novel. One day Tintin reads about a plane crash in the Himalayas. When he discovers thathis friend, Chang, was on board, Tintin travels to the crash site in hopes of a rescue.
When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.
This is a book about deep listening. It follows two childhood friends – a journalist and a former American soldier – on a kind of road trip through Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the close aftermath of the U.S. war there.
We watch them wrestle over the meaning of the conflict and their places in it. It’s reportage – the author is a third friend, following along, chronicling their conversation and laying out their arguments, blind spots and occasionally questionable reasoning as they try and deal with something almost too big and complicated to get a handle on.
The characters are not generals, or presidents, or militia leaders, they are just two old friends, trying to reckon with a war on a very human scale. Also the watercolored art is gorgeous.
Cartoonist Sarah Glidden follows up her acclaimed debut, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, with Rolling Black- outs, which details her two-month long journey through Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Glidden accompanies her two friends reporters and founders of the journalistic non-profit the Seattle Globalist as they research stories on the Iraq War s effect on the Middle East and, specifically, the war s refugees. Joining them is a former Marine and childhood friend of one of the journalists whose deployment to Iraq in 2007 adds an unexpected and sometimes unwelcome viewpoint, both to the people they come…
When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.
This book is, to me, one of the true weird masterpieces of human imagination.
It is one of the things that made me want to make comics in the first place, that expanded my idea of what comics and storytelling could do. It’s deeply weird, extremely unsettling, dark, funny, and, at times, a little offensive. And it is unlike anything you will ever read anywhere else for the rest of your life.
One of its delights is how clear it is at the beginning that the author didn’t know what he was getting into when he started. He just followed his imagination, trusting completely, and ended up with something grand and unique. And none of his work after this is anything like it. Which is probably for the best.
A LONG-OUT-OF-PRINT CLASIC BY A MASTER OF UNDERGROUND COMICS
In the late 1980s, the idiosyncratic Chester Brown (author of the muchlauded Paying for It and Louis Riel) began writing the cult classic comic book series Yummy Fur. Within its pages, he serialized the groundbreaking Ed the Happy Clown, revealing a macabre universe of parallel dimensions. Thanks to its wholly original yet disturbing story lines, Ed set the stage for Brown to become a world-renowned cartoonist.
Ed the Happy Clown is a hallucinatory tale that functions simultaneously as a dark roller-coaster ride of criminal activity and a scathing condemnation of religious…
When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.
This is the most profoundly absorbing experimental art-comic the world has ever produced.
It’s a fun book to sit with someone else and page through, backward or forward, or just ambling around, discovering things. The very simple conceit is that it’s a book that spans millions of years in time, but all happens in exactly one single space. It grew out of a six-page short story that blew people’s minds in the 80’s comics anthology Raw.
I remember hearing that the author had decided, two decades later, to expand it to book form, and wondered if that was really necessary. The short version had been such a perfect jewel of a piece. Turns out he had very good reason.
From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic vision. Richard McGuire’s Here is the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.
"In Here McGuire has introduced a third dimension to the flat page. He can poke holes in the space-time continuum simply by imposing frames that act as transtemporal windows into the larger frame that stands for the provisional now. Here is the comic-book equivalent of a scientific breakthrough. It is also a lovely evocation…
When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.
Everything Lynda Barry touches is earthy human gold.
One! Hundred! Demons! is one part memoir of a difficult childhood, one part comics how-to, and six parts warmth and humor and unruly red hair. It isn’t quite as dark as some of her other work, though it certainly gestures in that direction at times.
It also exemplifies Barry’s knack for finding beauty and delight inside the most difficult, unfair garbage life can throw at you. Such a great book.
Inspired by a 16th-century Zen monk s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full colour vignettes. In Barry s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighbourhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager. As a cartoonist, Lynda…
