Books like 7 Generations — picked by fans

This queer memoir takes us to New York City to explore the unfolding queer life of a child of Bengali immigrants in her difficult decision to divest from parents, colleagues, and friends’ expectations for her life. After taking up architecture as a career and attending Harvard to the delight of her parents, Anjali realizes that her real interest lies in creating graphic literature. This coincides with another journey away from the expected future marriage and family toward exploring and affirming her sexuality and attraction to women. In often spare and simple settings with clean lines that let readers fill in the gaps – for example, with picture frames containing blank canvasses rather than pictures – Anjali creates her own pictures, both as a graphic artist and in imagining her own life. 

Love lies at the heart of this fictionalized memoir. A full recipe from Anjali’s father’s repertoire, a culinary interest… show more.

This is a great story about a Muslim Pakistani high school student in Jersey City who suddenly body-morphs as she develops superhero powers. As Kamala discovers, being Ms Marvel is about following her faith’s call to help others regardless of who they are. Ms. Marvel’s engaging story educates readers on immigrant culture, debates, and shared values within Muslim families and communities and how closely aligned Islam is with the central tenets of superhero life to address wrongs while at the same time challenging Islamophobic ideas. 

Why is this comic important? It is a great way for teens, both inside and outside Islam, immigrants or not, to learn about this faith as one set of characters live it and to follow a character whose life is, in a variety of ways, not so different from their own. It’s also a series that invites readers to think about shared values and norms,… show more.

This compelling graphic novel adaptation captures Butler’s Afrofuturist science fiction in its dark-toned palette and relentless movements in and across panels, with pages crammed with characters traveling within and outside of an urban enclave surrounded by gangs and criminals. The red of apocalypse and the California desert saturate pages, signaling current and immanent violence and danger and a landscape in environmental crisis. Through it all, Lauren reflects on how a new vision is required to liberate the oppressed without reproducing the conditions that brought it about. Amidst the bleak and violent scenes, we read excerpts from her Earthseed journaling of an unfolding religion where God is Change.

A futuristic world portrays the ongoing struggles of Black Americans for equity, racial justice, and economic and cultural futures. Its spirituals and Black culture form a new platform for Lauren’s exodus to a new land, a journey fraught with danger and difficult decisions,… show more.

There are lots of graphic novels and memoirs with medical themes, but I want to shine a light on this unique collaboration by brothers who capture their shared experience of schizophrenia, one diagnosed with the condition and the other who accompanies him through difficult navigation of an inadequate health care system and the struggle of managing a disease that isolates individuals and families from their communities.

Each brother works side-by-side to tell their interrelated stories: Olivier is a visual artist, and Clem is an author and playwright. Olivier’s drawings are on the verso, in simple black and white sketches, often unframed, of family holidays, from picnics to Christmas, with obscuring smudges, stiff figures, and unsmiling faces that belie the sun, picnic baskets, and decorated trees of the settings.  He draws his world of meetings with doctors, attending group meetings, and struggling to get and hold jobs.

Using text on the… show more.

Eisner was a comics and graphic novel pioneer, first by his work on his classic creation, The Spirit, and then with his graphic novels. Eisner offers valuable, personal, professional, and practical insights into how the sequential art medium can be tailored to your intentions. In his foreword, he writes: “This work is intended to consider and examine the unique aesthetics of sequential art as a means of creative expression, a distinct discipline, an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea.”

The author of this book is a working cartoonist and illustrator and that makes this one of the best books out there. The book packs an immense amount of practical information about how to draw cartoons into easy, fun worksheet-style activities. Different styles of writing, as well as complex concepts, are communicated in simple visually striking lessons. I have to admit if I was giving a young artist a book (and they already had both of mine) I would definitely give them this book. It’s comprehensive, fun, and simple. It also allows the young artist room to draw in their own style, instead of copying a given drawing. That’s one of my pet peeves!

In his foreword, Eisner writes: “In this work, I hope to deal with the mission and process of storytelling with graphics.” Where McCloud shows you different options and tools for how to choose images to explore ideas, Eisner gets specific, and shows you how he does it. This book, along with the four others I recommend, and mine, gives you all the tools you need to choose your own path for effectively working as a writer and/or artist in the sequential art medium.  

This raw, experimental, poetic, and challenging graphic memoir began as an exploration of the work of artist/writer Tove Jannson (the creator of the Moomin novels and comics), but Julie Delporte goes well beyond the confines of criticism or biography to examine deep and difficult questions of gender and the challenge of creating a space to exist as a woman in a world haunted by the legacy of traumas past and present. Delporte’s colored pencil artwork is disarming in its beauty and simplicity, and her spare, intimate insights will stay with you for years to come. An essential read for our times.

What’s worse than a Montreal winter? How about four straight years of Montreal winter! While a nuclear power plant melting down and blanketing the metropolis with irradiated snow might seem like a horrible situation, Cab plays this apocalypse for laughs. Gertrude, a superhumanly-strong, snowmobile-piloting delivery driver, has to face off against irradiated beasts, gargantuan snowflakes, and even the withering scorn of fashionable Mile End hipsters. Maniacally creative and drawn with a light touch.

This slim but dense book chronicles the ups and (mostly) downs of a young woman’s life in Montréal and New York in the 80s and early 90s, a scuzzy time capsule full of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Doucet’s maximalist, punk-inflected art packs each and every claustrophobic panel to bursting, a perfect fit for this tale of a suffocating, toxic relationship playing out in the shadow of the Cold War. It’s no exaggeration to say that Doucet, who recently won the Angouléme Festival's Grand Prix, is one of the most important figures in modern comics, she was one of the first women to break into the boys’ club of the alt comix scene and rewrote the rules of the medium. She remains not only a giant in the history of Quebec comics but of the entire graphic novel art form.