68 Books Like Catwoman

I love Paper Girls because it’s a wild adventure with a great cast of dynamically written, queer girls. It’s a fantasy story that really grips the reader by the shirt collar and pulls them in. I definitely couldn’t put this one down because the story keeps you wanting MORE.

I have to again recommend this graphic novel for its gorgeous artwork and color palettes that really make it a feast for the eyes. 

Tom Strong is a throwback to classic pulp heroes, and the closest thing to a superhero you’ll find on my list. Tom is super strong, super smart, and super white, but that’s where comparisons to the heroes from which the author drew inspiration end! Tom’s Black wife and daughter are fully realized characters with thoughts and feelings of their own. Tom doesn’t punch out the bad guys, he doesn’t even believe in bad guys! Instead, he uses his intelligence to recognize that conflict arises not from malice, but from misunderstanding and incompatible needs and desires. With this in mind, Tom can use his super-intelligence to craft a compromise that reestablishes order. Far from preachy, eat-your-vegetables sermonizing, these stories are witty, layered, thought-provoking, and hilarious.

I’m recommending this book for how delightfully it considers the ill human body as a site of new possibilities. The Doom Patrol have never been well-known superheroes, perhaps because of the willingness of writers to confront the bodily trauma at the heart of their stories.

Morrison’s contribution to the series was to consider the Doom Patrol truly as freaks: people who could not fit into a society that demands gender, mental, and physical homogeneity. Mixing allegorical forms of illness—Cliff “Robotman” Steele’s fallible technological body—with more direct conditions like Kaye “Crazy Jane” Callis’ dissociative identity disorder.

Morrison, along with artistic collaborators, built a celebration of difference into a genre where most heroic bodies never break the mold.

Deadpool is superhero comics', and perhaps literature in general’s, most consistently challenging fictional engagement with cancer. Deadpool’s healing factor prevents his cancer from ever being cured, which traps him in a never-ending cycle of remission and relapse.

Unlike a superhero who responds to a bodily transformation by self-sacrificingly upholding the status quo, Deadpool is a mercenary and anti-hero. In this collection, writer Joe Kelly creates much of the narrative infrastructure that eventually made the character one of Marvel’s most popular.

Kelly also crafts a story where Deadpool is offered a heroic transformation that—through personal weakness, history, bad luck, and supervillainous interference—tragically fails. This book establishes the template for Deadpool stories and digs into Deadpool’s cancer for the first time.

This book contains a rare examination of HIV/AIDS in superhero comics. It’s much more likely a superhero story will deal with HIV/AIDS allegorically (see the recommendation above!) than directly.

Given the Hulk’s own fears about his blood contaminating his loved ones (his cousin Jennifer Walters became the She-Hulk after a transfusion of his blood), he is uniquely sympathetic to the illness of a friend who contracts HIV. As longtime Hulk writer David advances subplots (at this point, Bruce Banner and the Hulk have merged into a more-or-less well-adjusted form of the famous giant green rage monster), he builds space to linger on character details.

David himself has struggled with health issues in recent years, and this comic is also a reminder of one of the genre’s great writers.

Hey, look! It's totally a superhero comic! Some superheroes will probably get some super powers, and maybe a villain will try to destroy a town, and, true to superhero form, at least everything is kind of relatively okay in the end (not to spoil anything).

It has pretty much everyone's favorite superhero, since it has a lot of superheroes. Which is really interesting, because the first few pages are sheer horror. Seriously, it isn't every book that gets my mind flirting with a panic attack, but this one was fine after setting it down for a moment. Then it's mostly a superhero comic again and not really a horror story, except for when it is a horror story.

This is another masterful creation by Gene Luen Yang! After falling in love with American Born Chinese, this recent work of his did not disappoint. This story based on an old radio play is a tale of self-acceptance and standing up to hatred. Yang brilliantly intertwines the narrative of the Lee family and the issues of discrimination and violence they are faced with moving into a new suburban town along with the struggles of a younger, less experienced Superman coming to terms with being himself, an alien among humans.

Clever, comic-book reading, word-loving Flora is more cynical than ever since her parents’ separation. She’s sure her mother loves a shepherdess lamp more than her own daughter. When Flora saves a squirrel sucked up by a neighbor’s vacuum and he returns with super strength and the ability to understand language and write poetry, she finds a kindred spirit. I love this book for its colorful (human and squirrel) characters and subtle exploration of family dynamics. And I love that Flora’s journey, which is emotional rather than physical, isn’t wrapped up with a tidy bow at the end.

In a world with superpowers, two abilities mean you’re a Super and none means you’re Normal.

The Twist? Merrin Grey has a single power, meaning she’s half a Super called a One. And when she’s forced to transfer to a normal high school she meets Elias who is also a One. When they combine their powers, they can fly! 

One is a love letter to superheroes and comics and plays with the idea of what makes someone a superhero vs a less than. I loved all the sci-fi tropes stood on their heads in this book. And Merrin and Elias are the cutest. This was one of the first indie-published novels I read. It showed me the art of possible, and how fantastic the world of indie publishing is.