Maus - A Survivor's Tale:Part I - My Father Bleeds History

By Art Spiegelman

Publisher: Pantheon

Part 1 of 2 of the seminal Art Spiegelman graphic novel detailing his relationship with his father, and his father’s escape from Hitler’s concentration camps as a Polish Jew. Remarkable is an understatement.

Hark! A Vagrant

By Kate Beaton

Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly

HARK! A VAGRANT takes readers on a romp through history and literature — with dignity for few and cookies for all — with comic strips about famous authors, their characters, and political and historical figures, all drawn in Beaton’s pared-down, excitable style. This collection features favourite stories as well as new, previously unpublished content. Whether she’s writing about Nikola Tesla, Napoleon, or Nancy Drew, Beaton brings a refined sense of the absurd to every situation.

In just four years, Kate Beaton has taken the comics world by storm with her non sequiturs, cheeky comebacks and irreverent punch lines. With 1.2 million monthly hits on her site — 500,000 of them unique — and comics appearing in Harpers Magazine, the National Post and The New Yorker, her caricatures of historical and fictional figures filtered through a contemporary lens display a sharp, quick wit that knows no bounds.

The Selves

By Sonja Ahlers

Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly

Before blogs, there were zines. Before zines, there were scrapbooks. Sometimes overlooked in the quest to produce high culture, these most direct and intimate means of communication and recording memory are the tools favoured by Sonja Ahlers in the making of her art. A self-taught artist and writer, Ahlers wears her pop culture obsessions on her sleeve, professing her love for such visual icons as Princess Di, Holly Hobbie and Stevie Nicks. Focusing on found objects such as stickers, greeting cards, magazine photos collected in collage framework, complete with song lyrics hand-lettered in cursive script and heartbreaking, melancholic water colors, Ahlers explores and exposes the social construction of roles, feminine and otherwise. Beginning with incipient childhood self-awareness and traversing high school status jockeying to adult social climbing, the cultural imagery that supports and informs personal identity is given uneasy new meanings and importance in Ahlers’ visual remixes. With The Selves, the schizophrenic nature of an identity foraged from modern cultural sources is laid bare.