Our Get Graphic! Book Discussions start up March 7. Take a look through the books we’ll be talking about and plan to join us this year! We’ll be holding the conversations as always at Bookhouse Brewing in Cleveland at 6:30 pm!
An Introduction to Comics
March 7: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
April 4: One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry
May 2: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
This season’s selections provide a foundation for discussing comics as a medium of expression. McCloud’s work has become a foundational text for “understanding comics,” and the author explains clearly what makes comics unique. Barry delves into the process of making comics to address our demons and even provides some hands-on exercises for readers! We round out this session with Bechdel’s Fun Home, an award-winning example of the comics medium.
BioGraphy
June 6: Maus by Art Spiegelman
July 11: March (Vol. 1) by John Lewis with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell
August 1: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
In the summer, we’re reading biography and autobiography as told through comics. Spiegelman’s Maus can arguably be called the book that brought comics into the mainstream consciousness, winning a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The first volume of the March trilogy is the inspirational story of the formative years of the late Rep. John Lewis. In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi tells the story of her childhood and early adult years living in Iran and Austria during and after the Islamic Revolution.
Iconoclastic Creators
September 5: Watchmen written by Alan Moore with artist Dave Gibbons
October 3: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
November 7: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
Alan Moore, Chris Ware, and Frank Miller – all in their own ways – rewrote the rules on what comics can do, both as a storytelling medium writ large and, for Miller and Moore, in the genre of superhero comics specifically. Moore’s Watchmen took the superhero genre and turned it on its head in a gritty, all-too-realistic alternate world. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan showed how comics could be used to tell stories in numerous flashbacks and parallel storylines with bold design taking center stage in many panels. Miller’s Batman in The Dark Knight Returns is a troubled soul written for a mature audience, and it is considered by many to be one of the pivotal turning points in the history of that character and in the superhero comics genre itself.