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Looking at pretty pictures may perhaps be the oldest human pastime – we’ve been doing it since prehistory! Ever since primitive humans stepped out of their caves and sighed at the beauty of the natural world, they attempted to replicate it on cave walls, preserving their fire-discovering, wheel-inventing stories for future generations. Thousands of years later, the graphic novelists took up the torch to do the exact same thing – like Michelangelo! The Sistine Chapel really is just a graphic novel adaptation of the Bible, after all. While watching humanity’s drama with God play out on the ceiling is certainly worth the trip, this list is for those who want to drink in stunning artwork without traveling to the Vatican. For all the homebodies, are the 10 most beautifully illustrated graphic novels of all time.
Blacksad
When Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido created Blacksad, they reminded us of something that humanity has known for thousands of years: cats are beautiful. Aesthetically appreciated as far back as ancient Egypt, cats are given a modern makeover in this Neo-noire masterpiece. This is the story of John Blacksad – a hardboiled private investigator who also happens to be a kitty. A feline lone wolf, Blacksad operates independently from the foxes and bloodhounds of the local police department, preferring to stalk his way into the city’s reptilian criminal underbelly on his own. A gritty pastiche of mid-century America, Blacksad’s art style feels like if you took Edward Hopper’s famous Nighthawks painting and turned everyone in it into an animal. Moody, dramatic, lonely, and furry.
Blue Is The Warmest Color
Reading Jul Maroh’s Blue Is The Warmest Color feels like getting slapped in the face by an angel – divinely beautiful and searingly painful. It’s the story of a tragic love affair between two young French women, beginning with incendiary passion and ending in brutal heartbreak. The watercolor art style feels like if you mixed regular paint with human tears – the tears that you’re certain to cry as you turn through its pages. The novel’s use of light is especially poignant, everything has a soft and blurry glow to it, making you feel like you’re looking at a world seen by someone ever on the verge of weeping. With the way things go in this novel, that pretty much describes the emotional state of these characters at every second of every day. Looking at the one we love has a way of making us all misty eyed – if that person goes away, bring on the waterworks.
Daytripper
Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá is ten days in the life of obituary writer Brás de Oliva Domingos, each of which results in his death. Separated into ten vignettes, the story follows Brás at pivotal moments of his life – first love, new parenthood, old age – before exploring how any of those moments could have been his last. After kicking the bucket at the end of each of these days, and the story continues on as if he hadn’t – a literary device intended to remind the audience of the fragility of our lives. The art style of the comic is equally delicate, soft colors and softer lines mix together to create a fuzzy and kaleidoscopic portrait of life – a life that could be snuffed out at any moment. Like Blue Is The Warmest Color, the blurry pages of this graphic novel are sure to be further smudged with your tears.
The Incal
A seminal work of sci-fi, The Incal by avant-garde film director Alejandro Jodorowsky is essentially Star Wars on acid. It’s the story of John Difool, a detective who comes into possession of a mysterious extraterrestrial artifact called the Luminous Incal – a crystal coveted by just about every faction in the galaxy. John navigates a labyrinthian world drawn by Jean Giraud, a groundbreaking illustrator more famously known by his pseudonym Mœbius. Depicting soft sci-fi worlds with Salvador Dali-esque surrealism, Giraud creates a dreamlike landscapes where technology and fantasy meet. This graphic novel sits somewhere between space opera and acid western, with a little bit of Dune thrown into the recipe for added spice – see what I did there?
Berserk
While “beautiful” isn’t the first word that many would use to describe the dark fantasy nightmare-verse that is Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, the late, great mangaka’s art style is nothing short of arresting. No doubt drawing inspiration from the biological horror of H.R. Giger, Miura paints the picture of a demon-haunted world that would terrify the devil himself. With his images of beautifully composed brutality, Miura was able create what is arguably the finest work of dark fantasy ever penned. It’s the story of Guts, a linebacker sized mercenary with a sedan-sized sword, cutting his way through demonic hordes in order to take revenge against a former comrade turned dark divinity. It’s somber, thrilling and tragic – blood drenched, rainswept portrait of a lone warrior who refuses to give in, despite overwhelmingly grim odds.
Monstress
Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda is a master class in art deco – a steampunk East Asian world rendered with turn of the century opulence. It’s the story of Maika Halfwolf, a teenage girl attempting to hide her identity as an Arcanic – arcane beings that are captured and consumed by the ruling sorcerer class for their magic. On her quest to avenge her dead mother, Maika is aided by a monster – a demonic being that resides in the stump where her left arm used to be. At its core, the art style of Monstress is a 1920’s interpretation of the biblically accurate angel – lots of wings and eyes, all laced in gold.
Square Eyes
Square Eyes by Anna Mill and Luke Jones is a soft sci-fi that follows Fin, an engineer who recently revolutionized the society of the near future with a powerful program. Once seated at the top of the digital world, Fin suddenly finds herself completely disconnected from the virtual reality that binds humanity together. Unable to access the artificial network that augments her city, the amnesiac Fin attempts to solve why she’s been booted out. The art style of the novel is just as eerie and dreamy as its plot, drawn with soft pastel pinks and purples that wash the world in a sense of unreality. It’s a place where everyone is wearing rose-colored VR glasses, but no one can take them off. Beautiful and disorienting, like a meet cute with a hot hologram.
Through The Woods
Through The Woods by Emily Carroll is a modern day collection of Grimm’s fairy tales, creepy enough to impress the screwed up Brothers Grimm themselves. Each of these five stories are rendered in shadowy black, bone white, and blood red, casting a lurid gleam over the already macabre tales. It feels like a folk horror picture book, something that the sorceresses of Robert Eggers’ The Witch would read aloud to the children they kidnap. The book features one of the author’s most famous works His Face All Red, which catapulted her to the heights of internet webcomic glory. It’s the story of a man who killed his brother, only for his deceased sibling to wander out of the woods a few days later totally unharmed. Did his brother pull a Lazarus? Or is it a doppelgänger that didn’t quite get all the details of the disguise right? You’ll have to read to find out.
Sin City
Sin City by Frank Miller is the ultimate hardboiled detective comic, and so quintessentially representative of the author’s style that it borders on self parody. Frank Miller made a name for himself in the late 80’s with his grimdark reinterpretations of Batman, somber portrayals that created the dour image of the caped crusader we know today. Sin City is Batman level grit taken to the extreme, taking place in a black and white metropolis peppered with streaks of bloody red. It’s classic noire stuff, femme fatales, burned-out private eyes, ruthless mob bosses, all rendered with such extreme chiaroscuro that it puts the Renaissance masters to shame. It’s a monochromatically mad world.
Persepolis
Persepolis is the graphic memoir of Marjane Satrapi, who came of age during one of the most tumultuous periods in Iran’s history. An adolescent during the Islamic Revolution, Marjane saw her formerly progressive society take a hard right turn towards theological conservatism. For Marjane and young women like her, this meant that the plethora of choices that they once had for their lives were suddenly limited – from what clothes they were allowed to wear to their career prospects. The novel is rendered in a somber monochrome that juxtaposes itself with Marjane’s colorful and outspoken personality. She’s a young woman who refuses to conform to an increasingly reactionary society, a world that views morality to be as black and white as the colors with which it’s illustrated. Hailed as one of the finest graphic novels ever written, Persepolis is a must read for anyone grappling with authority figures, which, now that I think about it, is perhaps every adolescent on the planet.
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Sarah Fimm
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