Adieu Birkenau: Ginette Kolinka’s Story of Survival by Ginette Kolinka, Jean-David Morvan, Victor Matet, Richard Efa, and Cesc F. Dalmases (SelfMadeHero). The horrors of war, taken in aggregate, are too much for the mind to grasp. But we can understand something of them through the stories of individuals, and Kolinka’s experiences, brought to life by a team of talented artists and writers, feel more meaningful than any compilation of facts and statistics.
Elise and the New Partisans by Dominique Grange and Tardi (Fantagraphics). When Paris was erupting with protest in the 1960s, Dominique Grange was right in the thick of it, and her experiences are chronicled here through the fictional character Elise. Grange and her partner, the cartoonist Jacques Tardi, don’t shy away from portraying the violence involved in the protests (from the police as well as the protestors) and never waver in their commitment to liberation and justice.
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). I’m not sure why this one is not winning all the awards, because it literally contains worlds in its bold, honest, and densely layered examination of the relationships among three generations of women (Hulls herself, her mother, and her grandmother). In the process of exploring their relationships, Hulls also considers how they were affected by a socio-historical context that includes the Chinese Cultural Revolution, multiple episodes of international migration, and some very nasty racial and gender politics.
I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together: A Memoir by Maurice Vellekoop (Pantheon Books). Today, Maurice Vellekoop is a successful artist and member of the Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, he was the youngest child in a Calvinist family of Dutch emigres living in suburban Toronto who was obsessed with television and ostracized for his interest in girly things. How he got from there to a successful adult life is told in this lavish graphic memoir, which is replete with pop-culture references and excursions into his family history.
Red Harvest: A Graphic Novel of the Terror Famine in 1930s Soviet Ukraine by Michael Cherkas (nbm). We’re not far from the 100th anniversary of the Holodomor, a Soviet-inflicted famine that killed millions of Ukrainians (some estimate 10% of the population died), yet for many it is at most one chapter of many in the book of Stalinist terrors. Michael Cherkas uses the fictional narrative of a Canadian-Ukrainian survivor to communicate the scope of this human-created horror, illustrated with rough-and-ready ink sketches that suggest they were created in haste as the author endeavored to stay one step ahead of the secret police.
Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund by Caitlin McGurk (Fantagraphics). Besides winning best title of the year, McGurk’s richly illustrated volume brings to life the work of an artistic prodigy who was the first female cartoonist for The New Yorker. Her specialty was portraying young women who, like herself, partied hard, spoke their minds, and enjoyed their new-found independence for all it was worth.
The War on Gaza by Joe Sacco (web comic in The Comics Journal). Joe Sacco employs his unique style of journalistic comics to report and comment on what he terms the “genocidal self-defense” (the Wikipedia calls it the Israel-Hamas War) currently taking place in Gaza. In the process questions how sincerely, when push comes to shove, the great powers of the West believe in the values they claim to hold dear.
You and a Bike and the Road by Eleanor Davis (Fantagraphics). Physical feats like cross-country bike trips are often an occasion for bragging, but Eleanor Davis’s memoir is instead a celebration of her human imperfections and her determination to stay true to herself. She illustrates the journey with loose pencil sketches that mirror her state of mind as much as the terrain through which she was passing, an approach which perfectly complements the text. | Sarah Boslaugh
*Should anyone be perturbed by the number of female creators in this list, I suggest you take a look at the 2024 Eisner winners.
