Since 2002, the first Saturday in May has been celebrated as Free Comic Book Day. The occasion was started to draw attention to independent comic book retailers by drawing folks to come in, pick up a free comic book to keep, and create new fans of the form. If you are interested, you can visit Pasadena’s Collector’s Paradise (at 319 S Arroyo Parkway Unit 4) on Saturday, May 5 and attend some author events, pick up a comic, and browse around. In honor of the occasion, and as a reminder that every day is “free comic book” day at PPL, here are some titles to whet your appetite.
If you haven’t ever tried a comic/graphic novel, note that none of the titles below have much to do with superheroes or newspaper comic strip punchlines. There is horror, mystery and crime fiction, nonfiction history and memoir, and highly creative science fiction/fantasy. Of course, with film and TV versions of the typical (DC, Marvel) becoming blockbuster productions over the last few decades, there is no shortage of the titles you know and possibly still love available, too. There are a few different ways to find comics and graphic novels for all ages at the Pasadena Public Library:
- Print comics and graphic novels are shelved as a separate collection in our libraries; you can search the catalog using a subject term “graphic novels,” and limit by “Adult,” or just browse the Graphic Novels shelves at your favorite branch
- PPL now offers ComicsPlus, a platform offering a large variety of comics, manga graphic novels, and web comics in digital form for all ages, with unlimited checkouts–read as much as you want, as often as you want with no waiting, holds or monthly limits. Find ComicsPlus in our eBooks & Downloadables page or our eResources listings, or download the app to get started.
- Check out digital comics, manga and graphic novels for all ages in Hoopla by selecting “Comics” in the format options. Hoopla provides titles with no holds or waiting, but you are limited to 4 items total (any format) per calendar month.
Happy reading!
Recommended Recent
The Talk by Darrin Bell 2023
This graphic memoir by a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning offers a deeply personal meditation on the “the talk” parents must have with Black children about racism and the brutality that often accompanies it, a ritual attempt to keep kids safe and prepare them for a world that – to paraphrase Toni Morrison – does not love them.
Light It Shoot It by Graham Chaffee 2024
Fresh out of prison for an arson conviction, clueless 20-year old Billy Bonney finds himself drifting through the seedy and unsavory world of cut-rate moviemaking, even more out of place amongst his peers than he felt as a teen six years earlier when he got busted. Following his brother to the sets of grade B and exploitation 1970s Hollywood seems like a path of least resistance, until he accidentally lands a job as a handler to a has-been actor. But the bright lights burn harsher and show more than he anticipated as he steps lucklessly into a gangster-driven plot to burn down a studio for the insurance money, and finds himself in over his head.
Beneath the Trees, Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath [Hoopla eComic] 2024
Live, laugh, shed blood. Dexter meets Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town in this twisted debut graphic novel! Don’t. Murder. The locals. This is small-town serial killer, upstanding citizen, and adorable brown bear Samantha Strong’s cardinal rule. After all, there’s a sea of perfectly ripe potential victims in the big city just beyond the forest, and when you’ve worked as hard as Sam to build a cozy life and a thriving business in a community surrounded by friendly fellow animal folk, warm decor, and the aroma of cedar trees and freshly baked apple pie…the last thing you want is to disturb the peace. So you can imagine her indignation when one of Woodbrook’s own meets a grisly, mysterious demise-and you wouldn’t blame her for doing anything it takes to hunt down her rival before the town self-destructs and Sheriff Patterson starts (literally) barking up the wrong tree. Cute critters aren’t immune to crime in this original graphic novel debut by writer-artist Patrick Horvath.
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls 2024
Tessa Hulls delves into her own family history and the intergenerational trauma caused by mental illness and political strife.
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman 2022
Women Holding Things explores the significance of the objects we carry–in our hands, hearts, and minds–and speaks to, and for, all of us. Maira Kalman‘s unique work is a celebration of life, of the act and the art of living, offering an original way of examining and understanding all that is important in our world–and ultimately within ourselves. [Librarian’s Note: Not classified and shelved with Graphic Novels, this work is technically a nonfiction book with illustrations, but if you know Maira Kalman’s art, you know how much of the writing is conveyed by her colorful, quirky and always affectionately-rendered illustrations. Highly recommended if you like graphic novels.]
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug 2018
A revelatory, visually stunning graphic memoir by award-winning artist Nora Krug, telling the story of her attempt to confront the hidden truths of her family’s wartime past in Nazi Germany and to comprehend the forces that have shaped her life, her generation, and history. [Librarian’s Note: This is one of the most visually beautiful graphic novels I’ve ever seen. It is gorgeous, and the ways it compelled me to think about history and how we grapple with our pasts–personally, family, community and country–were quite profound. Highly recommended.]
Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder by Scott Snyder; art by Tula Lotay; color by Dee Cunniffe 2024
It’s 1927–the late days of the barnstorming era, when pilots competed with each other by performing deadlier and more wondrous feats. Injured pilot Hawk E. Baron is back from the frontlines of the war. Still a young man, he’s an adventurer who lives his life traveling from town to town in his plane entertaining folks–most of whom have never seen a car, let alone a plane. His world changes when he meets Tillie, a young woman who shares his passion for aviation and adventure. They become a traveling act, delighting folks with their antics. Tillie even becomes Hawk’s wing-walker, climbing out on the wing of the plane mid-flight to perform death-defying acrobatics. When they learn they are suspected of a horrific crime, their journey becomes an even deadlier race against time.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and Fred Bernard; art by Benjamin Flao [Hoopla eComic] 2024
Are trees social beings? For forester Peter Wohlleben, the answer has always been yes, the forest is a social network. Trees live like human families: tree parents live together with their children, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick and struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers.
Recommended Classics and All-Time Greats
Laika by Nick Abadzis 2007
This is the journey of Laika, the abandoned puppy destined to become Earth’s first space traveler. With the blending of fact and fiction, this story intertwines three compelling lives. Along with Laika, there is Korolev, a driven engineer at the top of the Soviet space program and Yelena, the lab technician responsible for Laika’s health and life. [Librarian’s Note: This one is technically for middle school-age readers, but it is one of my very favorite graphic novels. Poignant, emotionally compelling, gorgeous, and a nice fact/fiction blended treatment of the experiences lived by Soviet scientists during the high-stakes Cold War space race. Highly recommended for adults.]
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It’s a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison’s father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family’s Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter’s complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned “fun home,” as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.
The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner 2006 edition
A Contract with God, originally published in 1978, was the first graphic novel: the prototype’along with Life Force and Dropsie Avenue’or such seminal works as Maus and Persepolis. Set during the Great Depression, this literary trilogy, assembled in one volume for the first time, presents a treasure house of now near-mythic stories that fictionally illustrate the bittersweet tenement life of Eisner’s youth. With nearly two dozen new illustrations and a revealing new foreword, this book ultimately tells the epic story of life, death, and resurrection while exploring man’s fractious relationship with an all-too-vengeful God. This mesmerizing, fictional chronicle of the universal American immigrant experience is Eisner’s most poignant and enduring legacy.
Love and Rockets Series by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez [Hoopla eComics]
Love and Rockets is a long-running (43 years and counting) series written and drawn by two brothers, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. Each Hernandez brother has his own separate narrative: Jaime’s Locas stories about a group of friends in the southern California punk scene, and Gilbert’s Palomar tales, focused on the colorful, eccentric residents of a small village in Central America.
Reading Love and Rockets is less like starting an epic novel and more like checking in with old friends. Jumping into the series for the first time is like joining a new community – you might get a brief introduction to the various characters, but it’s on the reader to figure out who is who and what is going on. [Librarian’s Note: After reading an article in a free weekly about “Los Bros Hernandez” during my college years–around 1987–I went into a comic book store for the first time and bought whichever issue was on the stand. I was hooked, immediately, and started collecting, hunting down earlier issues and waiting for the latest to come out. I never expected to be into comic books, since Archie and Jughead, Batman and Superman, Spiderman and the X-Men–those were what I new comics to be and they left me pretty disinterested. Love and Rockets–the storytelling, the art, and probably the So Cal-local origins of the artists–was how I came to a deep and abiding interest in graphic novels as an adult! Highly recommended.]
(Source: Powers, Jefferson. (Posted on November 7. 2024) This is Why You Should Read Love and Rockets. 1986Comics.com https://1986comics.com/)
American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar: Stories by Harvey Pekar; art by Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Val Mayerik, and Gerry Shamray 2003
Cleveland native Harvey Pekar is a true American original. A V.A. hospital file clerk and comic book writer, Harvey chronicles the ordinary and mundane in stories both funny and touching. His dead-on eye for the frustrations and minutiae of the workaday world mix in a delicate balance with his insight into personal relationships. Pekar has been compared to Dreiser, Dostoevsky, and Lenny Bruce. But he is truly more than all of them–he is himself.
The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi 2007
Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi’s bestselling, internationally acclaimed memoir-in-comic-strips. Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming – both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland.
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman 1986
The author-illustrator traces his father’s imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel.
Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan; art by Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan Jr. [Complete Series available as Hoopla eComics] 2003
When a plague of unknown origin instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome, unemployed and unmotivated slacker Yorick Brown suddenly discovers that he is the only male left in a world inhabited solely by women. Accompanied by his mischievous monkey and the mysterious Agent 355, Yorick embarks on a transcontinental journey to find his girlfriend and discover why he is the last man on Earth. But with a gang of feminist extremists and the leader of the Israel Defense Forces hunting him, Yorick’s future, as well as that of the human race, may be short-lived.