Etelka Lehoczky

In recent years, several graphic novel biographies of fine artists have come out — some more successful than others. One rule is clear: Don't reproduce an artist's paintings if you can avoid it.

By celebrating those who applied the substance as a drug, Walter A. Brown aims to raise awareness — and to demolish what remains of the myth that scientific progress is driven by rigorous dispassion.

In Matt Groom's trippy comic, a warrior in a fantasy kingdom discovers she's not a real person — instead, she's an NPC, a non-player character in a video game. But unlike most NPCs, she's self-aware.

As part of our summerlong tribute to funny books, we take a look back at the ennui-drenched anti-humor of some of the 1990s, when absurdity and surrealism were the rule — laughs not so much.

Molly Mendoza's loopy new graphic novel isn't quite a young adult book, or a book for grownups, either. But it is a trippy visual experience, and Mendoza's art is gorgeous even when the story is thin.

Despite what you may have heard, dead-tree publishing isn't dead. In fact, a host of new print magazines are bringing some wild, weird, innovative words and pictures to the alternative comics scene.

Through his graphic memoir, the Star Trek actor-turned-author shows that while it may be too late to undo the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans, it's not too late to learn from it.

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's epic, gorgeous tale of a young woman with a monster inside her has won countless awards and been heaped with praise — but does it truly break new ground?

There's little to surprise in this story, especially if you know a bit about the subject's life and his ideas. But author Jim Ottaviani finds a nice balance between the personal and the theoretical.

Some might say these little works only acquire their auras through their creators' fame. But once you start pondering them, they start to seem like far more than mere artifacts of notable psyches.

Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore's new graphic novel is a comic-horror take on the very real problem of gentrification that follows two young artists moving to a struggling Chicago neighborhood.

Marcelo D'Salete's powerful graphic novel chronicles the mocambos, communities of runaway slaves that flourished in the jungles of 17th century Brazil, and all the lives they touched, slave and free.

Even in our current climate, it's sobering to consider how the profession of architecture treated modernist pioneer Eileen Gray. This graphic history is a thought-provoking, if incomplete, reflection.

Nina Bunjevac's harrowing new graphic novel takes off from Greek mythology to tell a story about sexual violence, obsession, and all the things people can't admit that they want, even to themselves.

Two new books — a reissue of 1971's Yellow Yellow and a compilation of Stamaty's MacDoodle Street newspaper strips — highlight the artist's joyful ability to imagine the world the way kids do.

Full of playful experiments with composition, and seemingly endless variations on common themes, Andy Warner and Sofie Louise Dam treat self-made "utopias" with unflappable cheer.

Inés Estrada's new graphic novel is set in a version of 2054 that feels oddly close to today; it's the kind of sci-fi that doesn't imagine the future so much as remind you how strange the present is.

Even as NPR editor Malaka Gharib makes light of herself in her high-spirited graphical memoir, her wisdom about the power and limits of racial identity is evident in the way she draws.

Artist Scott Hampton has a big job in this second volume of an ambitions, three-book adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods: Depict Gaiman's deadly serious characters without making them quaint.

Cartoonist Peter Bagge takes on the life of another independent woman in Credo, his biography of pioneering libertarian Rose Wilder Lane (also known for being the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder).