Non-Fiction Comics and Graphic Novels (Nonfiction)
Explore the best non-fiction comics and graphic novels! Discover compelling true stories, biographies, history, and more in our curated list of nonfiction graphic books.
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Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.
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The Cartoon History of the Universe
by Larry Gonick
An entertaining and informative illustrated guide that makes world history accessible, appealing, and funny.
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A People's History of American Empire
by Howard Zinn
Adapted from the critically acclaimed chronicle of U.S. history, a study of American expansionism around the world is told from a grassroots perspective and provides an analysis of important events from Wounded Knee to Iraq.
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Students for a Democratic Society
by Harvey Pekar
A history of the group Students for a Democratic Society told in graphic form.
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The Beats
by Harvey Pekar
This revelatory and exhilarating and funny book not only tells us of the Beat generation, but of a time when we as individuals felt truly free. It is as fresh and pertinent as the latest scholarly history only far more entertaining--Studs Terkel.
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The Vietnam War
by Dwight Jon Zimmerman
Depicts the Vietnam War from its expansion in the early 1960s through the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, plus what happened at home, including the antiwar movement, assassinations, Watergate, and more.
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Wobblies!
by Paul Buhle
A vibrant history in graphic art of the Wobblies, published for the centenary of the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World.
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What It Is
by Lynda Barry
"Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+" --Salon How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry's compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry's first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: "The ordinary is extraordinary."
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Safe Area Goražde
by Joe Sacco
A graphic novel based on the author's 1995-96 visits to Gorazde, one of the U.N.-created "safe areas" in Eastern Bosnia, showing the brutality and humanity that coexisted there during the Bosnian War of 1992-95.
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Palestine
by Joe Sacco
A landmark of journalism and the art form of comics. Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, this is a major work of political and historical nonfiction. Prior to Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995―Joe Sacco's breakthrough novel of graphic journalism―the acclaimed author was best known for Palestine, a two-volume graphic novel that won an American Book Award in 1996. Fantagraphics Books is pleased to present the first single-volume collection of this landmark of journalism and the art form of comics. Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism. Like Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine has been favorably compared to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus for its ability to brilliantly navigate such socially and politically sensitive subject matter within the confines of the comic book medium. Sacco has often been called the first comic book journalist, and he is certainly the best. This edition of Palestine also features an introduction from renowned author, critic, and historian Edward Said (Peace and Its Discontents and The Question of Palestine), one of the world's most respected authorities on the Middle Eastern conflict.
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King
by Ho Che Anderson
This groundbreaking body of comics journalism collects for first time Anderson's entire biography of the renowned civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Over a decade in the making, the saga has been praised for its vivid recreation of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history and for its accuracy in depicting the personal and public lives of King, from his birth to his assassination. King probes the life story of one of America's greatest public figures with an unflinchingly critical eye, casting King as an ambitious, dichotomous figure deserving of his place in history but not above moral sacrifice to get there. Anderson's expressionistic visual style is wrought with dramatic energy; panels evoke a painterly attention to detail but juxtapose with one another in such a way as to propel King's story with cinematic momentum. Anderson's successful use of the graphic novel to tell a major work of nonfiction has drawn favorable comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Osamu Tezuka's Adolph. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial; color: #424242}
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Kafka
by David Zane Mairowitz
Mairowitz's text and Crumb's graphic novel-style illustration help the reader understand Kafka's life and thinking and the phrase "Kafkaesque."
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Logicomix
by Apostolos Doxiadis
Recounts, in graphic novel format, the life of Bertrand Russell, mathematician and philospher, and his life-long struggle to achieve perfect logic and ultimate truth.
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A Dangerous Woman
by Sharon Rudahl
Throughout her richly storied life, Emma Goldman always took the side of the oppressed against capitalism and militarism and was always at the forefront of struggles of the powerless against society's strongest."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Stuff of Life
by Mark Schultz
Learn about the fundamentals of human DNA and evolution in clear, simple language.
