Welcome to Pratt's Guide to Comics, Graphic Novels and Manga!
Detail from "The Return of Ray D," Love and Rockets #20 (1987).
The comics medium offers a unique form of communication where word and image combine to follow the exploits of characters through space and time...Its ostensibly "innocent" form allows for the dissemination and articulation of difficult ideas in an accessible manner, providing a platform for political and social commentary as well as a vehicle for escapism, introspection and deviance.
— Emma Mahoney, Introduction to Cult Fiction: Art and Comics
In this guide you will find resources related to comics and graphic novels available in the Pratt library collection. For those interested in reading more comics, the collection's materials are divided into pages that outline a rough chronology of the medium's development in the United States. The "History, Theory and Criticism" page collects scholarly research about narrative sequential art. Finally, those interested in creating their own comics should check out the "Resources for Creators" page.
Pratt's collection of Japanese manga is also covered in this guide; go here to begin learning about this unique form of sequential narrative art!
Pratt Comic Club
A place for all comic-loving Pratt students to meet, share their work, play drawing games, learn about self-publishing, and collaborate! Members curate and edit Static Fish, an anthology of student work which has been printing up to three times a year since the 1980s. All Pratt students are encouraged to submit!
Static Fish: Spring 2010Call Number: 741.5 S797 2010:springPublication Date: Spring 2010Spring 2010 anthology of work from Pratt's student comics club.
Static Fish: Fall 2012Call Number: 741.5 S797 2012:fallPublication Date: Fall 2012Fall 2012 anthology of work from Pratt's student comics club.
Essential Reading
Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art form.
The Complete Maus
Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits.
Watchmen
This Hugo Award-winning graphic novel chronicles the fall from grace of a group of super-heroes plagued by all-too-human failings. Along the way, the concept of the super-hero is dissected as the heroes are stalked by an unknown assassin.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
It was not until college that author Alison Bechdel, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her distant and exacting father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Black Hole
Details the sexual and psychedelic misadventures of a group of teenagers, from their initiation into the grisly mysteries of Biology 101 through a summer in which some of their lives seem like science experiments gone awry, where intercourse can leave indelible mutations on the body.
The Complete Persepolis
Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution.
Staff Picks
On a Sunbeam
In two interwoven timelines, a ragtag crew travels to the deepest reaches of space, rebuilding beautiful, broken structures to piece the past together; and two girls meet in boarding school and fall deeply in love, only to learn the pain of loss.
Through the Woods
Discover a terrifying world in the woods in this collection of five hauntingly beautiful graphic stories that includes the online webcomic sensation “His Face All Red,” in print for the first time.
Skim
Presents the whole gamut of tortured teen life -- friends, love, depression, suicide, and cliques --through the eyes of Skim, a.k.a. Kimberly Keiko Cameron, a would-be Wiccan goth at a girls' academy in Toronto during the 1990s.
Hard Boiled
Carl Seltz is a suburban insurance investigator, a loving husband, and devoted father. Nixon is a berserk, homicidal tax collector racking up mind-boggling body counts in a diseased urban slaughterhouse. Unit Four is the ultimate robot killing machine and the last hope of the future's enslaved mechanical servants. They're all the same psychotic entity.
Cyclopedia Exotica
In Cyclopedia Exotica, doctor's office waiting rooms, commercials, dog parks, and dating app screenshots capture the experiences and interior lives of the cyclops community; a largely immigrant population displaying physical differences from the majority.
Asterios Polyp
Asterios Polyp is an award-winning architect who's never built an actual building, and a pedant in the midst of a spiritual crisis. After the structure of his own life falls apart, he runs away to try to rebuild it into something new.
Blacklung
A bookish sixteenth century teacher is abducted into the crew of a pirates to serve as a scribe for the captain, a man who has made it his mission to commit as many acts of evil as possible in order to ensure that he meet his dead wife in hell. A strange, violent nightmare of a book.
Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth
This first book from Chicago author Chris Ware is a pleasantly-decorated view at a lonely and emotionally-impaired "everyman" who is provided, at age 36, the opportunity to meet his father for the first time.
