Books and beyond

Comic-Con International, a four-day showcase of comic arts, artists, and products begins today in San Diego. In its 41-year history, Comic-Con has grown into one of the world’s largest celebrations of all things pop culture, including sci-fi, fantasy, film, television, video games, and animation. Comics and graphic novels, however, are still at the heart of Comic-Con.

If you haven’t picked up a comic book in decades, or if you doubt a compelling, grown-up story can be told in pictures, we invite you to sample the following titles.

 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is author Alison Bechdel’s memoir of growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the 60s and 70s, and her troubled relationship with her father, a closeted gay man who ran the local funeral home.

Y: The Last Man is a suspense-driven adventure series about a mysterious plague that instantly kills everyone with a Y chromosome except Yorick Brown, a young magician, and his pet monkey, Ampersand. Start with Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned.

Blankets by Craig Thompson is a touching coming-of-age memoir of the author’s rigid fundamentalist Christian upbringing and his relationship with Raina, a girl he falls in love with against the backdrop of a Michigan winter.

Maus is Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part biography of his father, Vladek, a Polish Holocaust survivor, in which Jews are depicted as mice and Germans as cats. Start with Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History.