I Read Comic Books discussion

This month we're reading comics about real life stories - from silly slice of life to deep histories, and everything in between!

Pick a comic that is a memoir, autobiography, or biography and tell us all about it, share recommendations, etc. in the thread below!

For this month's theme, I will be reading Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. I just finished Sunshine: A Graphic Novel for the challenge and really resonated with Krosoczka's way of storytelling, so I'm looking forward to this read (minus the tears I will 100% be shedding throughout).

Good call @jessica! I really enjoyed reading sunshine for the challenge as well.

I’m going to wait a few days to pick for sure, bc I find that people here have some great ideas. In the meantime, a couple others on my possible list are Genderqueer, George Takei’s book, and Family Style by local (to me) creator Thien Pham as all those books have been on my to-read list for some time.

Maus would also be a great choice for this month, if anyone still hasn’t read it.

Strongly recommending :


As for me, i think i'll finally read They Called Us Enemy that is sitting on my coffee table for way way too long.

I’m planning to read Jordan Mechner’s “Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family”. I had completely forgotten I’d put it on hold at my library and it came in last week so the timing is fortuitous.

Paul wrote: "I’m planning to read Jordan Mechner’s “Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family”. I had completely forgotten I’d put it on hold at my library and it came in last week so the timing is ..."

Oh, that was a pretty good one too!!

I picked Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. I don't normally like auto-biography, and I didn't really get into Beaton's earlier published comics. But this was quite interesting. It isn't just about her, but also about what it is like for anyone to work in the Alberta tar sands. It is a bunch of people, mostly men, working far from their homes, often living in dorms, and doing dull, dangerous work. People behave differently under such circumstances.

I’m reading Shackleton — Antarctic Odyssey by Nick Bertozzi. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Also recommend March by John Lewis. I’m mid-Volume 2.
And Crude: A Memoir by Pablo Fajardo and Sophie Tardy Joubert. Beautifully illustrated!

I read The Complete Maus at the start of the year and gave it 5 stars, as per my review. I've got the March trilogy but not sure I'll have time to read this for a couple of weeks.

I ended going with Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction, and I'm really glad I did. I enjoyed this one at least as much as Sunshine. It's a very different tale, but with similar art & storytelling. This one covers a much longer period of time, which shifts the pacing, yet the pacing works well in both books.

I've read many that are mentioned already, so here are a few other options:

Stiches: A Memoir by David Small- an artist recalls his childhood in a dysfunctional family and how it shaped him.

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasent by Roz Chast- an adult daughter struggles with caring with her difficult and elderly parents in their last years.

Fatty Legs by Christy Jordan-Fenton, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton & Liz Amini-Holmes- an Inuit girl from Canada copes with the horrors of residential school.

Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story by Sarah Myer- a Korean-American girl struggles with racism and questions about their sexuality.