This little book provides a guide to recent graphic novels that are (supposedly) still in print. They are listed alphabetically by the author’s name. There are all different types here, Love and Rockets, Spiderman, The Jungle Book, Swamp Thing, Batman, Charlie Brown, Maus, Sandman, Calvin & Hobbes, and The Simpsons, among others. Many less obvious novels are also listed. For each of the novels listed, Weiner has a short paragraph summarizing the plot and commenting on the artwork. Many of the entries have a black and white picture of the book cover, and all of them have the date, price, publisher, and ISBN of the book. It would have been helpful to include the number of pages too. There’s a short introduction with a sketch of the history of graphic novels, and there are two sections at the end on “Novels Featuring Comic Book Characters” and “Further Reading.”

The 101 Best Graphic Novels is a pretty helpful guide for people who need to start somewhere, and it probably has useful information for people who already know a lot about graphic novels. But basically this reads like a catalog — Weiner is no Leonard Maltin! Hopefully this book will come out in new editions every few years, to keep up to date with new publications and to drop those books that have gone out of print. Browsing through Amazon.com, it looks like quite a few of the novels listed have in fact already gone out of print, or at least will be hard to find.

Categories: Fiction, General