Comic Books for Grown-Ups: 10 Masterpieces of Graphic Nonfiction

Seeing the world in six-panel strips, or what Allen Ginsberg has to do with the wonders of zygotes.

Who doesn’t love comic books? While infographics may be trendy today (and photography perennially sexy), there’s just something special about the work of the human hand. Good old-fashioned manual labor, literally, brings a unique richness to storytelling where words alone sometimes fall flat. We’ve put together a list of some of our favorite graphic non-fiction, excluding Maus-style memoirs — perhaps another time — since narrowing down to ten picks was tough enough. These hybrid works combine the best elements of art, journalism, and scholarship to command our attention and gratify our curiosity.

THE BEATS

We’ve long loved authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, so we were thrilled to discover The Beats: A Graphic History, an anthology that mashes up biography, criticism, and literary readings from the seminal creative movement. Comic art legend Harvey Pekar presides over the enterprise with a boldness befitting the Beatniks’ sensibility, along with graphic geniuses Peter Kuper (of Mad magazine fame), Ed Piskor, and other big names in the medium.

The Beats invokes the immediacy of 1940s and 50s art, music, and writing; even better, it provides political context and introduced us to an entire panoply of artists whose contributions to the era are lesser known. From painting sessions in Jay DeFeo’s flat to strains of mental illness throughout the movement, The Beats is an invaluable addition to our picture of a charged moment in creative history.

EDIBLE SECRETS

How do you make 500,000 declassified documents yield up their stories? Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified U.S. History pulls it off with a combination of stellar journalism and informative, witty illustration. Scholar Mia Partlow, graphic designer Michael Hoerger, and illustrator Nate Powell collaborated to create what started out as a serialized zine on the relationship between food and politics in America, and the highly confidential government coverups of these strange bedfellows’ intersection.

Upton Sinclair-style muckraking for our modern era, Edible Secrets covers the CIA’s milkshake assassination plot of Fidel Castro, popcorn mind-control schemes, and how a box of Jello led to two death sentences during the 1950s Communist red scare. Like a graphic interpretation of Wikileaks, the slim but delectable volume investigates the down-and-dirty ways in which the U.S. government altered history using the most common of comestibles.

Whether you’re an activist, foodie, or history buff, Edible Secrets is a fascinating and fun creation about acts of agriculture — something each one of us, consciously or not, commits every day.

A.D.: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE

Cartoonist Josh Neufeld accomplishes the nearly impossible in his award-winning A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, namely, taking a subject as tragic and media-saturated as 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and making a page-turner out of its retelling and aftermath. Neufeld shows the story through five (real-life) New Orleans residents to whom we became completely attached, which is precisely the point. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge demonstrates what the comic medium does best — namely, completely immerse the reader-viewer in another world by engaging multiple cognitive functions — and offers a fascinating parallel to last week’s Hurricane Story.

Through the parallax narratives of Neufeld’s five characters, we came away with a fittingly complex perspective of the human experience of this news story.

THE 14TH DALAI LAMA

The history of modern Tibet gets told via one man’s life in The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography. Llhamo Döndrub was the two-year-old child of a peasant family in northeast Tibet when he was named the new spiritual leader of a people; traditional Japanese manga style and first-person perspective bring intimacy to the sweeping story that unfolds from that watershed moment. It’s easy to see why the Dalai Lama authorized this life story, an imminently human treatment of large-scale historical narrative. We live vicariously through Tibet’s takeover by communist China under Mao Zedong, and the Dalai Lama’s decision to live exiled in India in an effort to save his people’s culture.

The 14th Dalai Lama is a quick read that still does justice to its spiritual subject matter.

THE STUFF OF LIFE

If only all biology textbooks were as cool as The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA. The great news is that it’s never too late for continuing education, and The Stuff of Life‘s pictorial approach is much more fun — and conceptually sticky — than we remember science being in school. The book starts with the mind-boggling story of how an inchoate mass of chemical elements formed into life over five billion years ago, and then drills down to the cellular level before getting into applied genetics (even Dolly the Sheep makes an appearance). With the help of friendly black-and-white cartoon panels, A,T,C, and G molecules cohere into a narrative beyond alphabet soup and the double helix, and we’re proud to be able to explain the difference between phenotypes and polypeptides again.

SMARTERCOMICS BUSINESS BOOKS

A new series of books by SmarterComics is harnessing the human tendency toward what’s known as the pictorial superiority effect, and adapting popular business and strategy books by iconic thought-leaders into visually-driven narratives. Among the series so far: Wired editor Chris Anderson‘s The Long Tail, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and the Sun Tzu classic The Art of War. Great graphics illustrate Anderson’s argument around the death of “common culture,” Hill’s endorsement of the practical power of positive thinking, and entrepreneur Robert Renteria‘s rise from gang violence to civic leadership.

Read our full review of the SmarterComics series here.

THE INFLUENCING MACHINE

One of the coolest and most charming book releases of this year, The Influencing Machine is a graphic novel about the media, its history, and its many maladies — think The Information meets The Medium is the Massage meets Everything Explained Through Flowcharts.

Written by Brooke Gladstone, longtime host of NPR’s excellent On the Media, and illustrated by cartoonist Josh Neufeld (yup, he of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge fame), The Influencing Machine takes a refreshingly alternative approach to the age-old issue of why we disparage and distrust the news. And as the book quickly makes clear, it has always been thus.

Read our recent full review here.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Melding a graphic novel, photo essay, and travelogue, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders tells the story of photographer Didier Lefèvre’s 1986 journey through Afghanistan with the international non-profit organization Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Lefèvre documented the group’s harrowing covert tour from Pakistan into a nation gripped by violence in the aftermath of the 1979 Soviet invasion. While a few of his 4,000-plus images were published upon his return to France, years passed before Lefèvre was approached by his friend, graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert, about collaborating on a book that would finally tell his remarkable story. The resulting effort, assembled by graphic designer Frédéric Lemercier, is a seamless tour de force of reportage.

Read our full review here.

BURMA CHRONICLES

The lovely Burma Chronicles is another fortuitous creative byproduct of Doctors Without Borders. Comic book artist Guy Delisle travels around the world with his wife Nadège, an MSF doctor, tours which previously resulted in two other gorgeous works of graphic nonfiction — Shenzen: A Travelogue from China, and Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Delisle lives the atypical life of an NGO house husband-cum-cartoonist, alternating between inking panels and daily perambulations near Nobel Prize winner’s Aung Sang Suu Kyi‘s home, where the opposition figure was still under house arrest at the time he was in the country.

What makes Burma Chronicles so charming is its balance of quotidian domestic life and international affairs. Delisle’s growing knowledge of the country’s culture plays off the constant development of his infant son, lending the whole work (and the world) refreshing perspective.

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE ILLUSTRATED

If anyone could make grammar fun, it’s Maira Kalman. An update of William Strunk, Jr. & E. B. White‘s definitive reference text on composition and form, The Elements of Style Illustrated marries Kalman’s signature whimsy with the indispensable styleguide to create an instant classic. The original Elements of Style was first published in 1919 in-house at Cornell University for teaching use, and became canon after a 1959 reprint. We’re all for achieving “cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English,” as White — who had studied under Strunk in college — described their collaboration; and the goal is made appropriately joyful in this new edition. In other words, we’d much rather be schooled in the basics of language usage by Kalman’s vibrant work than the old black-and-white Strunk & White.

A must-have for art lovers and the editorially exact alike, essays by White and fellow New Yorker contributor (and his stepson) Roger Angell put The Elements of Style Illustrated into historical context.

* * *

We hope you had as much fun as we did with this short survey of masterworks in a medium that doesn’t often get its due. Graphic nonfiction provides a clever solution to a perpetual problem — how to make audiences care about new or challenging material. These 10 books bring a childlike sense of wonder to their subjects, something that comes in part from the cross-disciplinary collaborations between artists, designers and writers that yielded the work in the first place. And they’re proof that you’re never too old to pick up a comic book.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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Anything You Want: Derek Sivers on the Secrets of Entrepreneurship

Why not to trust futurists, or what the entrepreneurial power of empathy has to do with the art of letting go.

Derek Sivers may be best-known as the founder of CD Baby, commonly considered the first true empowerment platform for independent musicians, but he also happens to be one the smartest, most interesting and most curious people I know. His first book, Anything You Want, is out today and makes the entrepreneurial heart sing with inspiration and insight into the business of following your dreams.

The book is the latest release by The Domino Project, one of 7 platforms changing the future of publishing.

Today, I sit down with Derek to talk about the essentials of entrepreneurship, selflessness, and forming a healthy relationship with the prospect of failure.

You’re extraordinarily good at synthesizing complex insights into digestible, bite-sized nuggets. If you had to do that with your top three learnings from your CD Baby experience, what would those be?

#1 : Delegate, but don’t abdicate.

Founders have a problem delegating, so I learned that one well, and my business took off huge because of it. But then I tried to delegate even more, even delegating major decisions inside the company that completely changed its culture. And that’s when it all went downhill. I had over-delegated. That’s when I learned the word “abdicate” : to give away authority or power. I learned it too late. The damage was irreparable. That’s why I sold the company.

#2 : If it’s not a hit, quit.

Many times before and after CD Baby, I launched projects that I thought were brilliant. But people weren’t into it. I used to persist, to try to push my idea into the world, against all resistance. But now I’ve learned from experience: starting a business is like writing a song. You can’t know which one people will like. If the world isn’t into it, don’t keep pushing it. Change the song or just write another song.

#3 : Know what makes you happy.

Too many people start business by emulating others. Thinking they need to be like the people profiled in magazines, or the last business author they read. But what you want out of life is different than them. If you prefer privacy, or are happier when your company is small, you need to know this and make a plan that accommodates it, instead of pursuing someone else’s path.

What’s the number-one quality one needs to have or choice one needs to make in translating a brilliant idea into successful entrepreneurship?

Be selfless. Do not think of yourself, your needs, your protection, your security. Think only of what would be a dream-come-true for your customers, and find a way to make that happen. Only after you design a perfect business from their perspective, should you adjust the numbers to make sure it’s sustainable. But focus entirely 100% on them, not yourself.

Other thought-leaders have previously spoken about the fear of failure and it — or, more precisely, your seeming resistance to it — seems to be a running undercurrent in much of your work. What’s been the role of failure in your career and what would you say is the key to having a healthy relationship with it as an entrepreneur?

Like the “#2: If it’s not a hit, quit” thing: You need to learn to let go, shrug it off, and try something else. Think of the life of a songwriter. They write 100-500 songs in their life. One is a hit. Who knows why? Some random combination of ingredients or timing makes it really click with people.

It’s the same with anything we do. Even if you had a big dream, pushed for it, and it didn’t happen. Learn to let it go and do something else. There are so many different things worth doing. You’ve got plenty of ideas.

Much has been said about the tectonic shifts in the music business today. Where do you see it all going in 10 years, both as an industry model and a sociocultural paradigm?

Nobody knows the future. Anyone who claims to know the future is full of shit, and not to be trusted.

Seriously. We have this strange obsession with wanting to know the future. But if you can learn to let that go, and admit you don’t know, you can stay focused on the very valuable skill of helping people here-and-now, instead of guessing what might be some day.

I don’t think about the future for one minute. Not at all. I can have some personal intentions, like, “I would like to move to Brazil in a few years.” But guessing what might happen in the world? No need.

Back in the day, you and I became friends largely through the overlap of our reading lists and our shared belief that what we choose to read plays an important role in the life of the mind and the entrepreneurial self. What books have excited you the most over the past year?

The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Irvine

Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin

Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Ed.: Anything You Want is out today and an absolute gem. It’s available in hardcover, mp3 audiobook, CD audiobook, shareable 5-copy and 52-copy mulitpacks, ultra-limited-edition collectible signed by Derek, and, of course, on Kindle.

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The Ascent of Money: A PBS Financial History of the World

Renaissance royalty, Oriental math, and why financial history is the essential backstory behind all history.

Among yesterday’s selection of 5 must-read books by this year’s newly announced TED Global speakers was The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. But the book was actually meant to accompany a 2008 six-part documentary commissioned by Channel 4 — the same folks who gave us What Is Reality?, The End of God?: A Horizon Guide to Science and Religion, How Music Works, What Is Time? — and distributed in the US by PBS.

The program is now available online in a clip of questionable legality that may or may not get pulled down by the copyright watchdogs at any point. But, while it lasts, it’s very much worth a watch — eloquent and digestible, it distills one of the most powerful driving forces of our civilization and its multiplicitous impact on just about every aspect of our lives.

Banks financed the Renaissance, while the bond market decided wars. Stock markets built empires and monetary meltdowns made revolutions. From ancient Mesopotamia right down to present-day London, the ascent of money has been an indispensable part of the ascent of man. But money’s rise has never been a smooth upward ride. As we’ll see, financial history has repeatedly been interrupted by gut-wrenching crises, of which today’s is just the latest.” ~ Niall Ferguson

(The sixth and final episode was uploaded as a separate video due to YouTube’s length restrictions.)

For an excellent companion to and enhancement of the documentary, you won’t go wrong with the book.

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Little Bets: A New Theory of Creativity and Innovation

What Chris Rock has to do with Steve Jobs, Stanford and the secret of cross-disciplinary creativity.

Innovation theory is great, but the dangerous disconnect there is that no matter how compelling the ideas, theses and arguments, we often fail to make the leap between how this theory both applies to our everyday real-life experience and is a reflection of the everyday experience of real-life innovators. This disconnect is exactly what Peter Sims’ addresses in his excellent new book, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries — a fascinating, eloquent and rigorously rooted in reality exploration of the creative process in innovaton. At its heart lies the concept of the “little bet” — a small, low-risk action taken to discover, develop and test an idea, a potent antidote to some of innovation and creativity’s greatest obstacles: perfectionism, risk-aversion, endless rumination.

The seed of this book was planted while I was attending Stanford Business School. One of the most common things I would hear people say was that they would do something new — take an unconventional career path or start a company — but that they needed a great idea first. I had worked before then as a venture capital investor, and in that work, I had learned that most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas — they discover them.” ~ Peter Sims

From how Chris Rock crafts new comedy routines with small audiences to hone his delivery to how Amazon’s Jeff Bezos extracts insights about opportunities from smaller markets, Sims enlists an incredible range of creative, strategic and business innovators to illustrate how “little bets” work — architect Frank Gehry, Twitter founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, musician John Legend, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, companies like Pixar, Google, General Motors and many, many more — swiftly swaying from psychology to business strategy to neuroscience to theory of mind and just about everything in between.

Lucky people increase their odds of chance encounters or experiences by interacting with a large number of people.

And since we’ve already established how much I love book trailers, it’s worth noting Little Bets gets bonus points for this one:

More than anything, Little Bets is a living testament — the opposite of a fluff-lined “manifesto” — to the power of life experience in innovation, of insights and principles and creative codes developed through years of being intellectually and creatively active, curious, and awake in the world, rather than staring at the PowerPoint slide on the screen of an MBA lecture hall. And what makes the “little bets” approach most noteworthy is that it applies to anything from artistic endeavors to policy to social entrepreneurship to real-time media and beyond.

One of the things that constantly surprised me was how many similar approaches and methods spanned across the vastly different fields. Story developers at Pixar, Army General H.R. McMaster, a counterinsurgency expert, and Frank Gehry use the same basic methods and of course make lots of little bets. They even use similar language and vocabulary – like “using constraints’ or ‘reframing problems’– but they all learned their approaches through their experiences, not in school. General McMaster may have said it best when he said that the parallels between these very different experts were ‘eerie.'” ~ Peter Sims

Part Spark, part Making Ideas Happen, part something else entirely, Little Bets is one of the most compelling journeys into the roots of creativity to come by in a long time. Amazon has a fantastic, revealing Q&A with Sims that will give you a taste of this gourmet meal from the kitchen of true innovation.

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