Review | Five of this year’s best graphic novels make perfect summer reads (2024)

‘I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,’ by Maurice Vellekoop

“I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together” — the title nods to the experience of growing up with “Carol Burnett Show”-era television while being enchanted with Barbie dolls and Disney fairy tales — unfolds mostly chronologically, from innocent, often joyous boyhood to the rocky journey of adult self-discovery.

Over the course of the book, Vellekoop comes out to his strict Calvinist immigrant parents, leading to a long estrangement from his intolerant mother, with whom he had once taken buoyant shopping trips. Their fraught relationship provides one arc of ongoing painful poignancy.

As in Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” the role of art-making is also deftly threaded through the narrative, sometimes providing personal enrichment, sometimes serving as a means of escape. Once Vellekoop heads off to art school, film and live performance especially serve not only as social glue but also as mirrors for meaning. Meanwhile, his romantic life unfolds in fits and starts — partly during the rise of AIDS — as he works out his complicated relationship with his desires.

‘Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice,’ by Eddie Ahn

As he demonstrates in his brisk memoir, “Advocate,” Eddie Ahn, a California environmental justice lawyer, often feels he’s making a difference through his work in the nonprofit sector. His aims, though, can run counter to the notions of “progress” prized by his Korean immigrant parents.

Ahn’s story moves efficiently from the author’s roots in Texas, where his family has a liquor and convenience store, and his early youth work with AmeriCorps to his law school years and his career with environmental nonprofits in the Bay Area. Along the way, we see Ahn endure a medical crisis and a detour into the allure of poker and “easy money,” as well as a job recession and racial prejudice while he occasionally mines his family’s past when grasping for illumination.

‘Aya: Claws Come Out,’ by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, translated from French by Edwige Renée Dro

Nearly two decades ago, Marguerite Abouet launched her superstar character, Aya — whom we met as a lively teenager in the ’70s, and who is now an ambitious college-age intern. Her deliciously soapy world has roots in both the Ivory Coast, where Abouet was born, and in France, where the author lives today.

Abouet created the series’ cast with her artist husband, Clément Oubrerie, who was born in greater Paris. More than a decade since the last book, they return with “Aya: Claws Come Out,” in which the series’ core friendships evolve with playful humor and sly banter intact, now set during the ’80s in the Ivory Coast capital, with an occasional cutaway to France.

‘Fall Through,’ by Nate Powell

This sci-fi story follows a time-traveling punk band called Diamond Mine that is magically tethered to both the ’70s and the ’90s. A break in the space-time continuum occurs whenever the touring group performs its spell-laden tune “Fall Through.” What hath the band’s vocalist wrought? And what can our hero — Jody, the upstart bassist — do to break this increasingly disenchanting loop?

Powell, the National Book Award-winning artist behind John Lewis’s “March” trilogy, embeds this bewitching work with Easter eggs that inspired his story, including nods to such bands as the Sex Pistols, William Martyr 17 and Five-O (the act behind the ’90s recording “Fall Through”), as well as the Eisner Hall of Fame cartoonist Lynd Ward, most famous for his wood-engraved wordless novels.

‘Lies My Teacher Told Me: A Graphic Adaptation,’ by James W. Loewen and Nate Powell

Also worth reading is Powell’s recent graphic adaptation of the sociologist James W. Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbooks Got Wrong.” It conveys, often in stirring chiaroscuro, Loewen’s thesis that U.S. textbooks fail when they become beholden to sanitized hero narratives and sweeping arcs of perpetual American progress. Powell’s visual depth beautifully adds visceral layers to Loewen’s efforts to undercut scholastic elisions: What did at least a dozen oft-used textbooks long leave out about Columbus’s direct effects on the Western Indigenous populations that came under his boot, or about Helen Keller’s radical socialism, or about one American colony of color that predated the Pilgrims? In cleverly dissecting and debunking what was taught for decades, Loewen’s stories collectively serve as an illuminating textbook in their own right.

Michael Cavna is an arts journalist, artist and 2023 recipient of the Ink Bottle Award from the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He has also worked at The Washington Post as television/media editor, theater editor, book reviewer and creator of the Comic Riffs column.