Best Graphic Novels of All Time

From Hell is the greatest graphic novel ever written, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell producing a work of such obsessive research and formal ambition that it transcends genre and stands as a landmark of literature, not just comics.

Bone by Jeff Smith is one of the most beloved graphic novels ever created, a fantasy epic that begins as a comedy and earns genuine emotional depth, accessible to readers of all ages and endlessly rewarding on reread.

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes is one of the most celebrated graphic novels in the alternative comics canon, a pitch-perfect portrait of teenage alienation that established Clowes as one of the essential voices in the medium.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller is one of the most important graphic novels ever published, the 1986 work that redefined what superhero comics could be and established the grim, psychologically complex template that defined the decade that followed.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman is the only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, a memoir of his father's survival of the Holocaust rendered through the metaphor of mice and cats that remains one of the most powerful works in any medium.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is the most formally sophisticated superhero graphic novel ever published, a deconstruction of the genre that uses every tool of the medium in service of its themes about power, paranoia, and moral compromise.