Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir, by Roz Chast.

Roz Chast and her parents were practitioners of denial: if you don't ever think about death, it will never happen. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is the story of an only child watching her parents age well into their nineties and die.

By turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, Chast reminds us how deftly the graphic novel can capture ordinary crises in ordinary American lives, how a mixture of cartoons and photographs and text can create a family portrait with all the intimacy and emotional power of a conventional prose memoir.--New York Times

Kill My Mother: A Graphic Novel, by Jules Feiffer.

Adding to a legendary career that includes a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, Obie Awards, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Cartoonist Society and the Writers Guild of America, Jules Feiffer now presents his first noir graphic novel. Kill My Mother is a loving homage to the pulp-inspired films and comic strips of his youth. Channeling Eisner's The Spirit, along with the likes of Hammett, Chandler, Cain, John Huston, and Billy Wilder, and spiced with the deft humor for which Feiffer is renowned, Kill My Mother centers on five formidable women from two unrelated families, linked fatefully and fatally by a has-been, hard-drinking private detective.

As our story begins, we meet Annie Hannigan, an out-of-control teenager, jitterbugging in the 1930s. Annie dreams of offing her mother, Elsie, whom she blames for abandoning her for a job soon after her husband, a cop, is shot and killed. Now, employed by her husband¿s best friend¿an over-the-hill and perpetually soused private eye¿Elsie finds herself covering up his missteps as she is drawn into a case of a mysterious client, who leads her into a decade-long drama of deception and dual identities sprawling from the Depression era to World War II Hollywood and the jungles of the South Pacific.

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth: A Graphic Novel, by Isabel Greenberg.

This book contains many stories, big and small, about and pertaining to the following things: gods, monsters, mad kings, wise old crones, shamans, medicine men, brothers and sisters, strife, mystery, bad science, worse geography, and True Love.

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is ambitious and impressive enough as a feat of world-building, but it's a good deal more than that. From its gods and ghosts and monsters, a rich and palpably human tale emerges ¿ a sad and unshowily beautiful love story that lands with an emotional impact you likely won't see coming.--NPR