From Joe Sacco's stark images of the Somme to overheard mobile phone chat and travels with grandma, it's been a vintage year for comics and graphic novels...
Another bumper year for graphic novels, which leaves me with only one problem: where to begin? Well, let's see. My comic book of the year, by a mile, is Rutu Modan's The Property (Cape), in which Mica Segal, a young Israeli woman, travels to Warsaw with her irascible grandmother to help her reclaim the apartment building she and her family were forced to give up in 1940. What happens next is… complicated. This, believe me, has everything you could possibly want in a comic: great pictures, a multilayered story, mystery, sharp wit. For the perfect Christmas package you could parcel it up with Modan's earlier graphic novel, Exit Wounds (set in Israel), or with Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Guy Delisle's superb book of reportage from that city.
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A classic of a different kind – by which I mean that I am declaring it to be a classic right here and now – is Co-Mix, a "retrospective" of comics, graphics and "scraps" by Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Maus (Drawn & Quarterly). Among the collectors' items gathered within are full-page reproductions of covers for Robert Crumb's Short Order Comix; a full-size insert of the long out of print Raw comic Two-Fisted Painters; and Spiegelman's peerlessly brilliant New Yorker strips about Maurice Sendak and – my favourite – Charles Schulz. The ultimate swank present for any completist Spiegelman fan.
