Crash, boom, ker-pow – the familiar sound of comics. No wonder Eng. lit. teachers and book reviewers have traditionally dismissed them with disdain. Now, though, they’re listening up, because graphic novels are proving that it is also possible to tell profound and moving stories through pictures and speech bubbles. You won’t find invincible heroes or bizarre beasts inhabiting the pages, but very real human beings with their very real and enthralling stories.

. Reinhard Kleists Biografie of Johnny Cash, the story of “fifth Beatle” Stuart Sutcliffe („Baby’s in black“by Arne Bellstorf), Jacques Tardis crime thriller Fog Over Tolbiac Bridge, road novels such as Matthias Schultheiss’s „Die Reise mit Bill“ (Travelling with Bill) or Baru’s „Autoroute du soleil“,, spectacular visions of the future like Enki Bilals Alexander Nikopol – all these books express more through images than through words. In Haarmann, authors Peer Meter and Isabel Kreitz have documented the greatest judicial scandal in Germany in the 1920s. And the extent to which our self-perception can deceive us is dissected by Japanese author Jiro Taniguchi in Chichi no Koyomi (The Almanac of My Father) and A Distant Neighbourhood. Plenty of gripping stuff for reading class, then.