Best Books 2020: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

Come Home, Indio: A Memoir

Jim Terry (Street Noise)

Terry’s unflinching memoir navigates coming of age between two worlds as he passes between divorced dysfunctional households, from his stern Irish-American father to his troubled Native American mother and their extended family on the reservation. As Terry deals with his own addictions as an adult, the graphic work evolves into a stunning portrait of healing through art, self-discovery, and spirituality.

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I Know You Rider: A Memoir

Leslie Stein (Drawn & Quarterly)

Stein’s meditative, ephemerally painted diary comics reach a profound new level in her latest memoir, which focuses on her abortion, its context, and her recovery and accompanying grief and relief. She illuminates both the vulnerability and self-determination inherent in this often hidden experience, with a frank observational gaze that brings the reader intimately along.

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Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio

Derf Backderf (Abrams ComicArts)

Fifty years following the tragedy at Kent State, Backderf brings to bear extensive research and his trademark comics reportage for this nuanced portrait of the last days of the student victims—amid Nixon-driven paranoia and surveillance on campuses across the nation. This distressing account of a dark moment in the nation’s history has a powerful resonance today.

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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)

Once a “boy wonder,” Tomine approaches middle age recalling a career in comics through anecdotes of his most mortifying memories and sustained grudges, foibles that reveal the casual racism and constant status-jockeying of the indie comics scene. It’s acutely, almost painfully funny—proving even a literary comics genius can still deliver great laughs—elevated by a moving, philosophical close.

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Paying the Land

Joe Sacco (Metropolitan)

Culture, commerce, and climate change clash in Northern Canada, where Sacco immerses with the Dene, a First Nations people, as fracking threatens the land and their way of life—but promises jobs. Sacco, as a master war reporter in comics journalism, delivers a striking portrait of a different kind of conflict zone.

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