Talbot's storytelling, as well as his draughtsmanship, has grown steadily more assured and subtle... For over a century children have loved getting a Rupert or Beano annual as part of the season's largesse. This year a lot of grown-ups should feel similar delight when Grandville Mon Amour turns up under the tree.

I've never made a secret of my belief that Bryan Talbot is a genius – if you don't know his brilliant graphic history book, Alice in Sunderland, you should buy it immediately – so I was always going to like Grandville Mon Amour. Even so, my passion for it took me by surprise: I can safely say that this is, by several miles, my favourite graphic novel of the last 12 months.

It’s a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) look at the complexity and dysfunctionality of family through a unique lens – and frames things in such a way that you can’t help but re-examine your own relationships, too.

Are You My Mother? is a work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.

As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual.

One of the chief pleasures of this book is how the words and pictures collaborate to gesture at a territory that neither might reach alone.

Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this, sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it - and you must!

Pure bliss.

Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.

A complex, fascinating and intellectually rich memoir.

Very original and arresting.

Throughout, there are magnificent feats of connectivity, startlingly complex internal monologues that unfold with perfect simplicity… I haven’t encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time.

Lively, fresh and expressive…humane, complex and beautiful.

Don’t let the cartoons fool you, this is an exciting and intelligent book and, at many points, highly moving. It doesn’t just tell Alison’s story, Are You My Mother? allows to you to think about your own.

Find everything this author has written. Every jot she makes on the paper enriches the baroque, painful, exhilarating story she has to tell.

It’s first and foremost funny, using graphical and verbal tricks to express the psychological dramas of an American household.

[Sacco’s] ability to cram in detail is extraordinary. And it is the details that linger.

When stretched to its 24ft length in the Saga Magazine office, we pored over it for ages. We predict you will want to do the same.

About Joe Sacco’s The Great War, one can write only essays or short, ecstatic sentences... A beautiful accordion-book, it unfolds on the Western Front, with all its monotony and misery: simple, but intricate; wordless, but vocal; brutal, but beautiful. A masterpiece of quietly affecting numbers, the thousands of lines, dots, and crosses that demarcate the thousands of lives, deaths, and crises.

The detail in this work is phenomenal, capturing the aloof generals, death in the trenches, and the wounded... [Sacco] makes visceral one of the bloodiest days in history.

Wordless and brilliant.

Sometimes words and photographs are not enough… [An] astounding book.

A unique and unforgettable experience.

A meticulous visual depiction.