I grew up in a terribly small town on the other side of the world but ours was a home filled with books to the brim. After reading the Great Gatsby, I started seeking out New York in both books and the popular culture I consumed.
First with novels—from Nella Larsen to Jack Kerouac to Sylvia Plath to Colson Whitehead. Then, once I encountered Alison Bechdel’s inimitable Fun Home, in the form of comics. When I finally made it to New York in person, I was already consumed by a love affair with the city that I had made up in my head before I ever stepped into it.
Over the years, as I pursued a doctorate in English, I found myself increasingly drawn to the medium of comics. That’s how my debut book This Beautiful, Ridiculous City—a graphic memoir that explores the promises and pitfalls of New York from an immigrant perspective—came to be. It is also a book about how literature led me to the New World.
Here are 8 comics set in New York City that I have read, reread, and loved:
Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story by Julia Wertz
As a graphic memoir about alcoholism and sobriety while slowly being priced out of New York, Impossible People is both effervescently humorous and profoundly sad. There’s something stirring yet wistful about Wertz’s observations about the indignities of life as a human and a cartoonist. One of the brightest spots in this book is her painstakingly detailed cityscapes—spanning bodegas, storefronts, windows units, and street signs in deep inks, a style that also appears prominently in her 2017 book Tenements, Towers and Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City.
Seek You: A Journey through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke
Seek You isn’t a New York story so much as a story that occurs in New York some of the time, as Radtke moves from her midwestern town to the city in her twenties. One of the finest examples of how research and storytelling can be combined in the comics medium, it deep dives into loneliness and its causes and manifestations, through elegantly explained scientific experiments, personal narratives, and stories of loneliness as it pertains to those around her. We learn about the part of the brain that responds to isolation, how social rejection feels akin to physical pain inside our brain, how the society we live in is not designed to foster community, and how technology figures into all of this, among other fascinating topics, all revolving around the concept of loneliness and human need for connection. An essential read.
A Contract with God by Will Eisner
Published in 1978 and one of the first book length comics to experiment with serious subject matters in this medium, it is often cited as the first graphic novel, although there were a few others before it. Yet its influence on the comics scene from the 20th century to the present day is incomparable. Eisner is also the artist who popularized the term “graphic novel,” although it was coined elsewhere a few years before this book was published. Drawn in sharp black ink, A Contract with God comprises impeccably expressive imagery spanning four short, interwoven stories. It is based in a tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx “that was built around 1920 when the decaying apartment houses in lower Manhattan could no longer accommodate the flood of immigrants that poured into New York after World War I.” It looks at a cast of characters—laborers, clerks, low paid city employees—from his own memories. These, he writes at the beginning, are true stories that he converted into fiction. The first story looks at Frimme Hersh, who lost his daughter to sudden illness, the second is about a has-been opera singer who tries to revive her glory days by coaching a hapless street singer during the Depression era, the third is about the super, Mr Scuggs, and the fourth and the final one is about the tenants of Dropsie Avenue vacationing in the Catskills.
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
One of the most ingenious graphic novels I have ever read, in which Mazzucchelli takes a story of a middle aged “paper architect” and Cornell professor and turns it into an existential quest. It is not so much a story about New York as it is about leaving it behind. In fact, the story starts when Polyp’s apartment building is set ablaze by a lightning strike, leaving him scrambling to escape in the middle of the night. Once outside, he stands in the pouring rain, watching his life go up in smoke. We follow him as he walks away, and takes the subway to Port Authority where he gets on a bus to the middle of nowhere. A formalist masterpiece, it eludes easy description, but if you like Greek tragedies and very literary comics, you will love Asterios Polyp.
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob
The book revolves around raising a mixed-race kid in a half East Indian, half Jewish family in Brooklyn, who asks hard questions about race such as “Are White people afraid of Brown people?” and more worryingly, “Is Daddy afraid of us?” Jacob’s visual style involves heavy use of colorful photographs as the backdrop of black and white graphic cut-outs of her characters and many, many speech balloons, to illustrate a story about race and diaspora in America, the ways it has changed for the better, and the ways it hasn’t. On the other side of the world, back in her parents’ hometown in India, the book looks at colorism through the eyes of a younger version of Jacob. Heartfelt, funny and incisively perceptive, it earnestly explores what it means to be Brown in America in the wake of 9/11 and in the aftermath of the 2016 election.
Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz Chast
The book originally began as a leaflet for her daughter who left her suburban home for school in Manhattan. Chast, who was born in Brooklyn, spent her early adulthood in Manhattan before moving away as one does in the pursuit of more space in the suburbs ahead of starting a family. Full of her signature wry but laugh-out-loud humor (as seen in The New Yorker), this pocket-sized book is, as the subtitle says, part love letter to New York and part guide book. If you are completely new to the city, it will teach you how to navigate the subway, the grid system, what cross-streets are, and how Sixth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas are the same thing but, of course, no one (really, not a single person) calls it the latter. If you have been living here for a while and already know everything Chast has to offer, the book’s easy charm will still (probably) urge you to take a long, aimless walk and make you appreciate this beautiful, ridiculous city all over again.
Queenie: Godmother of Harlem by Aurelie Levy and Elizabeth Colomba
Queenie: Godmother of Harlem is based on the life of Stephanie Saint-Clair, aka “Queenie.” Born on a plantation in Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, Queenie leaves for New York around 1912. She survives an abusive ex-boyfriend, followed by a brutal attack by the Ku Klux Klan, and then finds the courage to begin to foster a name for herself as the Queen of Harlem’s mafia. She became the runner of the numbers game in the 1930s when the Prohibition era was coming to an end. She built her own image, dressing in fine clothes and jewelry and purchasing ads in The New York Amsterdam News. She was a resilient woman and a compassionate leader who helped out and empowered many in the Black community with the money she made from racketeering. At the end of her life, we see her enjoying an idyllic afternoon in Long Island, retired. This heavily researched, part fictionalized graphic novel offers us deep insight into a piece of forgotten history.
Victory Parade by Leela Corman
Based primarily in 1940s Brooklyn and focusing on a cast of characters who are women, Jewish, and refugees, Victory Parade reflects on intergenerational trauma as experienced and passed down by Holocaust survivors. Grittier than most other books in this list, there are abusive marriages, illicit relationships, sexual harassment, and metaphorical disembodiment signaling the war-torn society, but there’s also love, longing, female friendships, and survival in the middle of it all. With frequent references to Greek tragedies and 20th-century painters, Victory Parade is a testament to the comic medium’s ability to portray complex and difficult subjects with nuance, create meaning with a coalescence of words and images.
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