Exactly what that classic is is highly individual. It’s summer, and you know what that means: convincing yourself you have the time to read that influential, historically vital classic of the canon that you’ve somehow missed all these years. TRīy Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins It’s a hypnotic book, almost lulling until the startling bigger picture comes into focus. Part analysis of Beaton’s own complicity in working for environmentally destructive companies in order to pay off her student loans, part analysis of gender relations, part observation of the transition between young adulthood and adulthood, and part trauma memoir, Ducks is so closely observed and focused on the trivial day-to-day that the dark humor and the bigger themes both slip in surreptitiously, building up to a series of poignant, powerful moments. As it turned out, Beaton was working on a massive autobiographical comic about the two years she spent working at remote oil companies, a young woman surrounded by men whose behavior ranged from predatory and harassing to polite, friendly, and ultimately boundary-pushing. When Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton stopped posting her intermittent web comic Hark! A Vagrant, certain sections of the internet mourned - the ones that appreciated never knowing whether they were going to get a fraught pirate love story or an offbeat Canadian history lesson. Image: Kate Beaton/Drawn & Quarterly Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands That memoir everyone’s been talking about Just be warned that it’ll make you look at every comics page differently. It’s the easiest education you’ll ever lay hands on, but it’s also a lot of fun. It was revelatory when Scott McCloud first published it - a funny, breezy, but insightful walkthrough of the language of comics symbolism, comics panels, and the language of visual storytelling - but now it’s just required reading.

Speaking of Understanding Comics, it’s coming up on its 30-year anniversary, and it’s still as relevant as ever. Tasha Robinson Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art It’s easy to grasp, but written for adults, and guaranteed to make you come away with some interesting and highly relevant trivia you can pull out at the next summer barbeque.

The book’s full title, Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day tells the full story: This is the Understanding Comics of network technology, and it uses simple, clear language and panel-based illustrations to walk readers through how the named networks were developed and how they function today.

The fundamental idea behind the nonfiction graphic novel Hidden Systems is that we’re all surrounded by and dependent on networks that we don’t understand, and maybe we’d all feel a little more connected to the world if we knew more about it. Image: Penguin Random House Hidden Systems

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