Usagi Yojimbo - absolutely the best, but there is violence and death. Attacklad is very into these.
Zeus & Hera etc. are good, but there’s not a lot of them.
Lucky Luke is good, and Alex Rider.
Uncle Scrooge is excellent, and there’s no way it’s too young for him. My father, who was a marine in WW2, Korean and Viet Nam was a big Scrooge fan, and so am I, today. Pick up the Rosa ‘Life of Scrooge’, although Barks is the best.
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Hellboy* isn’t pitched at the 11 year old set, but Attacklad is a big fan. I suspect that it is at the upper limit of his violent and spooky range.
How about PS 238? It’s about an elementary school for metahuman children. The world is nearly as rich as anything Marvel or DC has to offer, except actually, you know, self-consistent.
Thirding the Tintin and Asterix, those are what I read as a kid. Then again, I also read 2000AD and House of Mystery, so I might not be a good standard
But in that vein - not exactly a graphic novel, but the UK comics Annuals used to be a Christmas tradition for us - Beano and Dandy and Eagle (the last one is defunct - pity, it had Dan Dare). We also got the weeklies, but the Annuals were awesome.
Marvel and DC also put out trade paperback collections of the original runs of their iconic characters. It’s a good way to get kids into them before they get jaded by the re-imaginings and the like.
I totally agree, but at around that age, you become ‘too cool’ for ‘kids stuff’ like Disney comics and can’t see past the ‘kiddie’ Disney characters to the awesome stories inside.
I keep coming by this thread and thinking I should mention Digger :“A wombat. A dead god. A very peculiar epic.”
I think a 10-year-old might miss a lot of the depth of character and how amazing some of the artwork is, but it’s a great adventure even without that. Reading it online is easiest, but this page has all six volumes for $15 each.
