I’m with you there, certainly. There are some that, had they been written in prose instead of with pictures, would be automatic shoo-ins. Heck, Gaiman published Stardust as a prose novel, albeit with illustrations when they were warranted. And that would be another good one to study for various themes.
But I was thinking about more senior high school students (11th and 12th grades). Your idea of Bone for younger readers is a good one. I am unfamiliar with it, outside of flipping through it a couple of times at the comic shop, but I trust your judgment.
Do we have a problem nowadays with young people who are reluctant to read anything that isn’t presented on some sort of screen? I don’t know, and I’m not about to guess, but perhaps if the words came with pictures that occupied a full page (we’re a long way beyond the six-panel comic book page that I remember from my childhood), we might get kids turning pages instead of clicking “Next” and having to enlarge, or scrolling down.
If that’s the case, then I’d suggest that handing them a paper copy of pretty much anything that was mentioned in the “Books You Hated” thread is only going to make them hate literature even more. Perhaps graphic novels are a way to get them to like literature, to understand the ideas behind them, to get the picture (heh), to appreciate what the author is trying to say. Once they get hold of that, then we can move on to words-only books.
Like I said, an interesting idea.