Sandman by Neil Gaiman and various artists
**Trailers **by Mark Neecce and Julie Collins-Rosseau Off-Road by Sean Murphy Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
**30 Days Of Night **by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith
**Preacher **by Garth Ennis and various artists
**Ordinary Victories **by Manu Larcenet Y-The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
These are among my favorites; I haven’t gotten to the end of** Y **yet, and the end of 100 Bullets is still nowhere in sight. (NB : My tastes run to the grittier, more brutal end of the graphic-novel continuum, with exceptions made for really good stuff like **Off-Road **and the already mentioned Blankets and Perseopolis; you may want to take that under advisement before diving into a few of the series I’ve recommended)
You need to read Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Sleeper, then! It’s over and done with, collected in four volumes starting with “Out in the Cold.” There is also a prequel, Point Blank, also written by Brubaker. With a disclaimer like yours above, I can’t recommend it highly enough!
I recently discovered the Louvre art museum is sponsoring a group of graphic novels that feature the museum.
The first such volume that I came across is titled The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu. This involves a professional art assessor who is hired by the museum to evaluate the collections in it’s basement levels.
The assessor and his assistant enter the basements and promptly find they are exploring a seemingly endless series of underground levels, each with it’s own art related specialty and populated with persons who deal only with that specialty.
Just one example: The assessor and his assistant discover a room being tended to by one elderly man where is kept a collection of what at first glance seem to be multiple copies of the Mona Lisa painting. (The name of it is not stated, but it’s obvious that is what is being referred to.) But upon looking closer they realize each has a very subtle variation in Mona Lisa’s smile. They are told by the elderly man each of the variations is secretly put on exhibit on a rotating schedule, thus reinforcing the famous mystery of the smile.