Please enjoy this recommended graphic novel reading list from Katie Pryde at Books with Pictures:

Liebestrasse: During the final years of the Weimar Republic, Sam, an American banker, meets Philip, a German art critic, and they fall in love. Their romance is hit with an unspeakable reality as the Nazis come to power and fascism makes them a target.

Otto Binder's The Unwanted: Uncannily perceptive and prescient when it was written in 1953, EC writer Otto Binder's The Unwanted went unsold for more than a decade until he finally gave it to a fanzine publisher who promptly got out of the fanzine business — and so it languished, unread, in a yellowing file folder for decades. Never before published and now unearthed, The Unwanted is Binder's response to the 1950s McCarthy era, couched in metaphorical science fiction terms.

Red Scare: This graphic novel offers a detailed account of McCarthyism, focusing on the political repression and the anti-communist fervor.

History Comics: The Stonewall Riots: In this graphic novel, experience the Stonewall Riots firsthand and meet iconic activists like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Three teenagers—Natalia, Jax, and Rashad—are magically transported from their modern lives to the legendary Stonewall Inn in the summer of 1969. Escorted by Natalia's eccentric abuela (and her pet cockatiel, Rocky), the friends experience the police raid firsthand and are thrown into the infamous riots that made the struggle for LGBTQ rights front-page news.

Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles: It's 1953. While the United States is locked in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, the gay Southern playwright known as Snagglepuss is the toast of Broadway. But success has made him a target. As he plans for his next hit play, Snagglepuss becomes the focus of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And when powerful forces align to purge show business of its most subversive voices, no one is safe! (Local writer!)

Bitter Pill: Randy Shilts and the Dawn of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic (COMING OCTOBER 2026): San Francisco, 1981. Drawn from true events, this graphic novel follows Randy Shilts—biographer of Harvey Milk and one of the first openly gay journalists hired by the mainstream press—as he receives a chilling call at the Chronicle: a Los Angeles patient is being treated for a rare and aggressive cancer.

A meeting with an infectious disease researcher confirms his worst fear: this so-called “gay cancer” is neither rare nor isolated—it’s the beginning of a national health crisis. With those in power slow to respond, Shilts resorts to bold tactics to force attention on the unfolding HIV/AIDS epidemic. Featuring an afterword by Randy Shilts biographer Michael Lee, author of When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts.