The best new graphic novels

Slide show: On subjects ranging from war and love to physics and prostitution, 10 dazzling new illustrated books.

By Laura Miller

For every savvy comics fan there’s a reader who loved “Persepolis” or “Fun Home” but feels lost in the comics section of his or her local bookstore. This selection of 10 great “graphic novels” (an unfortunate term, since so many of the best works in the genre are nonfiction) published since the beginning of the year is for the occasional comics reader, a tip sheet on some of the best new work in the field.

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‘Feynman’ frames famed physicist just fine

Summer is the season for comic book heroes: Green Lantern, Captain America and of course, the late physicist Richard Feynman.

By Dan Vergano

Feynman doesn’t have a movie out for August, but this month brings the debut of the graphic novelFeynman by writer Jim Ottaviani and illustrator Leland Myrick. In classic comic book form, they chronicle the mind-blowing adventures of the Nobel-Prize winning physicist,adventurer and scientific icon.

“He’s basically perfect for comics,” says Ottaviani. “He was a genius but he was also always willing to do whatever he wanted to make his life interesting.”

In the pantheon of famous physicists, Feynman (1918-88) reigns as the trickster god, perhaps as well known for being a bongo-playing, strip-bar habitué, as for his blue-ribbon denunciation of NASA in the space shuttle Challenger tragedy. He worked on the Manhattan Project, attracting suspicions by cracking safes in security-conscious Los Alamos offices, and shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics, the theory explaining electromagnetic force that Feynman famously called, “the jewel of physics.”

Feynman, the graphic novel, goes through all of this but captures the jazzy flow of Feynman’s life in its spare lines. A bit of a sage, he also saidfunny, wise things:

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