While the people in this thread have mentioned some phenomenal mainstream books, there’s plenty more to discover about comics outside of the mainstream as well. Here are just a few recent ones:
Jimmy Corrigan: The World’s Smartest Boy by Chris Ware. A tremendously depressing, graphically adventurous novel concerning an extremely awkward man trying to reunite with his long-estranged father, Ware’s book made headlines in Britian when it won the Guardian award for best novel last year. It’s a very sad but deeply rewarding experience that really pushes the limits of comic narrative.
Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez. A 500 page epic that collects the stories of a fictional South American town, originally written for the Hernandez Brothers seminal Love & Rockets magazine. Similar in tone to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gilbert’s stories center on his all-around earth mother Luba and her seemingly endless extended family. Love & Rockets is still, for my money, the best comic ever, and this book explains (partially) why.
Who’s Laughing Now? , Dork! and Milk & Cheese by Evan Dorkin. Milk & Cheese (i.e: dairy products gone bad) is entirely a one-joke idea, but it’s a great joke: the alcoholic title characters go on a gin-fueled rampage through whatever happens to be pissing them off at the moment. Funny in the way that the Adult Swim lineup in funny - Dorkin, in fact, writes for Space Ghost: Coast To Coast. Dork! started life as a catch-all collection from Dorkin, collecting the stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else, but eventually mutated into a strange auto-bio-confessional comic. Still, the strips about the Eltingville comics club is worth the price of admission. Who’s Laughing Now? collects the Dork! issues into graphic novel form.
The Filth and The Invisibles by Grant Morrison. Morrison is, like Alan Moore, halfway between the mainstream and alternative comic scenes; both of these series were released on DC’s Vertigo label. The Invisibles is the comic medium’s version of Foucault’s Pendulum as re-written by Philip K. Dick - it’s a wild ride through Morrison’s crazed subconscious rantings on conspiracies, language, meta-texts and general weirdness. The Filth is, by comparison, shorter but ten times loopier - it’s either an investigation into the absolute nature of reality, or the story of a man going crazy because his cat is dying. Maybe it’s both.
There’s many, many more - I didn’t even mention Dan Clowes - but this’ll get you started.
L700
