In France, comic books are serious business

Alison Bechdel's autobiographical Fun Home is a stunningly powerful and brilliant exploration of grief, identity, literature and family. I absolutely love this book.

Other autobiographical works that I have really enjoyed include Craig Thompson's coming-of-age story Blankets, David Beauchard's Epileptic, and Art Spiegelman's classic Maus which another commenter here also mentioned.

Speaking of classics, Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese series is a wonderful collection of adventure stories with multi-layered literary qualities and meticulously researched history behind them. I would start with The Ballad of the Salt Sea, which was also the first in the series.

I also want to mention Marc-Antoine Mathieu's brilliantly Kafkaesque and visually intelligent graphic novels, although I'm not sure if anything other than Dead Memory and The Museum Vaults have been translated into English, sadly enough. But that's still better than some other favourites who don't seem to have been translated at all.

Although we are really only scratching the surface here, no serious list of serious comic books can be complete without a mention of Alan Moore. V for Vendetta, Watchmen and From Hell have all been turned into big budget film adaptations, but in that transition they have always lost something very central to Moore's works: his constant exploration of the boundaries of the popular comics medium itself, what it can achieve and what it can say about us.

• Jacques Tardi - It Was the War of the Trenches
• Jiro Taniguchi - A Distant Neighborhood (most Jiro Taniguchi's are amazing)
• Riad Sattouf - The Arab of the Future (top selling one in France lately)
• Emmanuel Guibert - The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
• Joe Matt - Peepshow

Could you give your definition of "serious" ? Is it serious as in "dealing with serious stuff" or "telling a story in an enjoying manner" or "not reusing the trope and cliché we have seen a million time"?

Some recommandation, in no particular order:

• Maus, Art Spiegelman. If want serious stuff, this is super serious stuff: it's part holocaust memoir, part biography, part character study.
• Message to Adolf, Osamu Tezuka. The same conflict with a Japanese perspective. And it's more of an epic saga than Maus. Also, Tezuka is the father of manga.
• Scott Pilgrim, Brian Lee O'Malley. You may have seen the (pretty good) movie. A generation Y guy has trouble going on of with his life, his girlfriend(s), and the band he is on. Also: changing hair color, mind control device, subspace hammer, and evil exes.
• The Rabbi's cat, Joann Sfar. You may have seen the (also pretty good) movie. An atheist cat eats a parrot, learn how to talk and wants to convert to Judaism in the 1920's Algier.
• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud. An art discussion about the comic medium, in comic form.
• The Scorpion, Enrico Martini & Stephen Desberg. Swashbuckling adventures and conspiracy with an Italian renaissance setting.
• Hikaru no Go, Yumi Hotta, Takeshi Obata. Modern day (well, early 2000's) competitive Go with a heian-era ghost.

Joe Sacco is pretty good.