Best graphic memoirs of 2026 (so far)

Earlier this year, my favorite place to buy graphic novels didn’t have the book I was looking for, and I thought, No worries, I’ll see if my second-favorite place to buy graphic novels has it. And then I got a little verklempt: We have never been this spoiled for choice. Though they are now the third best-selling genre in North America (behind general fiction and romance), the legitimization of the nonfiction graphic novel as a literary form is relatively new. Beyond the brisk sales, they’re among the most popular titles in elementary-school libraries, they win Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, and they get adapted into movies and streaming shows.

The now–expansive embrace of graphic novels makes the recent death of “Persepolis” creator Marjane Satrapi earlier this month feel like even more of a blow. Satrapi’s 2003 memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the country’s 1979 revolution became one of the genre’s first blockbuster hits, one of the most widely read (and widely challenged) graphic novels of all time. Earlier this year, “Persepolis” became a metanarrative as well, with the publication of “Wake Now in the Fire,” an account of an attempt to pull the book from Chicago public schools and the student uprising that followed.

The one downside of this abundance, of course, is that I can only read so many of them. In the first half of 2026, these five have stayed with me.