6 comics like Struwwelpeter

1. Wilhelm Busch: Picture Stories

by Wilhelm Busch

• Comedy

The rest of Busch — drunks, monks, cats, painters and children, most of them punished. Picture and verse locked together on the page thirty years before anyone thought to call the arrangement a comic.

2. Max und Moritz

by Wilhelm Busch

• Comedy
• Tragedy (shared)

Seven pranks by two boys, told in rhymed couplets under the pictures, ending with the pair of them ground into meal and fed to the ducks. Rudolph Dirks was asked to redraw it for an American paper and produced The Katzenjammer Kids instead.

3. Rodolphe Töpffer: Picture Stories

by Rodolphe Töpffer

• Adventure
• Comedy

A Geneva schoolmaster drew absurd little travel stories for his pupils in the 1830s, in panels, with the text underneath carrying the timing. Goethe read them and approved. They are usually called the first comics.

4. Hokusai Manga

by Katsushika Hokusai

Fifteen volumes of sketches — swordsmen, bathers, birds, ghosts, people pulling faces — printed from woodblocks. This is the book that put the word manga into circulation, a century before the form existed.

5. Tokyo Ghoul

by Sui Ishida

• Action
• Drama
• Horror (shared)
• Psychological

Ghouls live hidden in Tokyo and can only survive by eating people. Quiet student Ken Kaneki learns this the hard way: after a deadly date he wakes up half-ghoul, hungry for what he cannot bear to eat. Caught between two worlds that want each other dead, he tries to stay human — dark, graphic and heartbreaking.

6. Tokyo Ghoul:re

by Sui Ishida

• Action
• Drama
• Horror (shared)
• Psychological

Two years on, the ghoul-hunting CCG trains the Quinx: humans given ghoul powers. Their mentor, investigator Haise Sasaki, has no memory of who he used to be. The sequel to Tokyo Ghoul, where the war between humans and ghouls comes to its end.