Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. Visually, this graphic novel is pretty avant-garde, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Mazzucchelli uses style, colour, composition and even fonts in a variety of ways to illustrate context and character. Something like this seriously runs the risk of being pretentious garbage, and at some points the narration was a bit too philosophical for me, but the story of Asterios Polyp is so strong that in this instance it actually works.
 
Asterios, a pretentious and self absorbed architecture academic is taking some time out to live as a car mechanic after his house burns down. The novel goes through the memories of his failed marriage to the talented and intelligent yet shy and modest Hana, and his gradual realisation that he’d let the negative aspects of his personality take precedence over his relationship. This was a big book, but I couldn’t put it down and read it in pretty much one go (as a slow reader, I love that I can do that with comics).

There’s a really lovely few pages in the book that go through all the different aspects of his wife, from her combing her hair to her snoring and period stains, all lovingly reminisced. This is a comic that really pushes the boat out and I look forward to reading more like this in the future.