field_studies

Yes! I only hesitated to mention Baker because it's been a long while since I last read him and wasn't sure how well those books had aged. Personally, I'd recommend the Cowboy Wally Show and Why I Hate Saturn. He was at his best when relying on his pencil&ink skills (nobody can do facial expressions like Baker...an odd combination of high-realism and charicature), but he seemed (like so many) to have become caught up in computer colouring (including colouring his linework), which made a lot of his later work pretty hard on the eyes, I think.

I'll second all of Chris Remo's recommendations, and Fun Home too. A few others I've found excellent... All of Joe Sacco's journalistic work, but his most recent, Footnotes in Gaza, is his strongest yet. All of Ben Katchor's books, starting the the Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer books. There's a good reason this guy won a MacCarthur (sp?) fellowship. Has no one mentioned Dan Clowes yet? I'd start with the David Boring graphic novel. Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks, particularly for those who are already comic book fans, is a beautiful story. And for whatever its flaws, Dave McKean's Cages is magnificent. So few cartoonists have ever given themselves that kind of space to record the subtleties of conversation, or this particular slow-developing surrealism. So many wonderful books to discover for someone new to the medium, but those five are all indispensable.

The best I've ever read was Tim Krabbe's The Rider. Krabbe's best known as a novelist, but was also a competitive road cyclist in his time, and a chess grandmaster too. He calls upon all three expertises to produce a compelling, strategic and sometimes surreal (think the surrealism of exhaustion) portrait of competitive cycling. It's not a sport I've ever followed closely, but the book was fascinating nonetheless.

Alternately, (though perhaps less likely based on the description), the book could have been John Banville's The Sea, in which an older man, having recently lost his wife, returns to the seaside town of his youth. It contains this wonderful little passage (which posting here is partly just an excuse to quote): "Before Anna’s illness, I had held my physical self in no more than fond disgust, as most people do—hold their selves, I mean, not mine—tolerant, necessarily, of the products of my sadly inescapable humanity, the various effluvia, the eructations for and aft, the gleet, the scurff, the sweat and other common leakages, and even what the Bard of Hartford quaintly calls the particles of nether-do." One's never quote sure whether Banville either has double the working vocabulary of any other human being or if he's making most of the words up. I suspect it's a bit of both.