There will doubtless be those who scoff at the idea of a “comics laureate”, a newly created post to which artist Dave Gibbons is the inaugural appointment. The scoffers will probably be the same people who told me at school that Swamp Thing, written by Gibbons’ Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore, was in no way a suitable subject for an English essay, and those who Gibbons himself references when he talks of the image comics have in the UK: “They have always been associated with very cheap and somewhat lurid entertainment.”

But comics are both literature and art – in fact, they occupy the intersection between the two. And in Gibbons, whose work includes strips for the seminal British weekly comic 2000AD, art for American giants DC and Marvel, and comics for underground publisher Knockabout, graphic novelists have a fine ambassador in this renaissance man of the form.

Here are five works that should form part of Gibbons’ armoury in his new mission.

Comic strip from the Wicked + the Divine.

The latest title from comics’ current cool kids, Brits Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. “WicDiv” as it inevitably gets hashtagged is smart, sexy and so “now” it makes your teeth hurt. Every 90 years a phalanx of gods return in human form, and in their latest incarnations they’ve never had it so good, smack in the middle of the age of YouTube, Tumblr and the X-Factor. A stylistic cousin of Scottish writer Grant Morrison’s turn-of-the-century magnum opus The Invisibles, which is also a must-read.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Persepolis, a graphic novel about growing up in Iran by Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical story of growing up in Iran, first under the rule of the shah and then in the days of the Islamic revolution that overthrew the previous regime should probably be on school reading lists as a matter of course. By turns funny, wise and thought-provoking, Satrapi’s story is told in a deceptively simplistic monochrome style that oozes humanity.

There had been nothing like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman in comics when it hit the stands in late 1988; 75 issues and 17 years later it finished, and there’s been nothing like it since (apart from Gaiman’s current mini-series revival). Taking a second-string DC character and making him his own, Gaiman mined folklore, mythology and comics history to create a tapestry of breathtaking originality. People who never read a comic before or afterwards loved Sandman and it was credited with being a “safe place” for women readers who perhaps felt distanced from the medium.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Watchmen, co-created by Dave Gibbons himself and Alan Moore, was a seminal comic moment. Photograph: DC Comics

Gibbons shouldn’t be shy of including his own work; its publication was one of the seminal comics moments after all, and together with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns the same year was credited with reinventing the graphic novel and creating the post-modern superhero. Written by Alan Moore, Watchmen posited an alternate-history where superheroes were real in an America teetering on the brink of a nuclear war, blending in a murder mystery with political commentary.

Captain Marvel. ‘In reinventing this old character with a new, female persona, Kelly Sue DeConnick is leading the charge of women writers turning out excellent female superheroes.’ Photograph: Marvel Comics

Comics as a medium should never be ashamed of their most popular genre, and because not all superheroes have to be brooding, postmodern reinventions of themselves. Yet they don’t have to be adolescent male power fantasies any more either. In reinventing this old character with a new, female persona, Kelly Sue DeConnick is leading the charge of women writers turning out excellent female superheroes – see also Gail Simone’s recent run on Batgirl for DC and Red Sonja for Dynamite Entertainment, and novelist G Willow Wilson’s reboot of Ms Marvel as a young American Muslim girl. These titles are relevant, contemporary and – above all – fun.