Another bumper year for graphic novels, which leaves me with only one problem: where to begin? Well, let's see. My comic book of the year, by a mile, is Rutu Modan's The Property (Cape), in which Mica Segal, a young Israeli woman, travels to Warsaw with her irascible grandmother to help her reclaim the apartment building she and her family were forced to give up in 1940. What happens next is… complicated. This, believe me, has everything you could possibly want in a comic: great pictures, a multilayered story, mystery, sharp wit. For the perfect Christmas package you could parcel it up with Modan's earlier graphic novel, Exit Wounds (set in Israel), or with Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Guy Delisle's superb book of reportage from that city.

Also stunning is Joe Sacco's The Great War (Cape), a vast (and already bestselling) panorama of the first day of the battle of the Somme. This is a stark, uncompromising book, so much destruction and misery reduced to just 24 plates, the helmets of the massed ranks of the infantry coming to resemble (as I said in my review) the counters in a particularly heinous game of tiddlywinks. But it's a breathtaking achievement too, its beauty and power lying in its attention to detail, the way it forces the reader to look, and look again, at every aspect of the logistics of battle, from horses to trenches to foot soldiers to officers. I'm pretty sure it's already on many Christmas wish lists. But if it isn't on yours, add it right now: this is a real keeper of a book, the kind you need to own, the better that you might return to it again and again.

Those in search of something a touch more light-hearted will enjoy The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg, and The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins (both Cape writers, and both winners of the Observer's annual graphic short story prize), a beautifully drawn pair of comic fairytales. Greenberg's book celebrates snow and storytelling in all their various forms, while Collins's is a love song – or is it? – to facial hair and all who get tangled up in it. Lighter Than My Shadow by Katie Green (Cape) is a thunking great doorstep of a book and has a serious theme, being a memoir of its author's struggle with, and recovery from, anorexia. But even at its most heartbreaking it never feels sombre or heavy. Green's drawings, in soft shades of grey, have a childlike quality that is all their own, and its trajectory is so inspiring, plucky and, in the end, consoling, it's hard to put down (even if your shoulder does ache with carrying it). In similar, if rather more feisty, vein is Marbles (Robinson), Ellen Forney's revelatory, genuinely useful and frequently zany depression memoir-cum-handbook.

Katie Green's memor of anorexia never feels sombre, ‘even at its most heartbreaking’. Photograph: Prepress

Some comic books for art lovers. Rembrandt by Typex (SelfMadeHero) is a zippy biography of the great Dutchman that I think the artist would have loved. The (True!) History of Art by Sylvain Coissard and Alexis Lemoine (SelfMadeHero) is a series of parodies in which the authors attempt to answer the nagging questions of art history, including what caused The Scream, and why Van Gogh's Arles bedroom is so unnervingly tidy. Those interested in putting 21st-century graphic novels in historical context will love the richly illustrated and hugely informative Comics Art (Tate) by Paul Gravett, the co-director of Comica and a regular judge of the Observer's annual graphic short story prize. Fans of sci-fi, meanwhile, might like to try Aama 1 by Frederik Peeters (SelfMadeHero), the Swiss comic book artist best known for his HIV memoir Blue Pills. Set in the distant future, it begins with an amnesiac, Verloc Nim, being handed his diary by a robot monkey called Churchill.

SelfMadeHero has made its name by, among other things, publishing pithy, clever graphic versions of the classics, and this year it brought us The Complete Don Quixote, adapted from Cervantes by Rob Davis. I recommend this marvel of concision, and so much the better if you then scurry off to try the real thing. It might also make a good pairing, present-wise, with Martin Rowson's illustrated retelling of Swift's Gulliver's Travels (Atlantic), which is now in paperback. A classic of a different kind – by which I mean that I am declaring it to be a classic right here and now – is Co-Mix, a "retrospective" of comics, graphics and "scraps" by Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Maus (Drawn & Quarterly). Among the collectors' items gathered within are full-page reproductions of covers for Robert Crumb's Short Order Comix; a full-size insert of the long out of print Raw comic Two-Fisted Painters; and Spiegelman's peerlessly brilliant New Yorker strips about Maurice Sendak and – my favourite – Charles Schulz. The ultimate swank present for any completist Spiegelman fan.

Finally, a selection of stocking fillers. Hyperbole and a Half (Square Peg) is the book of the blog, in which Allie Brosh, a twentysomething American, details the mishaps of her everyday life with a few choice words and some quirky drawings made using Paint on her PC. With its meditations on cake and her demented dog it's pretty funny, and will certainly help you, should you perhaps decide to indulge in a spot of "self-gifting" in this instance, survive Christmas with your more crazed relatives (keep it in the loo, where you can lock yourself away in extremis).

Treasury of Mini Comics: Volume One by Michael Dowers (Fantagraphics) is a good present for the true comic nerd, containing as it does scratchy and pint-sized early work by American artists who would go on to become cultishly well known (Jim Woodring, Travis Millard, Kelly Froh). As for The Great Book of Mobile Talk, overheard by Andrew Barrow and observed by Posy Simmonds (Square Peg), this does what it says on the tin. Here are dozens of shouty (and occasionally whispered) one-sided conversations, all of which have been turned from annoying to hilarious thanks to a sublime collaboration between two very beady talents. Impossible to pick a favourite gag, but I think I'll go with the middle-class woman in the supermarket – Breton shirt, Mulberry-ish cross shoulder bag, wholly unwarranted expression of deep pain on her face – who can be heard saying: "Darling, there were two hazelnuts in the washing machine... You have got to check Otto's pockets!" I don't know why this should be so funny, but I find now that I have only to think of it to laugh out loud.