This year has delivered us a crop of graphic novels so rich and varied, you could wrap a different one for each family member and have done with other bookish presents altogether. First, though, a universal crowd pleaser, and my graphic novel of the year: Days of the Bagnold Summer (Jonathan Cape £9.99) by Joff Winterhart, which tells the story of a 52-year old librarian called Sue Bagnold, her teenage son, Daniel, whose interests include crisps and heavy metal, and what happens when they're forced to spend the long holiday together. (Answer: it's all a bit funny and sad.) I love this book so much, I would have to instantly excommunicate any friend who didn't feel the same way  though such is its greatness, this won't ever happen. A perfect gift, then, for gloomy teenagers, stressed-out parents, or anyone at all who remembers how completely terrible it was to be 15.

For sheer escapism, I recommend Grandville Bete Noire (Jonathan Cape £16.99), the third in Bryan Talbot's adorable anthropomorphic steampunk series (Philip Pullman is just the latest fan) starring a badger detective called Inspector LeBrock, and his rodent sidekick, Detective Sergeant Roderick Ratzi. At Toad Hall, lair of the multibillionaire Baron Aristotle Krapaud, a cabal of fat cats is plotting the overthrow of the French state by automaton soldiers. Meanwhile, our heroes are in hot pursuit of a masked assassin who is stalking the city's art world. The bastard child of Conan Doyle and Beatrix Potter, it's a gripping feast for the eyes. If this sounds too weird  or you have a younger reader in mind  there is always the Julius Chancer series by Garen Ewing (now collected as The Complete Rainbow Orchid (Egmont £14.99), timeless adventure stories that fans of Tintin will adore. A book to dip in and out of is Mrs Weber's Omnibus (Jonathan Cape £20) by Posy Simmonds, a satisfyingly fat collection of her old Guardian comic strips that will make you laugh out loud. (Heaven is a polytechnic sociology lecturer called George.)

Those who favour history, politics and current affairs don't have to make do with some 800-page tombstone of tightly packed prose. Give them, instead, A Chinese Life (SelfMadeHero £15.99) by Philippe Otie and Li Kunwu, a fantastic graphic memoir about life under Mao; Best of Enemies (SelfMadeHero £14.99) by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B, a wonderfully inventive account of US-Middle East relations down the centuries; or Journalism (Jonathan Cape £8.99) by Joe Sacco, a new collection of reportage by the acclaimed author of Palestine. Sacco's book takes him from the Hague, where he attends the trials of those accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia; to Uttar Pradesh, India, where he documents the lives of the untouchables; to Malta, where thousands of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa are washed up every year.

Moving and informative, I would pair this with my other favourite graphic book of the year, Guy Delisle's Jerusalem (Jonathan Cape £16.99), which makes breathtakingly light work of one of the world's most complex political situations. Or there is always Harvey Pekar's Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me (Hill & Wang £17.99), in which he explores the ways in which Zionism let him down (the great Pekar, author of the American Splendor comics, died in 2010; this, his final book, comes with an afterword by his wife, Joyce Brabner).

As I wrote when I reviewed it, no single woman, be she ever-so-happy or ever-so-desperate, is going to want to be given a book called Please God, Find Me A Husband! (Jonathan Cape £14.99) for Christmas. On the other hand, there is something irresistibly joyful about Simone Lia's search for the man of her dreams (it involves, among other things, a stay in a nunnery). It has a magic all of its own. Relationship angst of a different kind is on display in Are You My Mother? (Jonathan Cape £16.99) by Alison Bechdel. I didn't like this half so much as Fun Home, Bechdel's memoir about her closeted father. But for her fans, it is required reading all the same, telling the story from the other side with recourse to the theories of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and the novels of Virginia Woolf. (Quite a bracing present, then.)

Finally, nervous cooks will like Helen Ashley's Recipes from the Kitchen Drawer (Square Peg £10). It's not a new idea to do recipes in strip form; Len Deighton got there first with his 1967 Action Cook Book. But this slim volume has the edge on Deighton when it comes to simplicity, and would make a great stocking filler for anyone about to leave home for the first time. Includes a recipe for aduki bean burgers  a dish that would have had Harry Palmer rolling his eyes and reaching for his omelette pan  but also for such meaty staples as shepherd's pie and chilli con carne.

You would worry for Joff Winterhart, if he wasn't so obviously a superstar in the making. For here he is, publishing his first book, Days of the Bagnold Summer, in one of the most extraordinary years for comics that I can remember. So far, we've had new work by Alison Bechdel, Guy Delisle and Simone Lia; coming soon are long-awaited titles by Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. Not exactly a quiet time, then, and yet he stands out: as affecting as Raymond Briggs, as beady as Posy Simmonds, a truly fantastic debut. Oh, yes. One other thing. In 2009, Winterhart was the runner-up in the Cape/Observer graphic short story prize, with an entry in which the Bagnolds made their official debut. Perhaps we can claim a tiny bit of the credit for this one. 

Sue Bagnold is 52, and works in a library. Daniel, her son, is 15, and likes crisps, heavy metal, black clothes and his best friend, KY, aka The Master (cocky KY has enough confidence for the two of them, which is just as well, because behind his curtain of hair, Daniel is about as chatty as a clam). This year, Sue and Daniel are supposed to be spending the long school holiday apart; Daniel will be visiting his father and pregnant stepmother in the US. At the last minute, though, the trip is cancelled, the stepmother trilling excuses to older model Sue down the line from Florida. How does Daniel feel about this? OK, actually: at least he'll be spared the trauma of six weeks without Kerrang! 

What follows is the story of Sue and Daniel's summer: funny but plangent, replete with minor humiliations. Poor Sue. She knows she is boring. She knows she cannot communicate with her son, who looks to her "like a big, black, sad kangaroo". Her attempts at bonding  listening to his Megadeth CDs in the car, admiring his "poems" (actually, just the lyrics of a Metallica song he has copied out)  always seem to end in disaster. And yet how she longs for her boy! When he comes home drunk one night, and she has to hold his hair out of the way while he vomits, she doesn't have it in her to be angry: inebriated, he's so talkative, even affectionate.

The relationship between Sue and Daniel is beautifully drawn. But there are other things to admire, too. I loved KY's awful mother, who is into chakras and reiki and Nepalese bracelets, and who regards her son, with his pubic beard and his stupid hats, as her "brave Norse prince" (the awfulness of KY's mother is one of the few things on which Sue and Daniel are in total agreement); and I laughed at KY, who I recognised immediately (every comprehensive school has one). Most of all, though, I cherished Winterhart's drawings. These Bagnolds are well-observed to the point of cruelty, and yet his affection for them is never in doubt, their receding chins and gentle half-smiles tugging at your heart right up until the moment the new term begins.