While Publishers Weekly and Amazon helpfully organized their best-of-the-year lists according to clear genres and marketing categories, with comics falling (mostly) under "comics, Barnes & Noble takes a decidedly different approach: In its rundown of the Best Books of 2012, the retailer creates a "Best Quirky, Beautiful, Different Books" category, lumping comics collections and graphic novels in with cookbooks, home and garden design guides, and something called Underwater Dogs. Still, the comics selected are, overall, pretty solid:

Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, by Alvin Buenaventura, Chip Kidd and Chris Ware (Abrams ComicArts)

Batman: Earth One, by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank (DC Comics)

Building Stories, by Chris Ware (Pantheon Books)

My Friend Dahmer, by Derf Backderf (Abrams ComicArts)

Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson, by Mark Siegel (First Second)

Wizzywig, by Ed Piskor (Top Shelf Productions)

A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel, by Hope Larson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

It's also worth noting that The Walking Dead Compendium Book One (Image Comics), by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn, was No. 89 on Barnes & Noble's list of The Top 100 Bestsellers of 2102. It was the only comic to make the list.