Huggable Rat
Bryan Talbot, The Tale of One Bad Rat, 1996
Boyish-looking Helen runs away from an abusive home to live as a beggar on the streets of London. The only creature she trusts in the whole world is a pet rat she freed from her school's laboratory - a friend who also reminds her of the stories of Beatrix Potter, which she loved as a child and that now serve as a sort of escape route whenever reality gets too rough.
Bryan Talbot's graphic novel is unusual in that it's about child abuse (at a glance, it can even seem like a TV drama transported onto comics) but also the bad reputation that rats have carried for the past centuries. I didn't know, for example, that rats are highly intelligent, and that they can be quite clean since they groom themselves. Almost makes me want to get a pet rat!