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Uncivilized Books

10. Incidents in the Night, David B

An ouroboric mystery in the mode of Jorge Luis Borges, Incidents in the Night shares its title with the (nonexistent) magazine French cartoonist David B. discovers in an old bookstore at its outset. The dreams-within-dreams that proceed from his investigation lead him — literally — into the pages of books, one of which is supposedly a sanctuary from the Angel of Death. As with any dream, it only tracks logically from one moment to the next, but B.’s marvelous conflations of symbol and image make his artwork linger.

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Dark Horse

9. Bad Houses, Sara Ryan and Carla Speed McNeil

The hoarders and estate-sale haunters who populate the small Oregon town where Bad Houses is set all have different ideas about the value of stuff — as emotional succor, as a source of money, as burdensome ballast, as a window into history and the lives of others. Those conflicting visions send Ryan and McNeil’s characters colliding into each other, and their story relies on things unsaid as well as on the eloquence of mute objects.

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Koyama Press

8. Very Casual: Some Stories, Michael DeForge

DeForge is the current darling of the art-comics scene, and these body-horror-as-black-comedy short stories demonstrate why. At every opportunity, he mutates both the bulbous, knotted shapes of his characters and the deceptively familiar-looking forms of his stories. One piece involves a snowman carved open to reveal layers of hallucinogenic meat; in another, a man learns that his cartoon-beagle-shaped torso has been amputated; in a third, “litter gangs” organize to cover the streets with trash.

Pantheon

7. Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories, Ben Katchor

The scratchy, understatedly goofy monthly comic strips that MacArthur Fellowship-winning cartoonist Katchor has contributed to Metropolis magazine since 1998 are cockeyed wonders about the enduring architecture of the city (by which he means New York City) and the way urban citizens adapt their lives to fit it. He conjures up absurdities —gentrification of ’50s-era public housing complexes, a corporate office redecorating in the style of an old Chinese restaurant — that are just a few degrees stranger than reality.

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2000 AD

6. Zombo: You Smell of Crime and I’m the Deodorant!, Al Ewing and Henry Flint

A gore-drenched sci-fi comedy involving a bloodthirsty (but very polite) zombie, an evil sentient planet and “Shadow President Jason van Satan,” Zombo is as lowbrow as it gets, and also as highbrow — any given page might involve, say, faces being ripped off alongside a gag about French philosopher Guy Debord. Ewing keeps finding ways to make his vicious parodies of the lies pop-culture tells more uncomfortable, and Flint draws them with Grand Guignol gusto.

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336 Pages

5. Boxers & Saints, Gene Luen Yang

American Born Chinese cartoonist Yang’s long-in-the-works pair of graphic novels about the late-nineteenth-century Boxer Rebellion in China appeared simultaneously. Boxers focuses on a peasant boy whose crew of rebels dreams of taking back their country; Saints is about a peasant girl who’s rescued by missionaries and ends up on the other side of the conflict. Both protagonists have mystical visions of their gods leading them to glory, and both of them are doomed by dreams of righteousness that pave a road straight to hell.

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Fantagraphics Books

4. Fran, Jim Woodring

Woodring’s ongoing series of wordless graphic novels about the catlike creature Frank draw on the classic Hollywood cartoon tradition for their look and pacing, but dive into the murky, bulbous, sometimes horrifying depths of the unconscious. In 2011’s Congress of the Animals, Frank apparently got a happy ending with his lookalike opposite number, Fran; this time, he learns the hard way that she isn’t simply his prize for being a heroic archetype.

Image Comics

3. Saga, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

This giddy sci-fi serial concerns a tiny corner of an epic conflict: a pair of lovers from warring planets, on the run with their baby daughter, and the bounty hunters chasing them. Vaughan’s take on space opera is as much Kurt Vonnegut as George Lucas — it’s always about the strangeness of relationships, at its core — and Staples’ mind-bending visuals are tinkered together from biological forms and cultural detritus. (Vaughan’s fans should also check out The Private Eye, his digital-only thriller with artist Marcos Martin about the intersection of privacy and technology.)

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The Phoenix

2. The Phoenix Weekly Story Comic, various

You can only get it as an iPad subscription in the States, but this weekly British series is aimed straight at 7-to-10-year-olds’ sweet spot: multiple, ongoing adventure and comedy serials, plus how-to-draw features, puzzles and banter from cartoon-animal editors Tabs Inkspot and Bruno Barker. It’s a beautifully executed cluster of variations on the classic Euro-comics tradition, crafted with obvious affection for kids and their parents. Best feature: “Corpse Talk,” in which Adam Murphy interviews the corpses of historical figures from Boudicca to Nikola Tesla.

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Image Comics

1. Sex Criminals, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky

Fraction’s been having a very good year — his many other projects include the sleeper-hit superhero series Hawkeye — but this R-rated romp (about a bank-robbing couple whose orgasms can stop time) is his best work yet. It’s a precision-tuned screwball comedy on its surface, and that surface is gorgeous, thanks to Zdarsky’s ace sense of design and inventive color technique. But it’s also genuinely insightful about the ways sexuality shapes people, and it doubles as a love letter to analog media —one that happens to have been banned by the iTunes store.

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