The most familiar flavors of comics memoir these days are My Childhood Among Political Complications and How My Relative Survived the Holocaust. Marcelino Truong’s SUCH A LOVELY LITTLE WAR: Saigon 1961-63 (Arsenal Pulp Press, $26.95) is one of the former: Originally published in French four years ago, it owes a good deal of its form and tone to Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis.” In 1961, when Truong was a small child, his father, then the cultural attaché at South Vietnam’s Washington embassy, brought the family back home to Saigon and began working as an interpreter for the Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. By the time of the coup two years later in which Diem was assassinated, the Truong family had already moved to London.

Truong was largely insulated from the Vietnam War’s violence; his book is most engaging when he draws the way he experienced Saigon as a young child, keeping fighting crickets in matchboxes, visiting Catholic churches and cheap movie theaters, walking past public displays of confiscated Vietcong mortars, understanding the war only as something exciting that was happening in the distance (and that his parents sometimes argued about). Those scenes are punctuated by explanations of what was actually happening in the conflict and its political context, as well as battlefield sequences that quickly turn stagy. What holds the book together is Truong’s artwork: confident, contoured brush strokes with watercolor washes, alternating between full color and monochromatic tints. He shows us that what was happening in Vietnam was a nightmare, but also that his youthful perspective made it seem, at the time, like an adventure.

Amy Kurzweil’s FLYING COUCH: A Graphic Memoir (Black Balloon, $18.95) is one of the Holocaust-survivor variety: The survivor was Kurzweil’s grandmother, who escaped from Warsaw because, with her blond hair and blue eyes, she could convincingly deny that she was Jewish. (Excerpts from her oral history of her experience appear throughout the book in typeset form, sometimes accompanied by illustrations of the events she describes and sometimes by Kurzweil’s renderings of photographs and other documents.) But she’s only part of the story. The book’s title refers to a psychoanalyst’s couch, which Kurzweil’s psychologist mother told her could allow “the mind to travel to all sorts of places.” That leads, in turn, to the central visual metaphor here: the view from above. Occasionally, we see a building or city from a bird’s-eye perspective, its relevant parts diagrammatically labeled; more broadly, the arc of Kurzweil’s narrative is an overview of three generations of Jewish women, and the ways they echo one another.

It’s an ambitious plan, and Kurzweil studs it with some charming set pieces. Her attempt to figure out her Jewish identity in college finds her posing behind a series of carnival cutouts labeled “Ardent Pro-Israel Jew,” “Politically and Culturally Apathetic Jew” and so on, then being visited by dream apparitions of Jacob, Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, and finally declaring, “But I just want to draw pictures” — whereupon Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner and Harvey Pekar start chasing her. Still, the book’s stream-of-consciousness form often leads it to ramble and lose focus. When Kurzweil travels to Germany at one point to see where her mother was born, she feels “strange, disembodied . . . I’m always mining life for a good story, but all I ever see, I fear, is just my own reflection.”

BECOMING UNBECOMING (Arsenal Pulp, $24.95), by a cartoonist who identifies herself only as Una, begins by circling around traumatic childhood moments and a menacing time and place: the mid-1970s in Northern England, when Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was murdering women, and the author was repeatedly sexually assaulted beginning when she was 10 years old. But Una’s personal experience is less the center of this story than the springboard for an extended examination of what she calls “the four horsemen of gender violence — shame, isolation, disbelief, ridicule.” Sexist assumptions about “loose morals,” she notes, led police to ignore evidence that might have stopped Sutcliffe sooner. In one bravura sequence, she renders 72 police portraits of West Yorkshire women’s attackers from that era in her own hand. In aggregate, they’re unmistakably depictions of Sutcliffe: “just another violent male, staring them in the face.”

Una’s artwork (mostly black and white, with occasional jolts of flat color) rarely bothers with literal representation for more than a few panels at a time. Instead, she underscores her arguments with symbolic imagery: paper dolls, delicate sketches of imaginary insect-women, distorted and half-concealed contours of rapists’ faces. The book concludes with a heartbreaking series of portraits of Sutcliffe’s victims as they might look today if they had survived — all of them more naturalistic than Una’s self-portraits as a blank female form in a plain white frock. “I’m glad to be alive,” she writes, “but I wonder who I would have been, had I not been interrupted so rudely?”