It’s hard to hang a hat on PRETTY DEADLY, VOL. 2: THE BEAR (Image Comics, paper, $14.99), a graphic novel by Kelly Sue DeConnick, with art by Emma Ríos. This weird western saga gleefully, dreamily fuses a Greek chorus, spaghetti westerns, American trickster tales and creepy Japanese shoujo (girls’) manga. At the core of it, however, is a masterpiece of mythopoeism that many literary fantasists struggle to emulate. The first volume of “Pretty Deadly” introduced readers to the Reaper-minions of Lord Death: enigmatic entities with Old West names like Big Alice, Johnny Coyote and — deadliest and most iconic of all — Death’s own daughter, Deathface Ginny. After an epic, bloody regime change, however, the bitter old Lord Death has given way to a younger female successor. In Volume 2, Ginny and the other loyal Reapers must help consolidate this new Death’s rule by hunting down a rogue: the Reaper of War, who feeds and is fed by the killing fields of World War I.

Volume 2 is an improvement on the already stunning Volume 1, largely because the structure and stakes of DeConnick’s mythic universe have become clear. This volume also lingers more on the human lives impacted by these supernatural dramas, which helps to show why the Reapers are necessary. It helps too that Ríos’s art and the colors of Jordie Bellaire, occasionally jumbled in the first volume, have clarified since — though it’s still difficult to make out what’s happening in full-page action scenes swathed with the same color, as when Ginny battles the visceral red monster that War has become, upon a red blood-soaked battlefield.

This is a minor flaw. Every other element of this tale is a perfectly balanced mixture of the macabre with pure human poignancy. New readers will need Volume 1 too, but the return on investment is more than worthwhile.

In SUMMERLONG (Tachyon, paper, $15.95), his first new novel since “Tamsin” in 1999, Peter S. Beagle introduces readers to a cohort of eccentric yet fully textured characters: the aging flight attendant Joanna Delvecchio; her adult daughter, Lily; Joanna’s longtime partner, Abe the retired professor; and various denizens of the Seattle community who float through and around their lives. All is well until a newcomer shows up at the local diner: a mystery woman called Lioness Lazos, who proceeds to enrich and disrupt their lives in an almost mythic fashion.

The hook here is Beagle’s realism, which so ably captures the satisfactions and frustrations of these “people of a certain age,” as well as those of the more restless Lily. By turns of phrase, Seattle’s brief summer becomes a character here too, as Lioness’s presence causes any number of peculiar disruptions to the natural and social order. A baby orca nearly beaches itself in what might be homage; the most charismatic people at a dinner party are shown up in their pettiness; and the smell of a summer meadow manifests in the oddest of places. Lioness herself is too much of an archetype to feel as real as Joanna and Abe and Lily, but this is probably intentional, since it’s fairly clear early on that she’s Not From Around Here. The mystery of her true identity — which, again, feels intentionally non-mysterious past Chapter 2 or so — is secondary, probably because the story is really about how ordinary people change, and are changed by, the numinous.