Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened, edited by Jason Rodriguez, gathers stories by 16 comic book artists and writers inspired by old postcards Rodriguez dug out of bins in antique shops. The cryptic messages scribbled onto the backs of the cards ( I was in town today. Hope you were not in a fight last night ) leave their true meaning open to interpretation, and the device makes for some really inventive storytelling. Tic-Tac-Bang-Bang, by Stuart Moore and Michael Gaydos, is a peek at the dangerous lives of tic-tac-toe hustlers in the early 1900s. Time, by Tom Beland, follows an old man looking back on a lifelong romance from the cafe where it began. And Homesick, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Micah Farritor, is a gorgeous, slightly abstracted view of a dreamlife in Paris gone hollow and drab. Like the rest of the titles reviewed here, Postcards travels far and wide but ends up getting you right where you live.

Also laced with humor, but in a much more serious setting, is Cairo, written by G. Willow Wilson with art by M.K. Perker. With vivid, painterly artwork and a twisty plot that includes everything from demons and genies to drug runners and Israeli soldiers, the book sets its magic-realist tale of adventure and enlightenment in the context of the always volatile Middle East. A teenage Lebanese-American boy finds himself with a genie for a guardian/instructor, which is handy because he’s unwittingly stumbled into the middle of a centuries-old battle between good and evil for control of an ancient wooden box and its mysterious contents. The smart, witty but sensitive writing is nuanced enough that the story never upsets the balance between reverence and entertainment.

On a much lighter note is The Professor’s Daughter, written and illustrated by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. It’s actually the first book the now-renowned team worked on together, and it’s unique in that Sfar, who usually illustrates their collaborations, did the writing, while Guibert contributed the illustrations. In 19th-century London, the daughter of a famed Egyptologist falls for the mummied prince Imhotep, inexplicably awake after 30 centuries. Their madcap courtship gets them into all kinds of trouble, and eventually jail; the queen is unceremoniously tossed into the Thames; murder and mayhem ensue; and everyone, or almost everyone, lives happily ever after. The retro-style illustrations and lively, absurdist writing make this book as lovely to look at as it is delightful to read.

Blending irony-tinged cool and hipster ennui with, like, actual feelings, Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings is a frank, funny and sometimes cringe-inducing look at a Japanese-American guy in his late 20s struggling with his arguably underdeveloped emotions. Ben Tanaka’s longtime girlfriend leaves him to move from California to New York, which he takes as an opportunity to explore some of his less admirable fantasies. The stark, unfussy artwork allows plenty of room for exploring the story’s complex themes of racial and sexual politics, gender roles, artistic ambition and distance vs. intimacy.

The antiqued look of the first few pages of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival makes it clear you’re in for something extraordinary. Following the wordless squares of sketched narrative is like watching a jittery old scrap of film dug up from the bottom of an archive; in appearance and feel, it calls to mind Chris Marker’s lovely 1962 short film La JetŽe. The plot is a classic a man sets out to make his way in the big city, where he’ll bring his family later but this time it’s infused with magic. The city is guarded by mammoth winged statues and covered in incomprehensible hieroglyphs; cute little alien creatures hide in unlikely corners. The lack of text or dialogue emphasizes the man’s sense of alienation, but gradually he makes connections with other refugees and the frighteningly strange world becomes familiar.

Equally exciting, and actually true, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is an illustrated memoir by Ann Marie Fleming about her great-grandfather, who in his day was a famous Chinese magician and vaudeville performer. Fleming, a filmmaker, started looking into Sam’s life after her grandmother died; her research led her on nearly as many travels as the magician himself enjoyed, as she tracked down version after version of the truth about her grandfather. The result is not only a documentary film but also this amazingly textured, multilayered book, a lovely pastiche of photographs, documents, stylized mini-comic-book episodes and Fleming’s own charmingly simplistic stick-figure drawings.

Despite its intimidating 600-plus pages, Tekkon Kinkreet: Black &andamp; White by Taiyo Matsumoto rockets along at breakneck speed; before you know it, the story has ended, and you find yourself flipping back through the book for a lengthier gaze at Matsumoto’s explosive, neo-punk artwork. The full-throttle, splash-and-dash illustrations perfectly suit the wild, action-fueled story: A pair of fiendish little street urchins sharp-as-nails Black and sweet-but-brutal White defend their hold over the city’s violent underworld against a gang of yakuza who want to take control. What could easily have been a work of pure, unmitigated ultraviolence instead has numerous unlikely moments of tenderness and humor, thanks to Matsumoto’s nuanced writing and obvious affection for his characters. The book has also been made into a movie available on DVD.

Weird in an entirely harmless and wholly entertaining way (if you’re into that sort of thing) is Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs. If there’s anything cuter than those big-eyed, tiny-skirted Japanese manga characters, it’s Japanese manga puppies. And this book has both. It’s the story of an ultra-naive teenage girl, Suguri, who decides to move to Tokyo on her own and gets a job at a pet store. Turns out she has a sixth sense when it comes to dogs. She’s crazy for dogs! It’s a ridiculous construction and results in all kinds of awkward dog-related situations, as well as miracles of veterinary medicine that save the lives of the cutest puppies ever drawn. Sure it’s silly, but come on who doesn’t love puppies?

Another Dark Horse offering, The World Below by Paul Chadwick the writer/artist behind Concrete explores a mysterious sinkhole in rural Washington that leads to a secret underground realm. In a series of short adventures, six treasure-hunters risk life and limb to scour the perilous landscape for potentially profitable new forms of technology. Along the way, they’re attacked by all kinds of bizarre creatures from a giant robotic stove to a race of squidlike symbiotes to an alien society that wants to breed humans as pets. Naturally they’re also constantly endangered by their own conflicting personalities and inter-group tensions. Chadwick has likened the book to the TV series Lost, and it’s a fitting comparison.

Dark Horse is a reliably weird publisher, so it’s no surprise to find a couple of odd offerings coming from them. Ten years in the making, Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor collects a number of graphic-novel interpretations of Ellison’s short stories. They’re adapted and drawn by top-notch artists such as Curt Swan, Paul Chadwick, Mark Waid, Gene Ha, Steve Rude and Steve Niles. An eerily lifelike Ellison stares out from the cover drawn by Brian Boland; between stories, the author introduces and contextualizes his works. The stories themselves range from one-joke shorts to more elaborate thought experiments.

A more luscious and painterly surrealism can be found in God Save the Queen, written by Mike Carey and painted by John Bolton. It’s the story of an evil faery queen and a half-human changeling who finds herself pulled into a deadly circle of stylish, heroin-addicted faeries. Every page revels in its own incredibly lush but unsettlingly realistic beauty. And the story pulls no punches it’s a dark, spooky and weirdly sexy treatment of grim themes, including addiction, peer pressure, family loyalty, responsibility, forgiveness and taking loved ones for granted. In other words, this is no children’s fairy tale.

Billed as the Lost Prequel to Jimbo in Purgatory, Jimbo’s Inferno by Gary Panter is as beautiful as it is bizarre. It’s a tall, skinny book whose giant, creamy pages are crammed with Panter’s chaotic line drawings in tidily arranged square panels. A companion volume to the equally engrossing Jimbo in Purgatory, Inferno sees its intrepid hero he of the flattop haircut and musclebound torso plunging into the vile netherworld of Focky Bocky, a vast gloom-rock mallscape filled with all manner of frightened and frightening creatures. The sheer genius of transforming Dante’s vision of hell into a shopping mall allows for plenty of absurdist brilliance, most of which plays out in the hilariously over-the-top incongruity of the dialogue. In one panel, Jimbo turns to his tour guide/parole officer, Valise, and asks, Another river: is it boiling blood? But no, Valise assures him: It’s REALLY hot Dr Pepper. Think the archaicism of Dante spliced with the aggression of, say, Pulp Fiction. But in a really pretty, gorgeously put-together volume with a cool cover.

The latest book by Tony Millionaire is strange. The title character of Billy Hazelnuts is a Frankensteinian boy assembled by rats out of garbage, houseflies and mint. He and the young lady of the house, brainy Becky, set out to rescue the moon (which has disappeared over the horizon). They’re pursued by one of Becky’s suitors, a mad scientist in a galleon captained by mutinous robotic bird skeletons and seeing-eye skunks. Yep. Billy’s an odd but well-spoken little beast; unsuccessfully interviewing falling stars about the moon’s location, he protests, These blasted celestials can’t even get a story out before they explode in a flash of fire! It all takes place in Millionaire’s creepy sock-monkey universe, with its dizzying lines and button eyes and jam-packed black-and-white panels. His ever-shifting landscapes seem free of gravity, and outer space is always visible just beyond rooftops.