Douglas Wolk

Kevin Keller, it’s worth noting, isn’t the first openly gay character in American comic books by a very long shot — he’s just the first character to say “I’m gay” on a panel in an Archie comic book. In superhero comics, it’s old news (and in art comics, it’s very, very old news). The recently announced Batwoman series by J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman will be, as far as I can tell, the first ongoing superhero comic book with an openly gay title character and a Marvel or DC logo on its cover — but “ongoing,” “superhero,” “openly,” “gay,” “title character” and “Marvel or DC logo” are all qualifiers in that description, because otherwise Starman or Renee Montoya or Freedom Ring or Midnighter or any number of other possibilities got there first.

The significant distinction here is that, unlike superhero comics, Archie comics are specifically aimed at kids (well, and at aging collectors who remember reading them as kids, but the kids are the primary audience): They’re a fantasy about what high school will be like. That’s why the addition of Kevin to the series’ endless comedy of desire and disdain is welcome and long overdue. The social fabric of high school is going to include gay people, and the sooner kids (and aging collectors) take that as much for granted as they do the Archie/Betty/Veronica love triangle, the better.

Outside the “safe world for everyone” that Archie Comics’ Jon Goldwater says Riverdale represents, this is, of course, a hot-button issue, and if Archie Comics actually wanted to suggest that it’s no big deal, they’d have just published the story instead of announcing it via press release long before it appears. (Honestly, somebody protesting a fictional character’s entirely chaste homosexuality would be the best possible publicity for this project.) It’s safe to assume that the primary audience for this particular issue of Veronica — which won’t be in stores until September — will be people who haven’t bought an Archie comic in decades, unless they also bought those similarly hyped-up comics a few months ago in which a future Archie married Betty or Veronica.

The comics-historical significance of Kevin’s appearance is that it marks a shift in the Archie franchise’s history. The Riverdale gang appeared in a series of very conservative Christian comic books in the ’70s and ’80s. And in 2003, playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa — who’s also written for Marvel Comics and “Big Love” — wrote a play called “Archie’s Weird Fantasy,” which involved older, gay versions of the Archie characters, and was blocked by a cease-and-desist order shortly before its premiere. (It was promptly rewritten as “Weird Comic Book Fantasy.”)

So how big a deal will Kevin end up being in the long run? Probably not much of one. Parent has noted that the Archie line has been trying to expand the diversity of its cast, but as Chris Sims has pointed out, the last new character who’s actually appeared in Riverdale more than a few times was introduced something like 35 years ago. Even if Kevin sticks around, it’s hard to imagine him having a role beyond “the token gay guy.” That’s just hard-wired into the premise of the last 68 years’ worth of Archie comics: There’s a small, limited group of characters, and everyone gets exactly one personality trait. And it’s safe to assume that the first same-sex kiss in an Archie comic is a good long ways off — the interracial kiss on the cover of this week’s Archie No. 608 was a long time coming, too.

So, yes: Archie’s bosses get points for trying to make Riverdale a slightly less 1940s vision of what American culture is like, because stories for children don’t just reflect the world, they shape it. But the proof that the Archie characters don’t live in a world where everyone is heterosexual won’t be the first story Kevin Keller appears in — it’ll be the 40th.

Online comic strips are barely out of their infancy. There has been a lot of theoretical discussion of the ways cartooning on the Internet might take advantage of not being printed on paper, from motion enhancement to the “infinite canvas” of the computer screen, but relatively few Web comics are both technologically innovative and worth seeking out. Most of the best online cartoonists’ work, in fact, still looks a lot like newspaper strips, in much the same way that early TV shows tended to be very much like successful radio shows but with pictures. “Achewood” is no exception. In some ways, it’s formally conservative; Onstad’s minimalist artwork has a lot in common with strips from “Garfield” to “Life in Hell” to “Dilbert,” all of which are designed to get their visuals across even when they’re squished down to the postage-stamp dimensions at which most papers run their funnies.

But it’s impossible to imagine “Achewood” running next to “Blondie” and “The Family Circus,” for reasons that have to do with both its form and its content. Onstad is in a position where he can do anything he wants with it. If a strip’s not ready to go on a particular day, he skips a day; individual strips can be as short or long as they need to be. His characters can curse up a storm. He can mess with the tone of “Achewood” any time he feels like it (and the strip’s rare failures are mostly ambitious experiments rather than going-through-the-motions gags). He isn’t beholden to a syndicate, or to daily newspapers’ need to worry about offending their audience, or to anyone except himself. “Achewood” couldn’t possibly have evolved without the Web — not because of its “infinite canvas” but because of its infinite possibilities.

The flip side to comic strips’ liberation from print is that the most successful Web comics — “PvP,” “Diesel Sweeties,” “Wondermark” — often turn into print books eventually, and some work better than others when they’re transferred to wood pulp. “Achewood” makes the transition to print miraculously well. “The Great Outdoor Fight,” in particular, works as a stand-alone story; Onstad doesn’t bother to explain who any of his characters are, but their personalities and relationships are obvious from the get-go.

The core of this volume is the friendship between Ray Smuckles, a wealthy, reckless cat, and his best friend, a brilliant but withdrawn cat who goes by the nickname Roast Beef. Art about male friendship is a tricky thing to pull off, and very often contextualizes it in violence — a tradition that Onstad pushes to its parodic limits. “The Great Outdoor Fight,” as its title suggests, is also all about dudes wailing on each other: The GOF is a long-standing annual event (“3 days. 3 acres. 3,000 men”), in which guys pummel each other until only one is left standing, and that final combatant becomes a cultural hero.

As usual with Onstad’s stories — and even, sometimes, his individual strips — “The Great Outdoor Fight” starts nowhere near where it ends. Todd, a stuttering cokehead squirrel, hits up Ray for venture capital to create a series of anatomically incorrect attachments for cellphones, which somehow leads to a visit from Ray’s mom, who drinks a little too much Chablis and lets it slip that the father Ray barely knew won the Great Outdoor Fight in 1973. Ramses Luther Smuckles, as it turns out, was a pioneering fighter — as Roast Beef puts it, “He was like the Thomas Edison of handing a dude his ass!” — who fought under the name Rodney Leonard Stubbs (“The Man With the Blood on His Hands”). And although he never quite says so, Ray is clearly desperate for some kind of connection with his father.

So Ray qualifies himself for the fight by devious methods, signs himself up as “Son of Rodney” and joins forces with Roast Beef, who knows much more about the GOF’s history and traditions. Between Beef’s strategic insights and Ray’s inherited gift for mayhem, they manage to demolish most of the competition, although Ray has second thoughts once he has blood on his own hands. But only one man can win the Great Outdoor Fight, and Ray realizes he may have to thoroughly kick his best friend’s ass — the rules, in fact, say he has to “beat him ’til he can’t crawl, see, or cry” — since the last two men standing have only an hour to settle their conflict until the organizers run them over with Jeeps.

Summarized like that, “The Great Outdoor Fight” doesn’t sound nearly as funny as it is. But that’s part of why it works as well as it does: Onstad wisely builds a rock-solid dramatic structure beneath the story’s flurry of absurdity. That’s an impressive trick, since he’s also clearly winging it — he has claimed that he never plans his story arcs ahead of time, and has also noted that he “had no idea what the Great Outdoor Fight was before like the eighth panel of nine in the strip right before it became something.”

Onstad’s flavor of comedy takes a while to get used to (although it also gets funnier with repeated readings). He virtually never bothers with conventional punch lines, and he plays almost all his jokes absolutely straight. One of the “bonus features” included in the new book is a deadpan glossary of Great Outdoor Fight terms: “A fighter who is ‘Made in the Milling’ comes by his victories naturally, without strength or combat training, study, nutritional supplements, the development of personal philosophies, or use of alcohol or drugs (unless he has used drugs and alcohol since very early in life).” There are at least six jokes built into that sentence, and all but the last sneak up on you.

As with “Arrested Development,” one of the few comedies that works at all like “Achewood,” Onstad’s humor is often cumulative: Ray’s habit of using “the hell” as an all-purpose intensifier (“The hell look at all that mayhem”) is amusing on its own, funnier as he keeps doing it, and funnier still when it becomes clear from context where he picked it up. And when Roast Beef, who always speaks in a smaller-than-normal font with no punctuation, actually uses an exclamation point or two, it’s obviously a big deal; it’s also hilarious once you notice it.

Onstad’s not particularly virtuosic as an artist: He sticks to a single line thickness, never draws a background if he can possibly get away with it, hides virtually all of his characters’ eyes behind glasses, and recycles the same few three-quarter head-and-upper-torso shots whenever feasible. He lets his language handle what his drawings can’t. (We don’t actually get to see Ray taking on many of the GOF’s “tick-pimps, boilbacks, and yard-sleepers” — although Onstad’s invention of all three of those slurs to toss off in a single caption is funny enough that it doesn’t matter.)

Still, Onstad can make a few lines say a lot — Ray’s emotions are almost entirely conveyed by the tilt of his eyebrows and the position of his paws — and his visual strengths are storytelling and, especially, design. A single image of Roast Beef and Ray’s conscripts for their army (a hapless, ectomorphic cat with a leather aviator helmet and a little Black Flag logo tattoo; a leather-jacketed, mustachioed thug who calls himself “The Latino Health Crisis”) gets across everything we need to know about them. The cover of “The Great Outdoor Fight” is a hilariously dead-on evocation of a vintage boys adventure hardcover, right down to its embossed type, and the endpapers feature immaculately pastiched GOF posters from 1924, 1943, 1957 and 1969. You don’t even have to look at the text to tell what year they’re from.

His dialogue is enormously quotable, like “The Big Lebowski”-level quotable. (“I ain’t Frederick H. Coca-Cola but I do know something about building a brand.”) But it all works to build the slower, deeper comedy that comes from “Achewood’s” characters — Onstad inhabits his characters so fully that he used to write blogs as a bunch of them. Roast Beef, in fact, also writes a print zine, “Man Why You Even Got to Do a Thing.”

“The Great Outdoor Fight” even works as an example of the thing it’s parodying. The GOF is a childhood fantasy of awesomeness, a battle royal to end all battles royal, the ultimate There Can Be Only One — and it’s also sort of awesome. It conflates masculine glory and macho clichés and pro-wrestling burlesques of macho clichés until it’s impossible to tell which is which. Its traditions are both sacred and ludicrous, just like real traditions: The army captains who emerge by the second night are presented with a feast of turkey, brandy and NoDoz, which they can either eat themselves or give to their men, but not both. There’s a terrifically twisted version of the inevitable scene in which our heroes are sizing up their opponents’ weaknesses: “It turns out Ron’s wife has extreme problems with credit-card debt,” Beef notes. “It causes him great stress and his trapezius muscles are knotted all to hell.” (Beef gets one of Ray’s minions to summon the unlucky, tense fighter: “Tell him Son of Rodney is about to sell his wife a 29-Minute Ab Minder.”)

As preposterous and aware of its own tropes as it is, the GOF ends up stumbling onto actual emotional depth and momentum anyway — there’s real suspense over how it’s going to turn out. (Even Beef and Ray’s friends back home get so excited about the fight that they come to blows themselves, just to get in on the joy of ass-kicking.) By the time the book’s plot takes its last few grand, ridiculous swerves, the dramatic structure of the whole thing falls into place: It’s a story about Ray looking for his father, finding him and finding it within himself to surpass him in the figurative and literal arena of masculinity. No other daily gag cartoonist right now is doing anything as ambitious and intricate; no daily gag cartoonist fighting sudoku and horoscopes and “Beetle Bailey” for its column inches would even have the opportunity.

In the nearly 70 years since artist Bob Kane created Batman with writer Bill Finger, there have been thousands of comics about the character, and innumerable wildly different takes on him — all of them exactly as “valid” as they are good. Well over a hundred collections of “Batman” comics are currently in print. Pull one of them off a shelf, and you might see Batman as the cheerful, gadget-happy detective that Finger established in the early years; as the passionate Byronic hero of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ collaborations; as the half-demonic bruiser Jim Aparo used to draw (as Chris Sims puts it, “Every time Jim Aparo drew Batman hitting someone, it looked like — at the very least — they would never walk again“); as the art deco/pulp hybrid of the Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers era; as the rippling creature of the shadows Don Newton drew in the late ’70s and early ’80s; as the stoic martinet who appeared in J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen’s “Justice League”; as the tormented father figure of recent years. (The ingenious premise of Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel’s “Batman R.I.P.,” currently being serialized in the comics, is that Batman’s personal experience encompasses all of those stories, and that their cumulative stress is crushing him.)

For most of the past 20 years or so, the Batman seen in comics has been dominated by Frank Miller’s conception of him: the self-doubting, relentlessly driven ideologue of “Batman Year One” who eventually becomes the pain-wracked one-man paramilitary force of “The Dark Knight Returns.” “There are 50 different ways to do Batman and they all work,” Miller said recently. “In fact, I’ve probably done about ten of them.” The echoes of Miller’s stories in “The Dark Knight” don’t stop with its title (the movie also borrows a few riffs from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s “The Long Halloween”); the Miller idea that has stuck to the character most is that Bruce Wayne has made himself into a perfect person, physically and mentally, by sacrificing a lot of his humanity.

There’s one crucial element of Batman’s relationship to the Joker in “The Dark Knight” that’s directly drawn from the comics — and one that isn’t, but really ought to be. The comic book Joker, once the goofy, practical-joke-obsessed villain that Cesar Romero played in the mid-’60s “Batman” TV show, has evolved into a much scarier avatar of chaos. He’s a psychopath whose sole stable personality trait is his sadistic amusement at the pain and fear he inflicts, and a lunatic whose madness can curdle milk at 500 feet. That comes through magnificently in Nolan’s movie: Heath Ledger’s Joker lurches through every phrase he speaks, as if he’s trying to extract the right words from his roiling mind and has to orient himself by the North Star of his cruelty. 1988′s “The Killing Joke,” a brief, savagely cruel Batman tale by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland that has recently been reprinted as a fancy hardcover, crystallized the modern conception of the character, as well as the idea that Batman and the Joker are an inseparable dyad — that they complete each other, and that their struggle can never end, because neither one can kill the other.

The modern idea about Batman that’s most glaringly missing from “The Dark Knight,” though, is that he himself is mad, one way or another. Batman’s enemies aren’t simply criminals: They’re madmen, inmates of an insane asylum rather than an ordinary jail, and he’s functionally indistinguishable from them in a lot of ways. (Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s fascinating 1989 graphic novel “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth” explores that premise.) A rich man whose parents were murdered in front of him who responds to his grief by putting on a bat costume to beat up criminals? Arguably, he’s totally insane — or maybe he’s “super-sane,” a person whose mind has adapted to bizarre and painful circumstances in radical but very useful ways.

And it’s Batman’s mind that’s at the core of the best stories about him. He’s infinitely dangerous because he’s infinitely clever: There’s a sequence I still remember vividly from a decade-old Justice League story in which he holds off an invading alien fleet with nothing more than a box of matches and a brilliant plan. One disappointing thing about Nolan’s interpretation is that his Batman is basically just a growling James Bond — he relies on super-expensive gadgets and can beat down anyone in a fight, but any number of action-movie badasses can do that. We never see “The Dark Knight’s” Batman doing anything particularly thoughtful, which is a hallmark of the comic book Batman. Not for nothing has he starred in a series called “Detective Comics” for close to 70 years.

There are also a couple of aspects of Batman comics that are impossible to capture in a live-action film — mostly because a movie’s images always have to carry the massive burden of believability, and the fact that comics are drawn gives them a lot more latitude for visual impressionism. (For that matter, the “sound design” in the comics is considerably more effective: Batman’s guttural hiss is much scarier on the page, where readers can only hear it in their own minds, than coming from Christian Bale’s all-too-human larynx.) In “The Dark Knight,” Gotham City is solid and looming, imposing and full like a slightly creepier version of Chicago or New York. In the best Batman comics, it’s practically a character itself: an old-money beauty fallen into hopeless decay (imagine what might have happened if New York actually had dropped dead when Gerald Ford told it to), a maze of alleys and gargoyles and disintegrating, mossed-over remnants of splendor.

That version of Gotham is a bit more in evidence in the other Batman movie released this month: “Gotham Knight,” a direct-to-DVD animated feature. Actually, it’s not quite a feature, but half a dozen vaguely linked vignettes created by Japanese and Korean animation studios in an anime style; their scripts were written by Americans with connections to Nolan’s movies and “Batman” comics. The stories involve a few more familiar supporting characters from the comics than “The Dark Knight,” most notably detective Crispus Allen, one of the stars of Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark’s excellent “Gotham Central” comics; detective Anna Ramirez, who appears in both the animated and the live-action movie, bears a very strong resemblance to “Gotham Central’s” detective Renee Montoya.

“Gotham Knight” is, frankly, nowhere near as good as “The Dark Knight” — there’s nothing as sharp and speedy as Nolan’s dazzling opening bank-heist sequence, and its pace and line readings are slapdash in a familiar low-budget-cartoon way. But it doesn’t have to pretend to be “real,” and the spectacle and variety of its visual approaches to Batman and his surroundings are a welcome contrast to the gray bombast of the live-action movie. Its first episode lays out the premise of the project in miniature: A group of kids describe their encounters with Batman, and their explanations of him have almost nothing in common. He’s a half-imaginary shadow, dissolving into smoke; he’s a transforming robot with an arsenal of mechanical weapons; he’s a guy in a bat suit, frail and bleeding. The point is that they’re all sort of true, and the fact that the various segments of the film all look different doesn’t mean they contradict one another.

And although they don’t have the boundary-pushing illustrative verve of the best-looking “Batman” comics of recent years (Darwyn Cooke’s cool, minimal “Ego,” Paul Pope’s ferociously blobby “Batman: Year One Hundred,” J.H. Williams III’s multilayered compositions in “The Black Glove”), they manage to fill in some of “The Dark Knight’s” conceptual gaps. The most effective segment of “Gotham Knight” portrays Batman as a creature of almost pure intellect, whose body is effectively a liability: “Working Through Pain,” written by Brian Azzarello (who collaborated with artist Eduardo Risso on the Batman book “Broken City”), is explicitly about how he manages his physical pain but is entirely in the thrall of his unending psychological torment. A little more of that might have granted some depth to Bale’s stiff, guarded performance.

Still, there’s something missing from both “Knights” that an action movie — of any kind — can scarcely provide: a space for contemplation. Comics can be read at any speed you choose, and the best ones are meant to be lingered over, image by image. “The Dark Knight” is a modern bullet train of a film: It grabs its viewers by the neck and shoulders and frog-marches them from scene to pyrotechnical IMAX scene. It’s not surprising, then, that it focuses so little on what’s going on behind that sturdy black mask. In a story about the relationship between madness and a detective’s logic, which is what most of the best Batman stories are, the reader’s own mind has to be given room to work, gazing at pictures and working out what happens in the space between panels.

As “Unmanned,” the first volume of “Y,” begins, almost every man, boy and other male mammal on the planet has abruptly dropped dead in a single instant. Only two beings with Y chromosomes have been spared, for reasons unknown: Yorick Brown, a 22-year-old amateur escape artist, and his pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand. At the moment of the disaster, Yorick is in Brooklyn, talking on the phone to his girlfriend Beth in the Australian outback, and they’re cut off just as he proposes marriage to her; the rest of the series is Yorick’s adventures as he travels the post-catastrophe world for the next five years, trying to find her again.

But he’s got a major obstacle in his path, and it isn’t just that every government on the planet wants to get its hands on the last man alive, or that roving bands of homicidal “Amazons” want to see the last vestige of male oppression scrubbed from the planet. It’s that he’s kind of a twit. Yorick isn’t much of a hero by any standard (and neither is his sister, who actually is named Hero — their parents really liked Shakespeare). He’s a callow, bumbling dope with a reasonably good heart, but he’s basically just an overgrown boy, and the overall arc of “Y” is effectively about how he becomes a man in a world of nothing but women.

The keys to Yorick’s five-year journey, naturally, are the women he’s surrounded by, especially the series’ most indelible supporting character: his bodyguard, Agent 355. Known only by her number, she’s a dreadlocked young woman who’s also a totally badass assassin in the service of the Culper Ring — a spy organization founded by George Washington (in the real world) that’s taken orders from the president of the United States ever since (in “Y”). Of course, after the men are gone, you have to go a ways down the line of succession to find an acting president … to the secretary of agriculture, it turns out.

Vaughan gets a lot of mileage out of speculating about what would happen if all men really did vanish from the Earth: Vatican City, for instance, would become a mausoleum, and so would the floor of the Tokyo stock exchange, but the Israeli military would be just fine. Long-distance commerce would be a disaster for years, thanks to the highways being blocked by enormous pileups caused by half of all drivers abruptly keeling over. Australia, as one of the few countries that allowed women to serve on submarines, would rule the waves. Supermodels would be forced into new lines of work, like driving a garbage truck full of men’s corpses. (America’s next top undertaker!)

But “Y” isn’t an argument about what really would happen if the men were all transported far beyond the Northern Sea, or even a bildungsroman, as much as it is a wickedly clever satire of patriarchal culture. It’s a story about men and the chaos and ruination they’ve brought to the world, in which all the “male” roles are played by female characters. There are ferociously funny little riffs on women getting by on their looks, “man-to-man” conversations, “women and children first,” men as protectors and women as protected, women as sexual temptresses of men, men asking women to smile, “proving one’s manhood,” and practically every other kind of awful gender essentialism.

A friend of mine once complained to me that women wouldn’t really act the way Vaughan’s characters do — that “Y” simply “puts a wig on” the familiar world. That’s actually exactly why “Y” works, in the same way that Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” makes its satirical points about the British upper class by pretending not to be about British characters. Vaughan and Guerra’s murderous female supremacist Victoria, for instance, is totally unconvincing as a woman character — because she’s a perfectly convincing male supremacist in drag. The wig is a distancing device, a way to look with fresh eyes at the assumptions about gender that normally go unspoken and the stereotypes that are common currency, and make points about how strange they are and what perpetuates them. It also makes for a much more interesting story than a serious consideration of how the world might be fundamentally different after a “gendercide.”

And, in fact, virtually every character Yorick encounters in the course of “Y” is a woman doing some sort of stereotypically male thing: The series is populated by women soldiers, convicts, politicians, pirates, paparazzi. After the plague, male impersonators who can pass for the real thing are a hot commodity, and a brothel makes a mint with a robot gentleman who says things like, “Please, tell me about your day.” For a while, Yorick conceals his gender identity in a time-honored way: wearing a burqa. By the end of the series, Vaughan has thoroughly demolished the heteronormative romantic-comedy scenario — the idea that all Yorick has to do is make his way through the obstacle course separating him from Beth, and they’ll live happily ever after — as a young man’s immature dream.

A lot of Vaughan’s satirical moves can seem a little obvious, but that’s because there’s always somebody who’s going to miss the joke. (Just to hammer the point home, the scientist who may have brought on the plague by attempting to give birth to her own clone is named Dr. Mann.) Vaughan and Guerra even poke fun at their own efforts: Near the end of the series, a pair of dramatists who’ve found that making movies forces them to dumb down their vision switch to producing comic books. “This format has all the advantages of film and none of the drawbacks,” one of them declares. “It’s the cheapest way to get our unfiltered vision into as many hands as possible!” (Yorick’s opinion of their brainchild, “I Am Woman,” about the last surviving woman in a world full of men: “Meh.”)

Vaughan’s been flirting with Hollywood himself lately — he’s currently one of the staff writers for TV’s “Lost,” and there’s a “Y” movie in development — but he’s also still immersed in comics, writing his political superhero series “Ex Machina” (with artist Tony Harris) and recently contributing a story line to the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” comics series. And for all the comparisons “Y” has gotten to HBO-style closed-ended series, it’s very much a comic book: Vaughan structures it in ways that play to the strengths of the drawn page. Almost every panel ends with a little tug toward the next (a question, an off-panel voice, an unexpected event), every page ends with some kind of suspenseful moment or dramatic flourish that demands a page-turn, and every issue (or, if you prefer, chapter) ends with a very big cliffhanger.

It flows like a waterfall, and one of the things that makes the series zip along is its no-nonsense artwork. Guerra is one of the least flashy artists working in American comics: Her character, panel and page designs put clarity first and everything else second. The trade-off is that they’re often a little stiff, but that’s fine in the context of this story, especially because she’s also terrific at getting across subtleties of facial expressions in a few simple lines. “Y” is a very conversation-heavy series, for all its bursts of action, and Guerra’s straightforward staging and clean, spare compositions pretty much clear space for the character portraits that carry as much of the story as Vaughan’s snappy, salty dialogue.

Guerra, for whatever reason, couldn’t draw “Y” fast enough to produce an issue every month of its five-year run, so there are frequent “interlude” chapters, pencilled in a close approximation of her style by Goran Sudzuka and Paul Chadwick. (Inker José Marzán Jr., who worked on every issue of the series, unifies the look of the artwork.) The interlude chapters flesh out the back stories of various members of the cast — there’s even one devoted to Ampersand the monkey — although they defer the progress of the main plot, sometimes maddeningly.

Considered as a whole, “Y” meanders a bit in the middle: An extended sequence involving a trip to Japan and a drug-addled Canadian pop star falls flat, and there’s an ambitious failure of a sequence called “Safeword,” in which Yorick manages to shed his suicidal impulses thanks to an encounter with a kindly dominatrix. There are a handful of forced coincidences wheeled into place to get the story moving, too. Still, almost every incident and object in the series ends up having some kind of symbolic resonance by the final volume.

“Whys and Wherefores” leaves open a few big questions — there’s a question implicit in the series’ title, after all — but it resolves the overall story’s progression: Yorick’s journey from boyhood to manhood, and the world’s evolution from the wreckage of a patriarchal dystopia to something better. Most of the action of the first volume of “Y” happens near the Washington Monument; by the final volume, the scene has shifted to the rather more female Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

In an epilogue, set 60 years later, Vaughan and Guerra finally show us the sort of feminist utopia the rest of the series has carefully avoided. (A young woman, seeing a man for the first time, addresses him as “sire,” then corrects herself: “No, wait. ‘Sir.’ Sir, right? I’ve never actually used that word before.”) To the extent that Yorick himself is triumphant at the end of the story, he achieves his victory by refusing to do the “manly” thing. That may be the ultimate argument “Y” makes: Before the world can change for real, the stories we tell ourselves about the nature of men and women have to change, too.

Every page of Lynda Barry’s book demands to be stared at lingeringly and lovingly. “What It Is” is nominally a book about writing rather than cartooning; it’s jumbled and digressive, occasionally vague on the details. Even so, it’s likely to be useful and even inspiring to anyone who wants to make comics, or any kind of narrative art, for that matter, because what it’s meant to serve isn’t the mechanics of creative work but the creative impulse itself.

Barry is a cartoonist (her strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” appeared on Salon for a few years) and novelist who also teaches a writing workshop, “Writing the Unthinkable”; this is more or less the book version of that course. The whole thing is in comics form, or rather comics-and-then-some. Nearly every page is reproduced from a yellow legal pad on which Barry has drawn, handwritten, doodled, painted and pasted on evocative snippets of pictures and text until virtually every space has been filled. (One of the sources of collage materials she uses most is a cache of vintage, crushingly earnest schoolchildren’s papers.) It’s an art object itself as a book, and a gorgeous one, decorated like an envelope sent to a loved one; the birds and fish and monkeys that seem to turn up everywhere suggest that Barry’s created the kind of terrain living things are drawn to, sky and sea and air all at once.

The first and longest section of “What It Is” is essentially Barry’s artistic autobiography and manifesto. It’s framed by a series of not-easily-answerable questions: What is the past? Where is it located? Are there images inside of us? What are toys? What are monsters made of? Barry describes her experience of making art as a child, how that ability went away, and how it eventually came back and she “accidentally became a cartoonist.” She changed her life, she writes, by copying other people’s work before she could make her own: “In a fairy-tale it wouldn’t work but in real life it did.” It’s a very funny piece of cartooning — her portrait of herself as a sullen, early-’70s teenager is dead-on — and insightful about her own experience: “That I had a very Gorgon-like mother never occurred to me, and if it had, I would have been lost. Did the Gorgon help me love my mother? I think she helped me very much.”

That extended reflection is followed by the heart of “What It Is”: “Activity Book,” originally published in part as a Free Comic Book Day giveaway last year. It’s a sort of instruction book, but not for writing stories, as such. The core of Barry’s concept here is the primacy of “images,” by which she doesn’t just mean pictures but moments of real or imagined sensory experience that can be brought to life with strokes of a pen. The point of “Activity Book” is for students to inhabit those moments fully, and describe them in every aspect. Barry presents it as a kind of goofy game, guided by a “magic cephalopod” and a many-eyed aquatic creature called “Sea-Ma”; she emphasizes, though, that it’s incredibly important to keep your pen moving, rather than stopping to consider what you’re doing. And she backs it up with her own example: The final section of “What It Is” is 20 pages’ worth of the doodle pad Barry kept by her side while she was working on the rest of the book. That alone looks like she was having so much fun it’d be foolish not to follower her instructions.

If all this sounds process-obsessed, it is. The old joke is that artists like making art and writers like having written; Barry’s technique is to treat writing as a kind of visual art (she strongly encourages handwriting instead of using computers), in order to make the process a pleasure. She discusses the torment that set into her (as it does every post-childhood artist) in the form of a pair of demonic questions: “Is this good? Does this suck?” As she points out, “In all the books I read, no one had ever solved the riddle by thinking their way out of it. If anything, just the opposite was true.” The pleasure of making marks, she argues, only happens when you’re willing to not know what’s happening — to let images pull you along wherever they’re going.

If you’re looking to learn from any art instruction book, it’s worth figuring out the author’s particular biases; Barry, pretty clearly, leans toward the principle of making art from one’s own personal experiences and memories. For the most part, though, the artwork sparked by “What It Is” is meant to be made, period, rather than imagined and interrogated by the is-this-good, does-this-suck demons and thrown into a bottomless pit before it’s finished, or even begun. Barry’s directives are meant to let art flow out of yourself, for yourself. She recalls a favorite college art teacher: “When she looked at your work, she looked for a long time, usually while smoking a cigarette, and then the only word she’d say was, ‘Good.’”

Conversely, Madden and Abel’s new book, “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures,” is about crafting art for an audience. They both have impressive cartooning pedigrees: Abel has written and drawn a handful of well-regarded graphic novels, most notably the American-in-Mexico thriller “La Perdida,” and Madden’s comics projects include an ingenious catalog of stylistic devices called “99 Ways to Tell a Story.” A married couple, they also edit the “Best American Comics” anthologies. “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures” is a straightforward textbook, their 15-week program of lessons for aspiring cartoonists, with homework and extra-credit assignments for each lesson plan. It’s obviously designed for schools — both Madden and Abel teach at the School of Visual Arts in New York — although they also provide tips for “Nomads” (non-school-based groups) and “Ronin” (unaffiliated students tackling the course on their own).

Abel and Madden are pretty open about their own aesthetic biases: They tend to favor traditional narrative over its absence, the techniques of Western comics over those of manga, and comics printed on paper over the digital “infinite canvas” (although there’s a section on scanning artwork and making changes in Photoshop). But they’re also aggressively open-minded — nobody who wants to make comics of any kind is going to feel excluded by their course — and they encourage experimentation. Madden, in particular, is an experimentalist to the core — he was one of the people behind the Oubapo America project of creating comics with odd formal restraints.

A good deal of “Drawing Words,” though, is cookbook-style explanation — what kinds of paper and pen nibs work best, how to clean a sable brush, how to use an Ames lettering guide — and careful analyses of interesting comics panels and pages, meant to give students insight into how successful cartooning can work. Over the course of the book, the exercises for readers grow progressively more ambitious, beginning with single-panel cartoons and proceeding through comic strips (one assignment is to draw a Sunday gag strip from a script they provide), page composition, story structure, character development, world-building and mechanical reproduction. (Comics, as Madden and Able note, are unusual in that they’re made by hand with the intention of being mass-produced.) The final assignment is making a 24-hour comic — Scott McCloud’s famous challenge to write and draw a 24-page story from scratch in a single day.

Abel and Madden’s introduction, and a lot of their examples, are in comics form; there are images (sometimes by them, sometimes reproduced from other cartoonists’ work) on almost every page. Still, most of the book is text, written in a winningly clear, casual us-to-you tone: “You’re thinking, ‘There’s got to be a better way!’” There’s a running gag involving two fictional students — miniskirted mangaphile Junko and action-comics-drawing hipster Clay — working their way through the course.

If there’s a weakness to “Drawing Words,” it’s Abel and Madden’s assumption that anyone who wants to make comics is going to be able to at least kind of draw. (An “anyone can do this!” section near the beginning lists a few examples of cartoonists who aren’t traditionally virtuosic illustrators–although one of them is John Porcellino, a superb cartoonist whose style is minimal rather than technically dodgy.) There’s only a brief chapter devoted to figure drawing and another on drawing heads and hands, and surprisingly little space devoted to the vast differences between representational drawing and cartooning. The core of Abel and Madden’s approach, though, is in their title. They emphasize that narrative and imagery in comics are inseparable — that comics aren’t just stories with a bunch of vestigial drawings, but visual objects right down to the appearance of their text.

The only real area of overlap between “What It Is” and “Drawing Words” is their very similar sets of aleatory story-generating tools. “Drawing Words” includes an appendix of “story cards”: personality traits, physical characteristics, germs of stories (“a phone call,” “a diamond ring,” “an escaped prisoner”). The “writing kit” that makes up the shortest section of “What It Is” includes a set of shorter cues — words to be written on individual slips of paper and pulled out of a bag: “telephone,” “the beach,” “snooping.” Barry also suggests a similar bag of pictures, and offers questions to be selected at random while considering them: “What does the air smell like?” “What’s beyond what’s above your head?” “Is there anyone who just left or who may be coming?”

So which of these books should you give to an aspiring cartoonist? Both of them — maybe with a note that working through their respective exercises in tandem would be a good idea. “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures” is a pragmatic and encouraging manual, a well-wrought selection of tools. It teaches readers how to put stories on paper, but “What It Is” makes its readers need to: Barry’s book is about the joy of summoning what its cover describes as “the formless thing which gives things form,” and that formless thing has to be present before T-squares and bristol board are of any use.

A madly prolific cartoonist, Sfar has published over a hundred books in France. (A handful of them have been translated into English; “Klezmer” is also worth a look, as are the many volumes of “Dungeon,” his collaboration with Lewis Trondheim and a handful of other veterans of the French avant-garde comics scene.) Unsurprisingly, he’s also a very fast cartoonist, and the look of “The Rabbi’s Cat” is splendidly casual. Even his panel borders wobble as if he’s drawing them with his less dominant hand, and some images are just a few thick and thin slashes of ink, as if he can’t get the lines down quickly enough to keep up with his story. In places, his drawing style is a bit like New Yorker cover artist Edward Sorel’s fluid chicken scratch, but Sfar’s work has enormous stylistic variation even within individual panels: The rabbi, whose face is two dots for eyes, a big semicircle for a nose and three smaller arcs for eyebrows and a mouth, sometimes appears next to his cousin Malka, an aging lion tamer and huckster who’s meticulously caricatured and shaded.

The first section of “The Rabbi’s Cat 2,” “Heaven on Earth,” focuses on the cat’s observations of Malka, as well as his lion and a snake that follows them everywhere and considers himself an angel of mercy. (“One night I’ll hide in their shoes,” the snake declares about Malka and his lover. “And I’ll bite them almost at the same time. That will be my gift. That way, they’ll die together.”) One keenly constructed sequence drifts gradually from the cat’s 6-inches-above-the-ground narration into a grand, fabulist tone, until the story erupts into violence and the death of Malka and the lion — and then cuts away to Malka, explaining to a thrilled crowd of children that “that’s the story of one of the many times that I died.” Sfar never bothers to indicate where the main narrative has become the tale-within-a-tale, but that’s deliberate. Malka is trying to become a legend by conflating the particulars of his life with the glorious death he won’t have: “He wants future generations to come looking for his grave as a place of pilgrimage, seeking his protection.”

The legend, he knows, will soon be all that’s left of him and his lion; we know that it will also be all that’s left of his community. The ’30s weren’t a particularly propitious time to be Jewish, and there’s a constant undercurrent in these stories of the encroachment of hatred around Jews wherever they travel in Europe and Africa. Near the end of “Heaven on Earth,” the rabbi’s students are thinking about learning how to fight the anti-Semites they’ve been warned are looming; he tells them that they’d be wiser to spend their time studying, because “the day they come to kill you, you’ll die anyway,” but that way at least they’ll have read some books first.

The other, longer story in the new volume is “Africa’s Jerusalem,” a zigzagging tale that starts out as a “Tintin”-like adventure and eventually evolves into a love story, graced at its conclusion with bracing flashes of eroticism. (Tintin, in fact, comes in for a drubbing: He turns up for a page as an arrogant, racist reporter, Sfar’s upraised middle finger to French comics master Hergé’s infamous “Tintin in the Congo.”) In an introductory note, Sfar claims that “Africa’s Jerusalem” is “a graphic novel against racism,” which it is, but it’s also another opportunity for him to avoid the risk of the series falling into a formula.

The story begins when the rabbi receives a mysterious crate; instead of the books he expects, it contains a Russian Jewish painter who has tried to ship himself to Addis Ababa to find a rumored Jewish homeland in Ethiopia. (He only speaks Russian, and the Algerians don’t understand it at all; fortunately, the cat understands all languages.) Joined by a rich, arrogant local Russian man and the rabbi’s cousin, a sheik who’s also part of the Sfar family, they drive off to find Jerusalem in Africa.

What they discover along the way are a lot of questions about the relationship among art, faith and truth. When the Russian artist starts painting a portrait of Zlabya, her husband furiously (and jealously) insists that it’s forbidden by the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. The painter (via his translator) insists that if golems are permissible for rabbis to make, his art isn’t idolatry but prayer: “He say God do very good job creating beautiful women and he say thank you. His golem is not for copy God, it is for make contemplate how God is a good worker.” The final panel of the book is the Russian artist, lying naked beside his new wife (an also-unnamed African woman he has met in a bar en route to Ethiopia), declaring that “telling things like they are is not my job.”

Is it Joann Sfar’s job, then? Not if he can help it: His Algiers is a city built on family anecdotes and historical research, but it’s mostly the amorphous, edge-frayed invention of a tale spinner. Whether by design or accident, “The Rabbi’s Cat” stories perpetually swerve around in tone and style, as if Sfar’s improvising them a panel at a time. Characters wander out of the story, then back in again; the mood is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but lingeringly amusing, except when it turns shockingly sad or peaceful and reflective for a page or two; any scene could be a theological discussion, a broad bit of slapstick, a digression on animal joys, a set of nature drawings.

What keeps the book’s free-form ramble from dragging it off-course is the joy Sfar takes in his characters’ voices and the whirling brio of his drawings. Even his most outrageously abstract scribbles feel observed: His cat is a doodle whose shape is no more catlike than Garfield, but has the lanky body language and capricious presence of a real alley cat, with an ineradicable cruel streak that’s instantly evident from his circle-and-dot eyes. Sfar’s drawing style casually breaks all the rules of proportion, neatness, shading and perspective, the kind of violation that can be committed only by somebody who has studied those rules Talmudically. “Blessed are you, Lord our God, who allow us to transgress,” Rabbi Abraham prays in the first book, as he digs into “the least kosher meal in the universe.” (“And a glass of milk with the ham. And a good wine named after a church or a Virgin Mary.”)

Studying and religious law, naturally, are major concerns for most of Sfar’s human characters here: They’re ways to impose comforting order on a world whose rumble is getting steadily more menacing. Rabbi Abraham quarrels with other rabbis who interpret Jewish law dogmatically, but he’s also so used to understanding his experiences through books that he has to be reminded to pull his nose out of his Citroën travel guide and see the African landscape he’s passing through for himself. And when the cat suggests that perhaps he should just silently observe his unfamiliar surroundings, Abraham says, “You mean make no comments? Have no opinion on what I’m seeing? … I’ve never done that.” The cat, of course, follows no law but his own impulses. As much as Sfar’s work radiates affection and respect toward the ancestors he has imagined, his true sympathies are with the cat’s freedom to lie, to disregard formality and to dart off in any direction his whim takes him.