Review: New graphic novels look at vampire love, goblins and Mark Twain’s Jim, who is having a big year

Four new graphic novels showcase a range of approaches and subjects, from deadpan horror comedy to a subversive retelling of an American classic, a fantasy adventure about a magical world next to our own and an odds-and-ends collection from an American master that is more than the sum of its parts.

Big Jim and the White Boy

By: David F. Walker, Marcus Kwame Anderson.

Publisher: Ten Speed Graphic, 288 pages, $35.

Earlier this year, Percival Everett’s slyly satirical “James” imagined what would happen if Jim from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was a linguistically adroit man who, like other enslaved people, only spoke in Mark Twain’s minstrel dialect to hide his true self from white people. Walker’s “Big Jim and the White Boy” also reclaims Jim, though in more muscular form. As in the original, Jim has escaped from slavery and is floating down the Mississippi River with motor-mouthed Huck. But Walker’s graphic novel remix turns Jim from hapless wanderer to daring agent of the Underground Railroad, searching for his stolen wife and children. As in “James,” Huck is the sidekick.

The book’s boldest innovation is that it’s narrated by Jim and Huck in 1932, as bickering old friends with lots to say about what Twain got wrong. Through their narration and that of a historian character, Walker turns Twain’s picaresque into a dead-serious quest for freedom and reinvention that incorporates Nat Turner, John Brown, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and “Lost Cause” propaganda. It’s a big canvas, rendered in punchy style by Eisner Award-winning Marcus Kwame Anderson (also Walker’s collaborator on “The Black Panther Party”). While Walker’s rendering of Jim can feel two-dimensionally heroic — some action scenes where he and Huck fight off Confederates or slave hunters are distractingly conventional — the book nevertheless shines light on a character who was previously overlooked.

Frank Miller’s Pandora

By: Frank Miller and Emma Kubert, with Anthony Maranville, Chris Silvestri.

Publisher: Abrams, 208 pages, $24.99.

For the last few years, Miller has been something like the comic world’s version of “Yellowstone” auteur Taylor Sheridan, widening his creative universe by knocking out prequels and sequels to landmark works such as “Sin City,” “300″ and, of course, “The Dark Knight.” Given that, it’s exciting to see Miller launch a fresh new series, and one based in a genre far from the urban noirs he is best known for. “Frank Miller’s Pandora” collects the first six issues of a dark fantasy tale about Annabeth, a bullied and reclusive emo teen (flame-colored hair, Beetlejuice-striped clothes) who discovers the spooky forest near her home might include a portal for otherworldly monsters.

Emma Kubert’s art is appropriately flowery and fantastical, using dramatic pops of color to render the goblins, talking snakes and hobbit-like creatures whose epic power struggles are mostly invisible to Annabeth. She is more worried about the creepy residents in her mother’s boarding house and the true intentions of Knox, a mysteriously charming stranger styled like Dream from Neal Gaiman’s “The Sandman,” a work whose ethereal spirit Miller and his co-writers seem to be channeling here. The otherworldly plot dynamics get a little gnarled by this volume’s conclusion, but perhaps future installments will untangle them to create a whole new world for Miller to explore.

Life Sucks

By: Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria, Warren Pleece.

Publisher: Fantagraphics, 188 pages, $19.99.

First published in 2008 and now getting a long-overdue reissue, Abel and Soria’s “Life Sucks” is based on an old premise: boy likes girl who likes boy though not enough to break up with her creep boyfriend. But the authors juice the story with a bloody twist: The girl, Rosa, is a vampire-worshipping goth who’s unaware that the boy, Dave, is undead. The story is grounded in Dave’s workaday existence. Rather than inhabiting an elevated world of fabulous wealth and romantic musings, a la Anne Rice (who gets snarkily name-checked), Dave works nights at a depressing convenience store for owner Radu, a grouchy, cheapskate Romanian vampire who made Dave his bloodsucking servant, mostly to have cheap help.

Not all of Dave’s problems are relatable; other vampires mock him as a “vegetarian” who doesn’t hunt humans. But his life sucks in very human ways. Besides not being able to get out of the friend zone with Rosa, he has to fight for her attention with Wes, a rich surfer-dude and rival vampire with no moral compunctions about using their kind’s hypnotic powers to snag a girlfriend. This funny, de-glamorized and ironic takedown of vampire mythology courses with Gen-X ennui, lo-fi longing and sarcastic Kevin Smith-like bantering, while maintaining a surprisingly romantic spirit.

Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three

By: Chris Ware.

Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly, 208 pages, $49.95.

Just as certain music dorks get amped when some band of note releases an “outtakes and rarities” collection (you know who you are), certain comics dorks anticipate the release of Ware’s next “Novelty Datebook.” Though it has been a long 17 years since “Volume Two,” during that time Ware has clearly stayed frenetically busy. Like earlier iterations, “Volume Three” is a gorgeously printed, lovingly curated exhibition of Ware’s short-form work and sketches, cannily made to resemble a random odds-and-ends assemblage.

Starting off with typical Ware-ian self-deprecation about why the book shouldn’t have happened (“Bad idea! And: Sorry!”), the miscellany gathers a full panorama of Ware’s work, with which readers of graphic novels like “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” might be less familiar. Ware braids together the grounded (finely etched renderings of architecture in his Chicago hometown, his daughter Clara over the years, people reading on their phones on trains, sketches of ragtime musicians) with the interior (short comics about his anxieties are redolent with violently dark humor). The volume’s nostalgia — all those early 20th century toys and Warholian drawings of consumer products, real and imagined — verges on old-timey twee. But Ware’s understanding of the emotional weight of objects and memory gives this medley heft. His nearly scientific precision makes every page pulse with a love of drawing and appreciation for the mundane beauties it can deliver.

Chris Barsanti is the author of several books, including “Six Seasons and a Movie,” a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and contributor to Publishers Weekly. He lives in St. Paul.