“O LORD, WHAT A VARIETY OF THINGS YOU HAVE MADE! In wisdom you have made them all.” We know He made the lamb and the tiger, but what about the yeti, the kraken, and the manticore? Not to mention the Invunche, a “twisted, deformed, pathetic creature” that started out as “an innocent Chilean boy who is sold to a warlock.” Then there’s the flesh-eating Burmese Khimakha, an ogre so hideous that he’s ugly “even by ogre standards.” Oh, and Mothman: It looks like a human, except that it has “massive wings, no head, and a set of large, reflective eyes embedded in its chest.” (I think we can blame that

The first thing to know about Herbie Popnecker is that he’s a good-for-nothing—a fat layabout who doesn’t say much. The other thing to know is that he’s feared and respected the world over. Occasionally. He’s also basically a god. Or at least that’s how Richard Hughes (writing under the name Shane O’Shea) and Ogden Whitney depict him. Herbie first appeared in 1958 in issue 73 of Forbidden Worlds, an anthology title released by the second-tier publishing outfit American Comics Group. It was an otherwise throwaway story called “Herbie’s Quiet Saturday Afternoon,” one not much different from the

At the end of Grégoire Bouillier’s new memoir, the author recalls passionately kissing his mother at the age of seventeen and expecting the sky to quite literally fall on his head. Seconds afterward, he laments, “Everything has remained in place. The world is the same, and I’m its prisoner. My intervention didn’t accomplish anything. Didn’t cause any upheaval. It’s always the same oppressive emptiness.” Report on Myself chronicles Bouillier’s attempts to transcend the quotidian and live an outsize life—one that approaches mythical proportions.

The memoirist’s birth is the result of a threesome

Like a chapbook or a treatise, the collected writings of Agnes Denes are sheathed between plain and precisely designed manila covers. Yet The Human Argument is no arch Conceptualist tract. If Denes is recognized as one of the earliest concept-based artists, since the late ’60s her practice has nevertheless reveled in voluminously detailed drawings that are as lush as they are rigorous and in carefully tended yet plush, shimmering fields of wheat captured in deep-focus photographs, many of which are reproduced here. Similarly, her interest in linguistic codes began bare-bones but quickly veered

Should anyone doubt that the visual aspect of the comics form is its dominant narrative mechanism and the source of its idiosyncrasies, I can hardly imagine a more potent corrective than the works of French cartoonist Chris Blain. His command of the image—his lines, colors, and layouts; the moments and actions sliced and crunched and smeared across wide perspectives—drives his storytelling, while dialogue and narration traverse the mutable terrain of his grander world, his pages.

Gus & His Gang translates some of Blain’s newest work into English. It’s a pastiche of American cowboy fiction