My Fantastic Thing Is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, Fantagraphics, £35.99

Pretending is Lying, by Dominque Goblet, New York Review Comics, £16.99

Josephine Baker, by Catel and Bocquet, SelfMadeHero, £14.99

Fires & Murmur, by Mattotti and Kramsky, Dover Editions, £24.99

Sticks Angelica: Folk Hero, by Michael DeForge, Drawn & Quarterly, £17.93

Collecting Sticks, by Joe Decie, Jonathan Cape, £16.99

COME here. Look, there’s no-one around. There’s no-one who can hear you. So, go on then. You can tell me. What scares you? What really, really scares you?

Monsters, you say? Vampires? Werewolves? Really? What age are you? There are scarier things, you know. Much, much scarier. Real horror is all too human. It’s about sex and death and hatred. Fear doesn’t need shadows to fester. Sunlight works just as well.

Emil Ferris has published her first graphic novel at the age of 55. It is, quite frankly, remarkable; a deep, dark, dense vision of innocence and experience that takes in monster mags and the Holocaust, family grief and the death of Martin Luther King, all told in the pages of the ruled notebook of a 10-year-old called Karen who identifies as a werewolf and draws herself accordingly.

My Favourite Thing Is Monsters (the first of two volumes) is set in the late 1960s in Chicago; the Chicago of hippies and the low-rent, low-paid working class. It nests a murder mystery into a coming of age memoir, one filtered through a young girl’s love of horror movies and magazines and visits to the art gallery. Her next-door neighbour, a Holocaust survivor, turns up dead and Karen decides to be a detective and find her murderer (while avoiding the local bullies).

Ferris started work on the book while recovering from West Nile Virus (a mosquito-borne infection) and still suffering its after-effects on her motor responses. And yet the result is a stunning piece of cross-hatched ballpoint pen artistry and a narrative with the depth of a text novel.

For a graphic novel it’s a wordy book. But the words are worthwhile (not always the case in graphic novels). Here’s Karen talking about her brother’s bedroom: “Deeze’s laundry chair is loaded with a mixture of clean and dirty clothes in what amounts to Deeze’s closet. I used to hide here when I was little. I’d bury myself in his smell of aftershave and cigarettes and Deeze-grease. Deeze-grease smells like that Bellows painting of boxers or like standing in the men’s cologne department of Mars Hall Fields and eating pizza off the back of an alleycat who smokes Lucky Strikes. It’s sickening and delicious at the same time.”

While you get that taste out of your mouth, it’s worth noting, too, that the art is just as strong at both the macro and the micro level. Alongside the monster mag mock covers, if you look closely you’ll notice the deft use of colour breakouts and the repeated imagery of flowers and snowflakes and yellow stars and how they overlap and intertwine.

At its heart is a vision of a young girl trying to find her way in a world full of pain and fear and horror. Why, in that case, would you not want to be a werewolf if only as an act of defence?

It makes for an interesting comparison with Dominique Goblet’s graphic memoir, Pretending Is Lying, the latest publication from the New York Review Comics imprint. The Belgian cartoonist recounts her life as a daughter of a drunken father, a girlfriend and a mother in a series of impressionistic, fractured sequences mostly sketched out in a mixture of black and white and colour, paint, pencil and charcoal. It’s punchy, challenging stuff, with a scratchy insistence on texture and mood. But it keeps the reader at a distance whereas Ferris’s book invites us to dive in.

From memoir to biopic. Novelist Jean-Louis Bocquet and artist Catel Muller have teamed up before on a graphic life of Man Ray’s muse Kiki De Montparnasse. Now they’ve returned with a brick of a book that tells the story of Josephine Baker, the black American dancer who became the toast of Paris in the roaring 1920s.

Baker’s story is quite something. Born into poverty in Missouri she grew up in a racist country she needed to leave to become a true star of stage and screen in France.

Not that France was colour-blind of course. Paris embraced Baker because she was sold as a colonial vision of a half-naked African exotique famous for her “animalistic” "Danse Sauvage", which she performed in little more than a feather skirt and a smile. As her manager (and sometime lover) Pepito points out: “Leers and dirty looks are two sides of the same coin, dear.”

But for Baker, Europe let her be what America never did: herself. It made her rich, saw her courted by the great and the good, including the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, the architect Le Corbusier and many, many more.

Catel and Bocquet have a rich story to tell, one that takes in Baker’s time as a wartime spy, her involvement in the American civil rights movement (she was one of the speakers in Washington who prefaced Martin Luther King the day he gave his “I have a dream” speech), her love of animals, her friendship with Fidel Castro, her financial problems (from which she was helped out by Grace Kelly no less) and her adoption of 12 orphans of different races. It’s a huge life that requires a huge book (460 pages not counting the 100-page biographical notes) to tell it.

At times, that results in a rather bumpy narrative as Bocquet shoehorns everything in. That and the inevitable arch introductions of famous faces (“You know Man Ray?”) draw amused smiles. But you can’t fault the wealth of biographical detail. The whole thing rushes along at speed and Catel’s art is all bounce and sinew. She’s also, as an aside, great at architecture. The end product doesn’t have the humour and idiosyncrasy of something like Fire!!, Peter Bagge’s recent graphic memoir of the novelist Zora Neale Hurston, but as a gateway to a life well lived it’s worth stepping through.

The Herald:

Life stories are not the only tales that graphic novels can tell. Italian cartoonist Lorenzo Mattotti’s graphic novellas Fires and Murmur have been republished in a handsome gather-up by Dover Editions and are clearly fictions.

But that doesn’t make them clear. What’s going on in these pages? I wish I knew. Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky, who collaborates with the artist on Murmur, are here telling strange, wistful, frankly opaque fables full of fire and landscape and unstable mental states.

It’s confusing, the writing at times portentous (though that doesn’t mean it isn’t also affecting). But – and it’s a but that comes in bold type and large font size – it’s hard not to respond to the painterly slabs of colour Mattotti brings to the page. Both Fires and Murmur are full of his lush, frankly gorgeous visions of sky, sea and land, the metallic sheen of warships and the red violence of conflict. These are less stories and more dark ambient pieces that flicker and surge and drop away. For all the horror and insanity on display, you still want to walk into these pages and live in them.

For a more approachable idea of cartoon weirdness, Canadian cartoonist Michael DeForge returns with Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero. The title character is a former Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, mounty, libertarian and cellist (and that’s the condensed version), who operates in a national park full of talking flora and fauna and a clothes-stealing moose called Lisa Hanawalt (a cartoonist in-joke, that). This is minor DeForge, all quirk and facetiousness, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to visit.

The Herald:

After all this, Joe Decie’s Collecting Sticks, a sun-dappled, grey-washed vision of glamping, could seem slight, even fey. But that is to reckon without the pleasure of Decie’s smudgy vision and the recognition factor for anyone who has ever tried to live under canvas.

You could argue that Decie’s sitcom set-up of the feckless husband and capable wife is overplayed these days, but then some of us can recognise ourselves in the trope (and yes, my hand is up at this point). But really, what makes it work is its very ordinary notion of life’s small pleasures. Life is not always played out at operatic level. Sometimes it’s little more than a whisper. Sometimes some of us prefer the peace and quiet.