The Many Deaths of Scott Koblish, Scott Koblish, Chronicle Books, £10.99

In his spare time Marvel artist Scott Koblish has been drawing his own death for years now. In four-panel pages he has imagined himself being defenestrated, knocked down in the street, knocked off a mountain, murdered by monkeys, scorpions, cats, aeroplanes, eaten by monster trees and plain common or garden monsters.

As lefthand activities go, it’s a morbidly amusing exercise in comedic bathos. Gathered together in this single volume it’s entertaining. But the repetition – which is part of the joke of course – is also, at times, a little repetitive.

The Herald:

In fact the strips that are the most fun are those where Koblish drags out his death, stretching it beyond the four-panel format. In Gone Fishing he nearly drowns, is captured by strange underground creatures and then … well, let’s not go there. Spoilers, etc, etc.

Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees, Olivier Kugler, Myriad Editions, £19.99

The Strange, Jerome Ruillier, Drawn & Quarterly, £16.30

The Herald:

Here are two very different approaches to that hot-button subject, immigration. German cartoonist Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves is the latest example of the comic strip as journalism. Kugler transforms his real-life encounters with Syrian refugees in Kurdistan, Greece, Germany, England and France into visually dense yet perfectly readable comic strips that offer a real sense of lives lived at extremes.

Commissioned by Medecins Sans Frontieres, Kugler treats the refugees sympathetically – or to put it another way, as human beings. It is an account of the complex, labyrinthine political and social landscape in which they find themselves and the small pleasures they take whatever their circumstances. Never has breakdancing looked quite so life-affirming as it does in these pages.

Madagascar-born cartoonist Jerome Ruillier, meanwhile, offers a different take on immigration. Where Kugler is journalistic, his take is more novelistic. The Strange couches an everyman story of refugee experience in a funny animal story as told in colour blocks and scratchy pencils.

It doesn’t have the same visual or narrative punch as Kugler’s take on the subject, and yet the comic book surrealism that Ruillier deals in does feel appropriate for the Kafkaesque nightmare that his characters find themselves immersed in.

Bloke’s Progress, Kevin Jackson and Hunt Emerson, Knockabout, £12.99

This is a lot of fun. Author Kevin Jackson as opted to tell the story of the life and ideas of Victorian art critic and thinker John Ruskin in a graphic novel entertainingly illustrated by veteran cartoonist Hunt Emerson channelling the anarchy of such Beano artists Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale.

The Herald:

In Bloke’s Progress our contemporary everyman Darren Bloke is haunted by the ghost of Ruskin who explains his ideas about life and politics and art and makes Darren rethink his own lifestyle and philosophy. The result is an interesting corrective to the common notion of Ruskin as a crusty Victorian conservative with a fear of sex.

Hunt Emerson is clearly enjoying himself in the pages of Bloke’s Progress, but huge credit goes to Jackson for the way he manages to find a way to transform Ruskin’s progressive and still timely ideas into comics form.