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CRAWL SPACE Jesse Jacobs Koyama Press, 96 pages, $28.95

It’s hard to find a stranger and more beautiful graphic novel than Crawl

Space, the latest book by creative Canadian Jesse Jacobs.

Part of a blast of attractive new releases celebrating Koyama’s 10th anniversary, it’s the story of a mysterious, colourful world accessed by some teens through laundry machines in a basement.

There’s a teenage-years story here, with anxieties, hopes and peer pressure threatening the mind-expanding realm, and the story is strong.

But this book is special because of the art.

Jacobs has combined clean line art with rainbow colours, presented mostly on nine-panel grids and often without dialogue, to tell stories visually in ways that only a comic can.

It often looks like a series of optical illusions, but it still flows as a story, even if it makes you blink sometimes.

It might freak you out and make you sad, but Crawl Space is a compelling example of the medium at its best.

HOSTAGE Guy Delisle Drawn and Quarterly, 436 pages, $32.95

The art style is simple, the words are presented in short bursts and almost nothing happens for more than 400 pages, so Hostage shouldn’t work. But Guy Delisle is such a skilled storyteller, and the story is so affecting, that Hostage is one of the best graphic novels of the year so far.

Launched at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival earlier this month, this book focuses on Doctors Without Borders staffer Christophe André, who was kidnapped in the Caucasus region in 1997.

As Montreal-born Delisle told an audience at TCAF, he spent years speaking with André about the experience and creating this powerful, nuanced graphic novel.

Every tiny change in routine became significant to André as he was chained to a radiator in an apartment for three months, alone with his fears.

The tension and ennui become hypnotic, page after page, as Delisle draws us into the dreadful experience. It’s compassion in cartoon form.

ROUGHNECK Jeff Lemire Simon and Schuster, 272 pages, $34.99

“I was never really a hockey player . . . I was just a thug.”

Derek Ouelette’s bitter words sum up his sports career in Jeff Lemire’s new release.

Afaded star whose violence had him pulled off the ice permanently, he’s back in his hometown in northern Ontario, where he spends his days washing dishes, boozing, fighting, and sleeping in an upstairs room at the local rink.

Then his sister arrives after years of absence and Ouelette, while rediscovering his Cree roots, has to face his own past, and his family’s.

Lemire is Ontarian, of course, and so is this story. Its setting will resonate with anyone who’s felt the cold and seen the bleakness of a small town in winter.

But Roughneck is a human story about regrets, and about blood, and it hits hard, like a bodycheck.

Get this book. Nobody in comics does Canadian stories better than Jeff Lemire.

WHEN BIG BEARS INVADE Alexander Finbow and Nyco Rudolph Renegade Arts Entertainment, 32 pages, $19.99

It’s pitched as “the most Canadian book ever written,” and it would be, except for all the horrible destruction.

When Big Bears Invade looks like a children’s book but is designed to delight adults.

It’s a rhyming tale of Canadian cities being wiped off the map by Godzillasized bears, who, sick of humanity’s misdeeds, work their way through our country in creative and weirdly satisfying ways.

It starts with Toronto, of course, as a grizzly hoists the CN Tower like a lance and uses it to trash skyscrapers. His furry buds target other landmarks, drowning Vancouver while surfing, then flicking Calgary away like a carpet.

Ottawa isn’t spared either, with Justin Trudeau left dangling for his life from an uprooted Peace Tower.

Thanks to lighthearted poems by Finbow and rewarding, detailed art by Rudolph, it’s funnier than it may sound, and there’s a story with a twist, too.

A guilty pleasure for disaster movie fans.