Graphic novel roundup

“Passing for Human” by Liana Finck, Random House, 240 pages, $28

“Passing for Human” is memoir as retrieval: “A draw-er doesn’t draw because she loves to draw,” Finck writes. “She draws because once she lost something.” It is this idea that Finck has lost something — “Let’s call it ‘my shadow,’ ” she suggests — that animates “Passing for Human.” And so the book’s first image: the moon and the sun in tight embrace. All girls, we learn, are born with a living shadow that serves as a guide; most girls, including the artist’s own mother, lose it. When the book opens in a conversation between the protagonist “Leola” — presented as a reimagined or “tampered with” Liana — and a lover, the fate of Finck’s own shadow is an open question.

Finck’s line in “Passing for Human” is so fine and delicate it seems as if it will unravel altogether. Her story is also unconventional: It often stops and restarts, drifting into and out of interludes; Finck might rewrite an ancient text as a feminist fable and then suddenly recall a difficult childhood moment at school. Between prologue and epilogue appears a series of first chapters. And yet it all holds together so well that any other telling is unimaginable.

Finck has succeeded in creating her own twilight zone, a land the artist seems to inhabit, a place of both substance and shadow.

“Home After Dark” by David Small, Liveright, 416 pages, $27.95

With his groundbreaking memoir “Stitches,” David Small made the minor leap from illustrating children’s books to bringing new visual and narrative form to the hellscape of American adolescence. He furthers this project with his often disturbing, ultimately hopeful “Home After Dark.” Announced as a novel, “Home After Dark” owes its deeply affecting mood to Small’s distinct brush and wash techniques that move the reader from the interior life of his teenage protagonist Russell Pruitt into a nightmarish evocation of 1950s America: a place of broken families, dead animals and youthful excursions into homophobic cruelty.

The story follows Russell’s journey across America following the revelation that his mother has run off with his father’s best friend. As Russell’s father struggles to regain his footing, he moves his son from what appears to have been a relatively stable if alienated Midwestern upbringing into a series of roadside motels, homes of unwelcoming relatives, and finally a humble set of rooms rented from a Chinese couple. Small shows this journey in a visual style that is tempting to call “cinematic,” panning wordlessly across both landscapes and characters’ faces. Yet it is the unique possibilities of comics that carry this tale.

“Me the People” by Pia Guerra, Image, 112 pages, $14.99

Best known as a cocreator of the comic “Y: The Last Man,” cartoonist Pia Guerra’s career took a new turn the morning after Donald Trump secured the presidency, during “one of the most awake moments I’ve ever experienced,” as she explains in her introduction to “Me the People,” her first collection of political cartoons. That’s when she sketched the book’s lead image, a riff of Bill Mauldin’s iconic “Weeping Lincoln,” which he had published after the Kennedy assassination. Guerra’s Lincoln, head in hand, is titled “SMH,” the internet acronym for “shaking my head.” As such, it both recalls a classic cartoon of a national tragedy and announces itself as a new product in a digital age when presidential pronouncements are delivered in real time on social media.

Guerra most often works in single-image visual allegories, offering naturalistic yet wholly absurd scenes: the president as circus ringmaster; the president as a baby being changed by Vice President Mike Pence. Those works helped take down Tammany Hall; it remains to be seen if satire can topple a political figure who so often seems to verge into self-satire himself.