The conflict in Montreal cartoonist Pascal Girard's Petty Theft is set up beautifully in a scene early in the book. A shy, depressed cartoonist goes to a bookstore in search of a book that might help him get over a recent breakup. At the bookstore, he sees a beautiful young woman reading a copy of his comic book. As he watches, the young woman drops his book into her bag and walks out of the store without paying for it. If it were a movie, Petty Theft would be a charming summer romantic comedy with a great conflict at its heart. The cartoonist—whose name, yes, is Pascal—is attracted to the woman, but he doesn't know how to broach the subject of her theft. His friends don't want him to bring her over because they're afraid she'll steal their prized books. His whole tenuous relationship with her is built on a lie, or at least an aversion to the truth. Girard's art is like a sketchier version of Hergé's, with expresive, cartoony figures wandering around half-formed landscapes, giving the whole book the intimate feel of looking in a cartoonist's sketchbook. If you're in the mood for a sparkling entertainment of a comic to read in the sun on a summer afternoon, you won't find another book as cheerful, or as beautifully told, as Petty Theft.

Gene Luen Yang's excellent memoir American Born Chinese felt like a sea change in comics; for a medium that's been dominated for far too long by white dudes, Yang's coming-of-age story talked about race and racism in a way that American comics had never really discussed. Yang's newest book—as a writer; he's teamed with comics artist Sonny Liew, about whom more presently—is called The Shadow Hero, and it excavates an interesting moment in American comics history by reviving the short-lived public domain superhero The Green Turtle. Created in 1944 by comics artist Chu Hing, the Green Turtle was given his powers by a turtle spirit, and he exhibited a peculiar trait for an American comics hero: The reader almost never saw his face. The Green Turtle always fought crime with his back to the reader, or with a cape across his face. In a postscript to the book (which, in my opinion, really ought to have been an introduction, because it enhanced my enjoyment of The Shadow Hero greatly) Yang theorizes that Hing wanted the Turtle to be the first Chinese-American superhero. Times being what they were, of course, Hing had to keep his hero's race a secret even from readers.

What Yang does here is provide a ground floor for the Green Turtle story, and it's a fun comic, packed with the standard superhero tropes of dead parents and contrived costume origin stories. Liew's art is appropriate for this kind of story, representing the Green Turtle as a buff superhero (his costume consists of a mask, cape, gloves, boots, and trunks, meaning he fights crime both shirtless and pantsless) and surrounding him with cartoony Asian characters who have been emancipated from decades of racist caricature.Yang dedicated The Shadow Hero to his children, making clear that his goal is to claim a chapter of comics history for Chinese-American kids who feel alienated from the culture. He succeeds, and beautifully. I hope this isn't the last we'll see of the Green Turtle.

I'm a sucker for travelogue comics, where cartoonists sketch out their journeys in confessional, occasionally harrowing detail. So I was already inclined to like Truth Is Fragmentary, the autobiographical comics of Gabrielle Bell. But I didn't expect to love the book as much as I did. A genre can only take you so far, and Bell's cartooning charm carries the book the rest of the way. Bell's art is so perfectly married to her writing style that her handwritten captions, with their slightly-off-kilter lettering, are as much of an aesthetic choice as her dense, neurotic art style. The words and the pictures fuse into one, and you fall into the work in such a way that you can't remember if you imagined a detail you read in a caption or saw it illustrated in Bell's inky line. The book is an incredibly self-conscious account of Bell's journeys across Europe to visit friends and attend comics festivals. Bell gets into social situations and then spends the majority of the time beating herself up for some insignificant action or discussion. Then she wonders why she ever went out into the world in the first place. If that kind of thinking sounds self-destructive and dull to you, then congratulations! You are probably a well-adjusted person and Bell's comics will probably annoy you. But for everyone else, Truth Is Fragmentary is like going on a long trip across Europe with a dear friend who knows you well.