Drew Weing's Set to Sea is a pirate adventure comic. And it's published by Fantagraphics Books, which usually tends to avoid such easily identifiable genre fictions. So what makes Set to Sea so special? Oh, only everything. The book is made up of full-page panels telling the story of our protagonist, a hulking mass of a man who considers himself to be a poet. Soon enough, he's kidnapped and put to work on a pirate ship. All he wants is to escape. But then a raiding band of pirates attack, and our hero finds out he's got a certain knack for the ocean-going life. This is a gorgeous little book; Weing is a fastidious cartoonist (his work resembles Roger Langridge somewhat) who overloads every single page with feathery little lines, but not one of those lines are out of place. You can see every brick in the buildings in the background, or every knot on the wooden deck of a ship, but it's not by any means overwhelming. It's a perfectly rendered world in which to lose yourself for an afternoon, and Weing's big-hearted narrative will leave you filled with longing for a life of adventure.

Speaking of overwhelming experiences, The Graphic Canon of Children's Literature is a book that aims to overwhelm you from the very first page. It's an anthology of comics compiled by editor Russ Kick in the style of his show-stopping Graphic Canon three-volume boxed set. This time around, the artists are adapting classics of children's literature in comics form, from Aesop's fables to the Hardy Boys to fairy tales from Russia and Peru to the Harry Potter series. The book opens with underrated Seattle cartoonist Roberta Gregory's Aesop adaptations, and it includes a truly impressive array of great cartoonists, from Peter Kuper to Dame Darcy to Rick Geary. Like most anthologies, the Canon is a mixed bag; not every artist is going to be to your liking. But the highs are astronomically high. Lucky Knisley and Shawn Cheng both contribute dense adaptations of beloved works (Knisley adapts the Harry Potter series with a single page to describe the events of each book, Cheng adapts Baum's entire Oz series with a similar constraint). Lesley Barnes's "The Firebird," which you can see a piece of on the cover of the volume, is impossibly lush. Matthew Houston's geometric cartoons give The Time Traveler a welcome comedic sense, but it also adds a certain kind of majestic sadness to the final scenes of the story. This isn't a book you can give young children—there's a little bit of nudity and some of the reimaginings of Peter Pan and Little Red Riding Hood get pretty dark—but anyone with a mature enough sensibility will find themselves staggering at the breadth of artistic skill trapped between these covers.

One name you don't see mentioned often enough when it comes to artistic skill is Ernie Bushmiller, the creator of the Nancy comic strip. (If you have any doubt that Nancy is a masterpiece of cartooning, I'd direct you to Ivan Brunetti's account of trying to become the artist for Nancy, which was published by Boing Boing this week and David Schmader's great appreciation of Nancy which we published a while ago.) Fantagraphics is republishing Bushmiller's Nancy strips in chronological order, and man do these books make for a weird reading experience. The latest one is Nancy Loves Sluggo, which collects all the strips published from 1949 to 1951. It's hard to read this book from beginning to end, because each Nancy strip is so self-contained in its own little weird (but perfectly rendered) universe with its own weird laws of physics and behavior. But as a volume to dip into it's a special experience. You can't call this strip, for example, especially funny:

But its interior logic is fascinating, and as works of cartooning go, it's just top-notch rendering. There's no way anyone on earth could misinterpret what happens in this strip. It's universally understandable, even though it doesn't resemble the real world at all. Reading these strips one after the other becomes a hypnotic experience. You get sucked into Nancy's experience and you start to understand it well—maybe a little too well. You can feel your eyes becoming inky black dots. Nancy's world is many things, but it's certainly not unwelcoming.