BIG BABY by Charles Burns

(Fantagraphics) $24.95This juicy bundle of reprints offers up four stories from Burns’ alternative comic work of the early 1990s, some of which appeared in Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine. The gorgeous color cover introduces new readers to an odd, alienated child named Big Baby; the volume also contains extra sketchbook material.

Burns, author of the current Black Hole comic series, portrays the stiff-faced tyke as hapless and innocent, yet brash. Big Baby (also known as Tony) is witness to the bizarre turns of circumstance in the seething suburbia around him. Sinister workmen and neighbors abound here, but most impressive is a point-of-view coup: The artist skillfully transforms the fears that adults can stir in children into horrid critters of the landscape — molemen, skinless monsters, and amphibious phantoms. Adult sex is linked to skin eruptions and illness; a room filled with blood also appears. Somehow, Burns is able to convey Big Baby’s teenage babysitter and her boyfriend as being exotic, foreign, and lurid, just the way teens seem in the eyes of children.

With an eye on pulp novels, Burns depicts a world of derelicts and sleaze just outside the sightline of suburbia; likewise, beneath the veneer of Burns’ starkly marvelous panels and creepy narratives lurks the flavor of those old educational films on health and hygiene.

In contrast to various other suburban angst narratives by baby boomers, Burns idealizes the parental figures and keeps them curiously angelic. The emotional dangers they represent are displaced to inhabit ghouls and other draconian adults. While this work’s biggest, most obvious asset is its crisp, deliciously drawn panels, its richly infused narratives are multi-layered and suffused with the preoccupations and ghoulish sicknesses of both suburban culture and childhood itself. STACEY LEVINE

A GIRL WITH A MONKEY: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES by Leonard Michaels

(Mercury House) $14.95Leonard Michaels’ short stories read like seductively poetic monologues delivered in staccato compression by a smart, stoned, and sexually sophisticated Jewish graduate student with a knack for quoting Hegel and Marx. The monologues deal almost exclusively with the sentimental education of a narrator who discovers himself, not always happily, on the front lines of the so-called sexual revolution.

Michaels’ substantial talent resides in his ability to portray, with candor and dark humor, the involuted game of getting laid as a matter both personal and political. In a story such as “The Honeymoon,” Michaels proceeds from a single moment of psychological tension — the instance when a young, beautiful bride falls immediately in love with her young, beautiful waiter — into a winding investigation of the vanity and narcissism inherent to the act of desiring.

While Michaels’ jazzy style is extremely lovely to behold, it can sometimes get the better of his material; in a couple of pieces, the acutely self-conscious hipster tactics he employs to arrive at the heart of the matter sound a bit dated, and tend to psychoanalyze the story right into oblivion. This criticism, though, is probably more a matter of familiarity than anything else — I’ve read many of the stories in this collection so often over the years that it’s easy to forget how blown away I was the first time around. And the best ones, such as “Manikin” or “Murderers,” are just as poignant and invigorating as ever. RICK LEVIN

AN EMPIRE WILDERNESS: TRAVELS INTO AMERICA’S FUTURE by Robert D. Kaplan

(Vintage) $14Robert D. Kaplan is a writer best known for his work on the bloody, deeply entrenched race feuds of the Balkans. In 1995 he visited Fort Leavenworth, Kansas — the Harvard and Yale of war games, attended by the military’s top brains and full of the relics of their priestly mission. But with the Cold War over, that mission has changed, and so has the identity of what they were sworn to protect. With this in mind, Kaplan asked a simple question: In 50 years, will the national anthem still (even involuntarily) give Americans a thrill? His short answer is no. The long answer is the book.

In St. Louis and Omaha, Kaplan finds ghettos, disowned by the surrounding polities, who have stronger links to their international counterparts on the web than to their own fellow citizens. In Arizona he comes across Navajo and Hopi restrained from tribal bloodshed only by the presence of the federal government. Kaplan’s most heartbreaking chapter is “The Greyhound Underclass,” describing a bus journey through the Southwest among the victims of a society commercialized to sterility, in which those at the bottom are driven deeper into the legacy of their wrecked families and the repetition of their parents’ awful lives: “I had never traveled among a more rootless and unstable crowd… who took such poor care of themselves. Never in Africa, certainly not in Mexico….”

In the West, Kaplan finds his models of 21st-century America in the multinational and fragmented sprawl of Orange County, and in Portland, where the civic duty and ecological ethos often called “Seattle liberalism” finds its true home. Seattle, Kaplan feels, is neither fish nor flesh. Kaplan all but guarantees that British Columbia will join the U.S. Northwest, culturally if not in independent nationhood, and argues that with our public spaces, wilderness, and strong neighborhoods, we may be the only Americans in the future with anything we would fight to keep. GRANT COGSWELL