Julie Delporte's Everywhere Antennas delivers the intimacy of reading someone's journal. It also happens to be one of the most beautiful journals you've ever seen. Antennas tells the story of Delporte's mysterious ailment, which she attributes to wi-fi signals and cell phones and basically modern society in general. In beautiful, delicate colored pencil illustration, Delporte explains how she decided to run away from it all in a quest to overcome crippling anxiety. This is not a book for hypochondriacs—I almost think it should be sold with a giant bright orange sticker on the front that reads JULIA DELPORTE IS NOT A MEDICAL DOCTOR—but the conversational style and beautiful artwork makes this a fascinating, but sometimes maddening, experience.

The Amateurs is a disgusting, dirty joke of a book. Here's the premise: Two men wake up with a bizarre sort of amnesia. They recognize each other, but they don't know much else. Through context clues, they realize they work as butchers. So, without any knowledge or skills, they decide to butcher some live animals, with disastrous results. It's a black-and-white comic, so the pages are thick with inky blood as the two men bumble through their day, chasing down a pig and accidentally cutting themselves while impatient customers try to figure out what the hell is going on. Conor Stechschulte's artwork is as brutal as the premise, with slashing lines raining down everywhere on the page. If you approach the book as a physical comedy, where entrails and gore are the props, you'll find yourself happily laughing your ass off by the time you see the surprised expression on the pig's face when it realizes what's about to happen.

This is the same kind of problem that plagues people who write for Mickey Mouse: Hello Kitty is a character who basically, and by design, has no personality at all. She's a space intentionally left blank, and she resists any attempts to give her motivation. We know the kitty is saying hello, but why? She seems cheerful, but is she blithely so? Is there wit behind those dots and whiskers, or is it more of a corn-fed innocence? (Is she even a cat, for God's sake?) Hello Kitty Hello 40 is an anthology of mostly silent comics by 41 international artists, including Jay Stephens, Gene Luen Yang, Debbie Huey, and Chynna Clugston Flores, depicting the ongoing adventures of Hello Kitty in stories of three pages or less. There's a lot of technical mastery in this book, and the bright colors practically bounce off the glossy pages and into your eyes, but the character at the center of all the stories—making friends with giant robots, going on road trips, joining a rock band, fighting monsters, throwing parties—is basically a blank.

If you're looking for children's comics with personality, local comics publisher Fantagraphics Books happens to be putting out quite a few great examples this fall.

In addition to their gorgeous chronological Peanuts collections, they're also printing smaller themed Charlie Brown collections like Waiting for the Great Pumpkin and Snoopy's Thanksgiving. These are Peanuts quick hits, brief showcases of particular personality tics. Great Pumpkin follows Linus through several Halloweens as he keeps faithful to the idea of a deity who visits only the most sincere pumpkin patch. Charles Schulz was a devout Christian, but it's hard not to read a loving satire of organized religion into these books, especially when Linus sits on a curb with an alarmed look on his face and announces, "I was a victim of false doctrine." Snoopy's Thanksgiving is a little less thematically satisfying, as it includes a whole array of Thanksgiving gags, from a mix-up with Snoopy's brother Spike to shenanigans involving a fake mustache and Woodstock's continual outrage at the slaughter of all those poor birds to celebrate thankfulness. If you like a little more adventure in your kids' comics, Fantagraphics also publishes some nifty Carl Barks books including Donald Duck and the Ghost of the Grotto. Barks fashioned Donald Duck as a kind of suburban American Tintin, an adventurer who also likes quiet nights at home with his nephews. This little book, slightly larger than a postcard, contains giant octopuses, errant missiles, and angry hornets. What else could a kid want?