Etelka Lehoczky

Gaudy beauty and extravagant horror twine around each other in Marjorie Liu's new graphic novel Monstress. It's the story of a girl caught up in a war of magic in which neither side comes off well.

Graphic artist, fortuneteller, musician and mischief maker Dame Darcy published the comic Meat Cake from 1993 to 2008. This new compilation is packed full of all the things that obsessed her.

Minicomics are kind of a relic — few artists now want to go to the trouble of printing and distributing paper comics. But there are still a few out there that are worth the trouble of hunting down.

Valiant Comics' plus-size superhero is starring in her first solo book — and while the story (and her costume) underwhelm, Faith herself is a glorious creation; smart, compassionate, geeky and fun.

If you're the kind of person who'd wear a hot dog costume to a princess party, you'll love Lisa Hanawalt's lushly illustrated, off-the-wall diary/food meditation/travelogue Hot Dog Taste Test.

High art is highly entertaining in this grown-up goof on the Where's Waldo? books. Readers hunt down a tiny Andy Warhol against a series of elaborately detailed art and culture-themed backgrounds.

Skottie Young's comic may horrify (or delight) the parents of princess-obsessed kids. It's the story of a not-so-little girl who's gone a little violent after 27 years trapped in a sparkly fairyland.

Chester Brown's new graphic novel is hard to categorize — a work of lay scholarship about prostitution in the Bible that's simultaneously ideosyncratic, meticulous, imaginative and heretical.

Carlos Giménez's graphic novel Paracuellos is an unflinching memoir of his time in the orphanages of Franco's Spain; it makes the experiences of a few boys in the 1950s inescapably universal.

A new collection reprints the first six issues of EC Comics' classic 1950s pulp horror series. Packed with gore and goofiness, these may, in fact, be the comics your mother warned you about.