4 new graphic novels to fill your spring days with color and mystery

Nobody draws absence and silence like María Medem. "Land of Mirrors" (translated from Spanish by Aleshia Jensen and Daniela Ortiz) imagines the end of the world in wobbly lines, iridescent gradients and beguiling colors with barely perceptible texture. Antonia, the sole inhabitant of a deserted town, climbs a bell tower every day to observe the fields, plunges into a freezing creek, soaks in the sun with only stray dogs for company. When she finds an unusual flower to care for, keeping it alive becomes her sole reason to carry on in a world where everyone she knew and loved is gone, even her memories of their faces lost.

The monotony of isolation is broken when a stranger appears, seemingly out of nowhere, with a flask made out of mirrors. The interloper, Manuela, is a traveler whose purpose is to gather sounds that she imitates and reproduces. Hoping to save her flower, Antonia follows Manuela back to her town, venturing far beyond her familiar stretch of land for the first time. They walk for many miles accompanied by strange stories, starry nights and psychedelic berries all the way to the land of mirrors. Unlike Antonia's ghost town, this land is still inhabited by people. A party erupts with unnamed people as the sun sets, followed by a ritual celebration of the winter moon. An immortal greyhound returns once a year.

In evocative and quietly contemplative prose, "Land of Mirrors" considers solitude and longing. The story is nearly inscrutable at times, but Medem's visuals are a sensorial and aesthetic delight. Pages flooded with citrus yellow and tangerine oranges melt into amber, pink and soft lilacs across the horizon. This striking use of colors is complemented and elevated by Medem's page compositions and panel layouts. Days sometimes pass by in the span of just a few pages, yet other moments are extraordinarily slow; the sun sets, eyelids droop, embers fly in a tantalizing unhurried pace, rendering the story intensely atmospheric.

"I Ate the Whole World to Find You" by Rachel Ang tells five interwoven, ambiguous stories that follow Jenny, a 20-something woman, through various stages. In the first, she works a dead-end job, where a comical-looking man in a monocle and a top hat appears out of thin air to dock her pay if she slacks off for more than a few minutes. Falling for a co-worker with a disturbing fetish dooms her to a disaster that thrusts her back into a childhood of unspecified trauma. In the end, she emerges from a sea of amniotic fluid with her newborn, transformed by the arrival of her "inchoate co-pilot."

In "The Passenger," the second and strongest of the five vignettes, Jenny is stuck on a train ride with her ex, Jack, and his new girlfriend, who wants to be a life coach. Jenny retreats into the depths of her own mind, tuning out the world and the words of her fellow travelers, a dissociative state that Ang evokes with empty looming speech bubbles. When Jenny clutches one of the hovering empty bubbles, the compartment disintegrates into a chessboard, where she assumes the position of a pawn, while Jack and the new girlfriend become the king and a knight on the opposing side. The moment dissolves further as they transform into dogs, then into characters from the stop motion animation series Wallace and Gromit. All the vignettes in the book similarly shift from the mundane to the surreal with remarkable ease.

I first encountered Ang's work in a 2019 anthology called "Drawing Power" that collected nonfiction comics about sexual violence by more than 60 women cartoonists. While her work there left me impressed by her economical use of the medium, it is almost as if she's developed a language of her own in the years since, cinematically intermingling words and images to depict the disintegration of mind and body. Ang conjures light and shadow with no more than what appears to be pencil and charcoal: The gutter space between two panels becomes the door frame Jenny holds on to, frogs leap off the page, and wordless pages appear like storyboards for a film, where establishing shots and mid-shots are punctuated by closeup, overhead and low angles to create tension.

"I Ate the Whole World to Find You" captures its protagonist's interior world, even as the pages ostensibly focus on the exterior, through sketchy but bold and expressive lines, as well as a fluid use of space. The stories stand well enough on their own, but together they coalesce into something deeper, capturing the quiet desperation of an otherwise ordinary life littered with troubling memories.

On his deathbed, Franz Kafka makes Max Brod, his best friend who became his biographer, promise to burn all his unpublished manuscripts. Kafka dies, Brod stows away Kafka's remaining body of work, seasons turn, so do years, and the Nazis march in after spring. The manuscripts remain unburned.

Brod hotfoots it out of Prague, looking over his shoulder intermittently, through the woods and several towns, takes the last train across the Czech border, where he nearly loses the manuscripts, and then a ship to Palestine, aboard which he nearly loses the manuscripts a second time. The historical chronology of these events is modified to serve the flow of Novak's story.

There is no single panel from this short and small book that I can entice you with; the black-and-white ink drawings are simple, little more than loose scribbles. Each takes up a page by itself, surrounded by white space, almost resembling a flip book in their accumulation. The style is inspired by Belgian graphic artist Frans Masereel's wordless woodcut novels, though it lacks Masereel's intricate linework. The appeal, however, lies in the motion that Novak manages to create out of still images, a testament to the medium's curious power to animate stories in between panels, even when those panels don't appear side-by-side.

"Kafka's Manuscript" roused enough curiosity to send me down a historical rabbit hole, reading up on the real twists that left Brod's suitcase embroiled in legal controversy through the remainder of the 20th century and into the 21st, where some manuscripts languished in a Tel Aviv apartment occupied by scores of cats. Sometimes what a book leads you to can be as, if not more, interesting than what is found within.

It is said that Prometheus, the Greek Titan, stole fire from the Olympian gods to give to humanity. In this modern retelling of that myth, Prometheus, here called the Prisoner, has awoken from a millennia-long slumber in the age of iPhones and wars in oil-rich Central Asia. Written and drawn over the period of eight or so years, and brought to life with the help of a dozen flatters and colorists (the former fills colors in to the finished line work, while the latter typically adds highlights, shadows, textures and other details) this mammoth book intertwines several narratives. One follows Astrid, a young East African orphan who has been assigned to murder a god. A second follows a lost American man entangled with a military convoy in the middle of a desolate desert landscape pockmarked by signs of an ongoing war. Yet another centers on Omega, nephew to the Prisoner — an apparent stand-in for Zeus. These labyrinthine threads unite in the service of a reflection on how humans — for all our ingenuity, resilience and even empathy — are doomed to be destructive, to each other and to the natural world.

Everybody in "Tongues " talks. The gods learn speech from the humans. An eagle, the keeper of the fallen Titan who eats the Prisoner's intestine every day, talks. A chicken who isn't keen on titles talks as it guides Astrid on her murderous assignment. Even a teddy bear on the back of the lost American talks. The visual style, especially in the book's depiction of wilderness and wastelands, is reminiscent of the celebrated French cartoonist Jean Giraud. The panel layouts are often hexagonal, like honeycombs. Occasionally a page unfurls physically, folding outward to reveal more complex — and sometimes grotesque — visual imagery secreted within.

Some of the book's most baffling elements don't entirely make sense, but this, as the title suggests, is only Volume 1. And because certain parts of Nilsen's parable presume a fuller understanding of the characters and their backgrounds than the reader can (yet) reasonably possess, the story evades easy understanding. Still, "Tongues" balances brilliantly on the fine line between intriguing and perplexing.