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Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened, edited by Jason Rodriguez, gathers stories by 16 comic book artists and writers inspired by old postcards Rodriguez dug out of bins in antique shops. The cryptic messages scribbled onto the backs of the cards ( I was in town today. Hope you were not in a fight last night ) leave their true meaning open to interpretation, and the device makes for some really inventive storytelling. Tic-Tac-Bang-Bang, by Stuart Moore and Michael Gaydos, is a peek at the dangerous lives of tic-tac-toe hustlers in the early 1900s. Time, by Tom Beland, follows an old man looking back on a lifelong romance from the cafe where it began. And Homesick, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Micah Farritor, is a gorgeous, slightly abstracted view of a dreamlife in Paris gone hollow and drab. Like the rest of the titles reviewed here, Postcards travels far and wide but ends up getting you right where you live.

On a much lighter note is The Professor’s Daughter, written and illustrated by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. It’s actually the first book the now-renowned team worked on together, and it’s unique in that Sfar, who usually illustrates their collaborations, did the writing, while Guibert contributed the illustrations. In 19th-century London, the daughter of a famed Egyptologist falls for the mummied prince Imhotep, inexplicably awake after 30 centuries. Their madcap courtship gets them into all kinds of trouble, and eventually jail; the queen is unceremoniously tossed into the Thames; murder and mayhem ensue; and everyone, or almost everyone, lives happily ever after. The retro-style illustrations and lively, absurdist writing make this book as lovely to look at as it is delightful to read.

The antiqued look of the first few pages of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival makes it clear you’re in for something extraordinary. Following the wordless squares of sketched narrative is like watching a jittery old scrap of film dug up from the bottom of an archive; in appearance and feel, it calls to mind Chris Marker’s lovely 1962 short film La JetŽe. The plot is a classic a man sets out to make his way in the big city, where he’ll bring his family later but this time it’s infused with magic. The city is guarded by mammoth winged statues and covered in incomprehensible hieroglyphs; cute little alien creatures hide in unlikely corners. The lack of text or dialogue emphasizes the man’s sense of alienation, but gradually he makes connections with other refugees and the frighteningly strange world becomes familiar.

Despite its intimidating 600-plus pages, Tekkon Kinkreet: Black &andamp; White by Taiyo Matsumoto rockets along at breakneck speed; before you know it, the story has ended, and you find yourself flipping back through the book for a lengthier gaze at Matsumoto’s explosive, neo-punk artwork. The full-throttle, splash-and-dash illustrations perfectly suit the wild, action-fueled story: A pair of fiendish little street urchins sharp-as-nails Black and sweet-but-brutal White defend their hold over the city’s violent underworld against a gang of yakuza who want to take control. What could easily have been a work of pure, unmitigated ultraviolence instead has numerous unlikely moments of tenderness and humor, thanks to Matsumoto’s nuanced writing and obvious affection for his characters. The book has also been made into a movie available on DVD.