E-Mail This Article to a Friend Playing the oddities Unhinge your loved ones with the weird comedy of graphic art BY MIKE MILIARD

Gleaming, snow-white pages etched with inky precision, splashed with riotous color. Labyrinthine layouts with designs on bending the mind. These recent handsome volumes aren’t just "comics" or "graphic novels." It’s almost even a disservice to call them "books." They’re art. And paging through them all is a little like strolling through a weird and wonderful museum. There’s a lot to see, so let’s get started.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you, like us, spent your formative years burying your nose in Mad magazine. That slyly subversive rag would never have existed, let alone tickled the funny bones of generations of teenage schmendricks, without the unhinged wit and wisdom of Will Elder — called "the funniest artist Mad ever had" by the mag’s late publisher, William Gaines. In Will Elder: The MAD Playboy of Art (Fantagraphics; $49.95), editors Gary Groth and Greg Sadowski have given the hugely influential cartoonist and immensely talented draftsman the sweeping career summation he deserves.

In his awestruck introduction, Eightball and Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes marvels that Elder "was a force of nature, a Mozart of zaniness, a vessel from which a seemingly endless cascade of insane humor poured forth ... [yet] he had also within his makeup the patience, conviction, dedication and control to have produced some of the most perfectly realized, technically astounding work ever seen in comics! How could such a man as Will Elder exist?" This vibrant collection explains how, following little Wolf Eisenberg from his days as a rangy beanpole with a silly-putty mug who was known as the prankster prince of the Bronx, through his formative years at New York’s High School of Music & Art — which, while fostering fortuitous collaborations with future Mad-men like Al Jaffee and (Elder’s long-time co-conspirator) Harvey Kurtzman, also taught Elder how to channel his manic, mischievous energy onto the drawing board.

Elder’s boundless imagination and Yiddish sense of humor were coupled with spot-on artistic acuity. He was an Argus-eyed observer, adept at aping the styles of everything from Little Orphan Annie and Archie comics to homey Norman Rockwell paintings. (Jaffee thinks he might well have missed out on a lucrative career as "the world’s greatest forger.") Best are his sardonic advertisement parodies, which look so much like the real thing but betray a wickedly funny twist upon closer examination. (Ad-free Mad, not beholden to Madison Avenue, could get away with it.) Elder was a chameleonic talent, as able to lose himself in roiling, hellzapoppin’ tableaux, chock-a-block with visual puns, as he was able to render delicate, almost photorealist watercolor portraits. Groth and Sadowski have put together a worthy testament to Elder’s ingenious work — not just in Mad, but in other mags like Humbug and Trump (a short-lived ’50s imprint bankrolled by cartoonist manqué Hugh Heffner) and, of course, the randy adventures of buxom, blond-bouffant bimbo Little Annie Fanny.

Speaking of buxom, Bill Ward came of age around the same time as Elder, and had much of his raw talent. But instead of a wildly diverse and multifaceted oeuvre, his body of work was almost exclusively ... well, bodies. In The Glamour Girls of Bill Ward (Fantagraphics; $28.95), a sumptuous primer on Ward’s pulchritudinous ’50s pin-up girls, editor Alex Chun revisits an era that, if not exactly politically correct, sure was a lot of fun. More than a hundred full-page panels (a fraction of the more than 10,000 drawings he completed in his lifetime) show Ward poring over the curvilinear forms of pouty, kohl-eyed sirens, lounging languidly with a slender cigarette and a stiff drink, tantalizing unseen men with titillating telephone whispers. These ladies are wonders of nature, their fulsome top halves perched precariously and improbably on sultry, swaying hips. "Pardon me, miss," asks a dumbstruck gentleman in one panel, "but I’m a structural engineer, and I have a rather personal question I would like to ask you!"

Ward’s bevy of beauties is eye candy of the best sort. His effortlessly fluid lines, shaded with sensuous delicacy by black and white conte crayon, elevate the sultry to the sublime. It might be tempting to dismiss these women as sexist relics, as they stand suggestively in gossamer slips with pert nipples at attention. But Ward’s work, even the salacious color cartoons he did for prurient ’40s comic books like Love Confessions and Flaming Love, was "bawdy ... never tawdry." Far from being sex objects, his full-figured vamps are decidedly in control. They tower over men, who’re portrayed as boors, dolts, and horny half-wits. You can tell Ward loved these women, dangerous in their sleek black cocktail dresses and dagger-sharp heels, and respected their potent allure. His women are a reminder of a more innocent time, where sex had the frisson of the forbidden.

For self-assured women of a different sort, consider the hefty new compendium Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (Fantagraphics; $39.95), which zooms in on the mythical Mexican town of Palomar (population 386), the gynocentric locale where, for two decades, Gilbert Hernandez has been tracing the "Heartbreak Soup" storyline of the legendary Love and Rockets comic he pens with his brothers Jaime and Mario. This 520-page omnibus is the first time these stories have been combined into one continuous, tortuous narrative, the way they’re meant to be experienced.

From its beginnings in 1983, Love and Rockets established itself as something wholly new: a sprawling, distinctly literary beast that was neither scrofulous underground scribbling nor musclebound superhero shtick. It was wildly popular. "Los Bros Hernandez" are that rare comic-book commodity: artists who create characters so real and believable that readers eagerly trace their travails from issue to issue, and the Palomar tales, sprinkled with hints of the magical realism of Hernandez’s fellow Latin Americans Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende, are the most rewarding of the Love and Rockets storylines.

Gilbert is a master of narrative, using the pacing and placing of his panels like a skilled editor to set the mood and move his stories along. And his drawing style, a robust chiaroscuro that splits the difference between representation and cartoonish exaggeration, is well suited for his tragicomic subject matter. He’s adept at rendering facial expression and body language, capturing nuance and emotion with a few well-placed strokes of his pen. His characters seem to breathe, and as the years pass and their complicated back-stories and gnarled family trees are explored, they each age subtly but perceptibly. With its sprawling storylines and its intricate and recognizable explorations of life and love and sex and violence and infidelity and rock and roll, Love and Rockets has been likened to a soap opera. It is, in a way — but it’s also akin to the best literature.

Another quintessential ’80s comic that’s newly rejuvenated is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. In The Sandman: Endless Nights (Vertigo/DC; $24.95), his first Sandman book in seven years, Gaiman proves that his flair for structuring graphic storylines has not diminished after years as a best-selling novelist. Seven separate narratives pairing his words with the divergent styles of seven artists, Endless Nights relates seven strange and beautiful stories, one for each member of the immortal Endless family — Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction, Destiny, and Dream.

Gaiman is an inventive and provocative storyteller, weaving archetypal myths with modern-day neuroses, with a flair for artful violence and mordant humor. He’s always written to the strengths of his artists, and the beauty lies in how this wildly diverse bunch takes up the challenge, bringing his words to life. P. Craig Russell’s take on Death is a colorful, rococo parable about a timeless Venetian aristocracy that can stave off the black touch for only so many centuries. Milo Manara’s tale of Desire is salacious and gory gothic. Text is tangential in the visceral, modernist "Fifteen Portraits of Despair," which weds Barron Storey’s expressive abstractions with Gaiman’s evocative poetry. The most breathtaking, Bill Sienkiewicz’s Delirium, makes for fittingly head-spinning multimedia expressionism. Endless Nights is a welcome return to form, and a further pushing of the envelope, for one of the medium’s masters.

Gaiman’s Sandman, a pallid, spindly goth with a shock of jet-black hair, represented a radical recasting of the comic-book hero. No omnipotent spandex-clad muscleman, this protagonist brooded in complicated shadows. In Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross (Pantheon; $35), graphic designer and editor Chip Kidd and photographer Geoff Spear have joined forces to present a magisterial overview of a comic-book artist who, in his way, has effected a similar evolution. In his detailed, lovingly rendered watercolors, Alex Ross has given Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, et al. the air of humanity. His influences aren’t just comic-book royalty Stan Lee and Jack Cole, but artists like Vermeer, N.C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell.

Director M. Night Shyamalan writes in the book’s introduction that Ross "brings the mythical to reality." Indeed, Ross is easily one of the best comic-book artists at work today. In his works, like Superman: Peace on Earth and Batman: War on Crime, the characters aren’t mere line drawings but living, breathing men. His photorealistic figures represent a gigantic leap in the evolution of the medium; a master of physiology and physiognomy, and especially of dynamic composition, Ross draws comics that evoke the drama of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The formidable combination of Kidd’s dynamic design sensibility and Spear’s dramatic photography make for a ravishingly beautiful overview of his work. The pages sing with balletic grace and thrumming kinetic energy. (As a bonus, the book includes a new Superman-Batman story, written by avowed Batmaniac Kidd and lavishly illustrated by Ross.) Combining reverence for these American icons with a revolutionary visual sense, Ross succeeds in bringing these characters to life because they are his old and trusted friends.