It's a weird life: Masters of the graphic novel

It's a good time to be writing comic books. Not only is the form finally and blessedly free of the theorising over its seriousness and validity that has persisted since the term graphic novel was coined, but it's also a relatively young discipline, unhampered at its best by generic cliché and offering genuinely original narrative possibilities to writers willing to experiment. Publishers seem to be catching on, too; heaven knows how well these things sell, but three striking new examples demonstrate serious investment in the kind of production and design that allow a cartoonist's art to sing.

It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken proves once again that the Canadian cartoonist Seth's is a talent to be treasured. Like last year's Wimbledon Green (also published, rather beautifully, by Cape) this is a quietly sardonic story about comic geekery and the bachelorish pleasures of collecting things, as well as a tribute to the golden age of comic cartooning exemplified by The New Yorker under Harold Ross. Set in the mid-1980s, in semi-rural Ontario and Toronto, it's the story of Seth's growing obsession with a minor cartoonist from the 1940s and 1950s called Kalo, and of the miniature quest he undertakes to establish why Kalo published so little and stopped drawing so soon.

This is an introspective, nostalgic little tale, endearingly brisk in its delineation of character and with a sly, self-condemning sense of humour - the Seth of the book is made to seem tryingly old-womanish in his habits and self-preoccupations. It's A Good Life ... is also wonderfully designed and drawn, with Seth's deftly stylised sepiatone drawings in the service of a genuinely astute grasp of pace and narrative. It's a small triumph for the form.

Also from Cape is Exit Wounds, the second graphic novel from the Israeli illustrator Rutu Modan. It's the story of Koby, a young cab driver in Tel Aviv, and Numi, the girl who contacts him to tell him that his estranged father - her lover - may have been the victim of a recent suicide bombing in Hadera. Off they go in his taxi to find out, discovering on a sequence of cross-country forays that neither of them knew the missing man, or themselves, as well as they thought.

Produced in lavish full colour, Exit Wounds is an enormously attractive book, and Modan's striking talent for scenic arrangement, her distinctive jolie laide humans and her snappy grasp of dialogue give an absolutely cogent picture of the weirdness of life in contemporary Israel . "Look at those poor bastards," says one character, leafing through a picture spread of bomb casualties. "Oh, they're from the Haifa bombing," responds the other, gloriously missing the point, "nothing to do with us." Modan's vision of Israel isn't as explicitly surreal as that of her contemporary and sometime collaborator Etgar Keret, but it's just as compelling in its portrayal of the country's many faces, from desolate countryside to teeming city, from frontline political violence to Americanised consumer fastness. It's an intriguing, percipient, unsentimental piece of work that deserves a decent audience.

It's hard to know what to make of Horace Dorlan, the enigmatic Andrzej Klimowski's third graphic work. His earlier books, The Depository and The Secret, were novel-length zones of text-free chiaroscuro, surreal semi-narratives in stark black and white whose strange perspectives and dream-like illogic recalled the output of Kafka or Fritz Lang. This, his third work, is the first to feature text; his trademark art, one sinister image per page, is intercut with lengthy passages of not-necessarily-narrative text in a strangely arbitrary fashion.

The story, loosely speaking, concerns a professor of entomology - Dorlan himself, a sort of scrubby-bearded Philip Larkin figure - who suffers a mysterious accident just before he is due to deliver a lecture in Pisa. Before long he's having visions of a cabal of white-clad doctors who crossbreed girls with insects, a troupe of pygmy musicians have taken up residence in the back of his radiogram, and his wife, who may or may not exist, is communicating only through cryptic telephone calls. On the other hand, this may all be just the troubled imaginings of a brain-damaged colleague. It's tough to tell.

Despite Klimowski's signature visual style, which remains as uniquely troubling and brilliant as ever, Horace Dorlan isn't an entirely successful experiment: the text, which now dominates the narrative, just isn't up to the standards of the illustration.

As an artist, Klimowski has an intuitive grasp of what to put in and what to leave out of his tableaux; as a writer, he's no such thing, so the reader flounders through pages of elaborately unconvincing dialogue and iterative, clichéd description. Klimowski seems to be after a kind of Pinterian surrealism in his text, but this just reads like the rubric for a misbegotten art-school project. Horace Dorlan is just about worth it for the astonishing artwork, but this artist's first two books, which border on the essential, give a truer idea of the range of his considerable talents.

'It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken' by Seth and 'Exit Wounds' by Rutu Modan are both published by Cape at £14.99. 'Horace Dorlan' by Andrzej Klimowski is published by Faber at £12.99. To buy discounted copies (free p&p), contact Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897

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