Doctors

Dash Shaw is willing to bewilder you. His comics layer images and stories in a dream logic that I find helpful to approach with a wide-eyed openness. And when they've worked for me—as his new one, Doctors, most definitely does—it's because their strangeness is balanced by his characters' simple emotional language. The characters in Doctors may be enmeshed in a convoluted plot out of Philip K. Dick, involving a new medical device that temporarily revives the dead, but they speak with such direct yearning—"I care about you," "Please let me die"—that their bizarre circumstances feel intimately personal. The overall effect is a beautiful, ghostly melancholy.