Aiming to get readers thinking like architects and imbued with the fundamental principle that form follows function, Donnelly tallies basic requirements for a collection of buildings that Cho incorporates into a series of compelling and absorbing cutaway views. A school, for instance, should ideally have both learning and office spaces with easy access between floors, locations for eating and physical activity, and places to store supplies—all of which can be picked out in the spread-filling illustration that follows. Other structures, from shopping mall and museum to bakery, planetarium, and veterinary clinic, require distinctive mixes of similar and unique features. Cho sometimes skips essentials like restrooms and HVAC systems, although the omission is hardly noticeable. Her busy, finely detailed spaces are filled to the brim with bustling, individually drawn users who not only encompass a great range of ages, races, body types, and dress, but also include an “architect” whom viewers are invited to spot in each scene, as well as the occasional disguised animal or space alien.

In this deeply personal yet socially illuminating memoir, Maxfield navigates her Jewish American experience, tracing the tension between assimilation and exclusion. She writes: “Here’s what happens when you’re Ashkenazi Jewish. You get put in the ‘White’ box because of the color of your skin. But the self-described ‘real’ white people, the so-called ‘fringe’ groups, don’t want us in their box.” From her family lore—which includes bootleggers, a Hungarian grandfather, and a relative nicknamed “King David” of McKeesport—to contemporary tragedies like the Tree of Life massacre, the author situates her story in both intimate and historical frames. The memoir is rich in self-reflection, exploring guilt, empathy, and responsibility; Maxfield challenges readers to consider how social justice movements often overlook Jewish women when grappling with histories like slavery and the Holocaust. The author is unflinching about her own complicity, struggles, and ambivalence—she reflects on her reluctance to finally include her maiden name, Blumberg (thus claiming her Jewishness professionally), until after the 2016 presidential election. Travel memoir segments (from Europe to Morocco, Mexico, and Vietnam) interweave with these themes, highlighting the tension between global citizenship and national belonging. Equally compelling are her tender depictions of Jewish ritual, particularly the Seder, celebrating the warmth, love, and symbolism in family and faith: “every year at Passover, I say Next Year in Jerusalem, tossing a symbolic wish into the universe, a prayer… In case we don’t have a safe space here in the United States anymore.” The book’s episodic structure occasionally meanders, but the openness, insight, and dark humor maintain a steady narrative momentum. For non-Jewish readers, this is an eye-opening exploration of Jewish identity, survival, and the persistent negotiation between perceived advantage and real vulnerability.

Aside from being shut up in a submarine for nearly a decade after the polar ice caps completely melted, the crewmembers of the Absolution are doing pretty well for themselves. Morale is good, there’s birthday cake, and the showers are co-ed and uninhibited. All of this belies the sense of dread that the authors and illustrator Sanchez quickly establish with in-your-face splash pages foretelling the havoc and utter mayhem that lurk at the heart of their undersea horror show. These cramped and oppressively claustrophobic shots are juxtaposed against a wide-angle view of the Absolution silently cruising through a green expanse of algae, the world the crew once knew above possibly erased out of existence. Crackerjack Science Officer Liana Pearson, capable Capt. Martin Wilder, and the rest of the crew are eager but also wary about investigating a sudden distress call from a British warship called the Vehemence reporting the discovery of “clean soil” above their heads. (“If there are other survivors out there, if we aren’t the only ones, isn’t that worth exploring?” asks the chief engineer.) Gruesome dead bodies bathed in an awful green hue float mutely across several wordless panels before an insert highlights the fingernails of one of the corpses scraping across the hull of the smaller vessel the Absolution has dispatched to investigate—the ensuing “Screee” sound effect couldn’t be more impactful. The Absolution’s crew manages to return safely, but they do not return alone: An undersea organism determined to consume them all has come with them. What follows, as the creators deftly parallel the confined with the expansive, the now with the later, and the orderly with chaotic, is a kind of Danse Macabre with elements of grotesque body horror. Interpersonal dynamics between Pearson and the captain, and between the captain and his problematic brother, effectively underscore the dramatic tension as the unwelcome visitor ramps ups its unstoppable campaign of carnage and conquest.

Laura and Maya were childhood friends who have drifted apart in high school. Maya carries a torch for Laura but keeps it to herself, but then she and Laura kiss at Laura’s birthday party. Maya wakes up at the Heartbreak Hotel; this offers her a “timeout” from her life, but she’s stuck in a time loop in which she keeps waking up on the day of Laura’s party. Then, one morning, everything is different—she’s kicked out of her room and told to meet the other guests, who are also teenagers. The perspective shifts, and readers meet some of the other hotel guests: Martin is a lonely gay kid from a small town. He has a crush on someone he follows on Instagram and got his heart broken when he met the guy in person. Then there’s Fiona, a ballerina, whose heartbreak involves her childhood best friend, Eva, and her boyfriend Danny. Finally, there’s Finn, who doesn’t want to leave because he can’t face a world in which he’s responsible for his girlfriend’s death (“I read the checkout instructions and refused”). These characters, who are mostly strangers to each other, must become friends and work together to face their individual heartbreaks, escape the hotel, and return to their regular lives. The story of young love and grief is sad and poignant. Innocente’s expressive art is lovely, using mostly muted colors that fit nicely with the mood of the story. The hotel is literal, insofar as the characters all experience living in it, but it’s also an effective metaphor for the way people sometimes use escapism to cope with trauma. Because the characters are teenagers, they feel things particularly intensely—humiliation, betrayal, and grief are all recurring themes—and this is a deeply emotional work. There’s a dark twist at the climax, but this is ultimately a hopeful story, and one readers may find inspirational.

Encompassing works published from 1975 to 2013, this collection by Murguía reflects a flinty but compassionate sensibility, focused on people struggling on society’s lower rungs, especially in the Bay Area. The title story exemplifies the approach, narrated by a San Francisco building inspector investigating a fatal Mission District fire; the story encompasses the narrator’s personal heartache, a gentrifying community, and civic corruption in sharp, noirish language. (“The other barrio” is a euphemism for death.) The settings may vary—the Mexican film industry in “Boy on a Wooden Horse,” a Day of the Dead festival in “Ofrendas,” a Half Moon Bay dive bar in “El Último Round”—but the mood is typically dark, focused on the narrators’ past losses, usually romantic ones. A number of the pieces are short, little more than sketches, but when Murguía uses a wider canvas, he reveals some winning hard-luck characters: The narrator of “A Toda Máquina” has been working to stay sober, but a chance encounter with a woman at a Sacramento, California, convenience store sets him unraveling. These characters are at once shaped and undone by old-fashioned masculinity, from the hard-edged young men in “Winnemucca Barbershop” to the veteran dance instructor in “A Lesson in Merengue.” The sad-sack men can get repetitively gloomy (“If women are a puzzle, this one had a thousand mismatched pieces,” the “Máquina” narrator laments), but there are some welcome outliers: “Bye-Bye Vallarta,” about a woman changing her life’s direction while on a trip to Mexico; “A Subtle Plague,” a kind of ghost story about gentrification; and the sinuous closing prose-poem, “A Sentence,” interweaving details of Latin American folklore and history with references to the lust and heartbreak that drive the author’s work.