Four new graphic novels showcase a range of approaches and subjects, from deadpan horror comedy to a subversive retelling of an American classic, a fantasy adventure about a magical world next to our own and an odds-and-ends collection from an American master that is more than the sum of its parts.

Big Jim and the White Boy
By: David F. Walker, Marcus Kwame Anderson.
Publisher: Ten Speed Graphic, 288 pages, $35.
Earlier this year, Percival Everett’s slyly satirical “James” imagined what would happen if Jim from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was a linguistically adroit man who, like other enslaved people, only spoke in Mark Twain’s minstrel dialect to hide his true self from white people. Walker’s “Big Jim and the White Boy” also reclaims Jim, though in more muscular form. As in the original, Jim has escaped from slavery and is floating down the Mississippi River with motor-mouthed Huck. But Walker’s graphic novel remix turns Jim from hapless wanderer to daring agent of the Underground Railroad, searching for his stolen wife and children. As in “James,” Huck is the sidekick.
The book’s boldest innovation is that it’s narrated by Jim and Huck in 1932, as bickering old friends with lots to say about what Twain got wrong. Through their narration and that of a historian character, Walker turns Twain’s picaresque into a dead-serious quest for freedom and reinvention that incorporates Nat Turner, John Brown, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and “Lost Cause” propaganda. It’s a big canvas, rendered in punchy style by Eisner Award-winning Marcus Kwame Anderson (also Walker’s collaborator on “The Black Panther Party”). While Walker’s rendering of Jim can feel two-dimensionally heroic — some action scenes where he and Huck fight off Confederates or slave hunters are distractingly conventional — the book nevertheless shines light on a character who was previously overlooked.

Frank Miller’s Pandora
By: Frank Miller and Emma Kubert, with Anthony Maranville, Chris Silvestri.