
"Killing and Dying" by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly: 128 pp., $22.95): Tomine is a superlative comics artist, both for the acuity of his storytelling and the authority of his lines. In this collection, he makes a major creative leap, gathering six works of graphic fiction that take on baseball, domestic violence, the death of a loved one and the desire, or necessity, of making art — all of it evoked with an understated subtlety, without sentimentality or cliché.