Not just black and white

Ben Katchor, in his first book in over a decade, stretches and develops his natural sense of the absurd. The figures drifting through “The Cardboard Valise’’ are drawn with deliberate, weighted lines, and bear names like Emile Delilah, Elijah Salamis, and Boreal Rince. They journey to and from places like Tensint Island, with its public toilet monuments, and Outer Canthus, a two-dimensional country, and yet their movement is more poetic than linear. A love-hate relationship with objects runs throughout; when Emile leaves his cardboard suitcase (filled with his reading matter since 1970) in a Tensint Island hotel, the contents are contemptuously removed, later given away. Ultimately, the book, with its threadbare plot involving the alleged death of Emile, becomes a parable about our obsession with things, the cardboard valise a metaphor for our deceptively sturdy bodies, themselves subject to decay or disappearance.

In a similarly surreal vein, Jim Woodring continues the wordless work he did in “Weathercraft’’ with “Congress of the Animals,’’ the tale of a cat-faced character (whom aficionados will know as Frank) and his adventures in the Unifactor, Woodring’s invented world (a name, again, known to insiders). A portly, well-dressed black duck-like creature flies a balloon over a sparse, otherworldly landscape; a man on the ground with a crescent moon-shaped head downs the balloon with a carefully thrown rock; and off we go.