It is nearly impossible these days to walk into a bookstore without finding a section devoted to graphic novels. An umbrella term, graphic novels usually include comics, full-length books, magazines and manga, the Japanese word for comic. This month, three books — two graphic novels and one collection — show that lesbians have a lot they can look forward to in this genre.

12 Days, by June Kim (TokyoPop)
Based on a true story a stranger once shared with her, June Kim's beautiful and intense 12 Days is explores the impact of loss, and how relationships are supported and broken in times of grief.

Jackie loses the love of her life, a woman named Noah, twice. The first time happens when Noah follows her father's wishes and moves out of the apartment she shares with Jackie to marry a man. While Jackie is still trying to process the separation, she discovers that Noah was killed in a freak car accident on her honeymoon.

“When Noah talked about her death, I was always in her story,” Jackie explains to Noah's brother, Nick, who brings her the ashes after the funeral. “And I naively believed I would be there to listen to her last breath.”

Unable to cope, Jackie decides to honor and mourn Noah by consuming her cremated ashes in a drink she calls “ash smoothies.” As the 12-day cannibalistic ritual continues, Jackie and Nick develop a strong and complex connection.

The lines quickly begin to blur — between Nick and Noah, the past and the present, sanity and grief. In a particularly powerful section, Kim overlaps Jackie's memory of Noah telling her that she wants to get pregnant with a scene where Jackie and Nick almost have sex because if she had a child with him, “it would be like having one with Noah.”

Though Noah's presence in the story emerges in compelling flashbacks, it is through her absence that we truly understand Jackie's anguish. While the ashes in the jar slowly dwindle, Jackie spends her days thinking about and remembering her ex-lover — both the tender moments (“Her warm neck and breast against my back”) and the bad (“You can't even hold my hand without looking around. Whenever you do that I wish I were a man. And I can't stand that feeling.”).

Kim pays significant attention to the details — the characters' eyelashes and hands are rendered with the same precision as their expressions of grief. As with all stories of tragic loss, Jackie is consumed by the particulars of Noah's death, her last moments alive and how she might have preventing the whole thing.

Jackie's ritual of swallowing her lover's ashes comes from the ancient story of Queen Artemisia: “When her husband died, she drank his ashes so she could become his living urn.” Exactly what led Jackie to venerate Noah in this way is not fully clear until the end — and it is well worth the read to find out why.

Jokes and the Unconscious, by Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa (Cleis Press)
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud states that “laughter mediates between us and our discomfort with mortality, sexuality, ethnicity or any other touchy subject.”

Daphne Gottlieb (Final Girl) and Diane DiMassa (Hothead Paisan) use humor to address all of these “touchy subjects” and more in their new graphic novel, Jokes and the Unconscious. Based loosely on Gottlieb's life and smartly illustrated by DiMassa, it is a coming-of-age story that follows 19-year-old Sasha as she deals with her father's death from lymphoma and falls in love with a woman named Jet.

After her father dies, Sasha accepts a job as an administrator at the hospital where he had worked as a doctor. Moving from patient to patient to collect signatures for insurance forms, she begins to see her father from different perspectives as she reflects on his illness and her abusive childhood. Sasha has to reconcile the father who “did things so bizarre, there was no point in telling anyone” with the father who was a respected doctor and talked with pride, she's surprised to discover, about his daughter “the poet.”

In one chapter, “Things That Happen to Hearts,” Sasha compares her experience falling in love for the first time as a teenager to a heart attack her father suffered years before his death. “This is a story about two bodies joined by biology and coincidence. One body is in decline. One is in a post-adolescent heat.” Though her father survives (“My father's heart was just fine after a year on the treadmill”), Sasha's heart is “ruptured” when her lover leaves for college.

If Sasha ever comes daringly close to narcissism — the breaking of her adolescent heart is more destructive, she seems to think, than her father's heart attack — this is certainly the moment it would have crossed the line. Yet, even in this scene, Sasha is more reflective than absorbed, and toward the end she actually manages to reveal her father's humanity.

Many graphic novels do not get enough attention for the quality of the writing, but Gottlieb's background in poetry is evident; she has been a nationally touring performance poet. There are some lovely lines throughout this book, including: “The most powerful thing I'd ever seen, the heavy man who lumbered a bit on land, cutting cleanly through the water, beating me at races, little beads of wet clinging like sticky pearls to the gray curling hair on the tops of his shoulders” and “It's our last night together for a month and a half — she wants lips and sweet and all I am is teeth and gristle.”

DiMassa, author of The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist and an illustrator of several other books, adds an extra layer of context to the story with images that are as stark and raw as Gottlieb's prose.