I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed reading about someone’s discomfort quite as much as I did in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly). Ben Tanaka is underemployed and in a relationship that’s clearly on its last legs. He and Miko have reached that phase where they spend more time dissecting each other’s behavior than connecting in any meaningful way. The precision of their criticism and the passivity of their mutual aggression is strangely breathtaking.

Under normal circumstances, it would be simplicity itself to just point and laugh at Ben’s many dysfunctions. His best source of comfort seems to be the reliability of his discontent, his desire for things he doesn’t have and reluctance to let go of what he does, no matter how dissatisfying it may be. So when Miko leaves Berkeley for New York for an internship, Ben is torn between inertia and opportunity.

He takes the opportunity of Miko’s absence to explore an aspect of his nature that he’s spent a lot of energy vehemently denying exists – an attraction to white women. Ben doesn’t really take any pride in his Japanese-American identity, but it still trips him up. It’s another thing to blame when life goes wrong, and something resembling pride bubbles up when it can make an uncomfortable situation worse.

His attempts at courting blondes go about as well as you’d expect, and Tomine isn’t even slightly above punishing Ben for his ambivalence. But Tomine isn’t wagging his finger and saying, “See? This is what happens when you step outside of your comfort zone.” He’s just showing what happens to someone like Ben tries to hedge his bets.

If I didn’t end up liking Ben (he’s a liar and a hypocrite), I did find him absolutely engrossing. He’s a perfectly conceived jerk, and his skill at deflection and contrarianism almost qualifies as a mutant ability. There’s never a “Poor Ben” moment in the book, though Tomine persuades me that Ben’s not entirely to blame for his circumstances. The bits of comeuppance Ben endures are funny and resonant, and I felt like I’d been watching him stumble for years instead of a hundred pages or so.

Add in Tomine’s clean, absorbing art and his pitch-perfect mini-satires of so many worthy targets (the art scene, academia, independent film, and so on), and you’re left with one of the most readable books of the year.

I think I’m impossibly picky about autobiographical comics. I tend to resist them when the creators give their lives too much of a narrative arc, because it always strikes me as kind of fishy, but I also don’t like to feel like my time has been wasted with meandering, disconnected episodes. Self-deprecation is always welcome, but not at the expense of some core of sincerity and self-expression. And introspection is appreciated, as long as nobody loses perspective.

At the same time, I’m reluctant to sit down and say, “I’m sorry, but your life is just kind of dreary,” or “You really don’t tell your own story very well.” I mean, how awful is that? (I realize that it’s an artificial distinction, because surely creators care at least as much about their fictional constructs, and I have no problem digging into the strengths and weaknesses of made-up stories. Still…)

I’m also fairly results-oriented. I’m not especially interested in the creative process as I am the creative product. I tend to edge towards the door when people start talking about “the work” or “the process,” and I think there’s probably a circle of hell devoted to nothing but repeated airings of Inside the Actors Studio.

But I was really taken with Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian’s Get a Life, Drawn & Quarterly’s collection of their Mr. Jean stories. So I put Maybe Later, Dupuy and Berberian’s comic journals of the creation of a volume of Mr. Jean stories, on my wish list, and someone was kind enough to send it to me.

Alternating chunks of chapters from Dupuy and Berberian, who take an entirely collaborative approach to Mr. Jean, skirt most of my autobiography aversions. D&Q’s cover text warns that, “Above all, it’s about the creative process,” which should have had me running in the opposite direction, but my faith in the creators’ companionable charm was rewarded.

I don’t know that I’m any more informed on the actual process of creating Mr. Jean, but it’s good fun to read Maybe Later and speculate as to how the creators’ individual personalities intersect in their shared fictional creation. Berberian takes a lighter, more caustic approach to his journal entries, though he does sneak in thoughtful, amusingly framed bits on why creative people create. (They end up involving archers, divers, and the Dynamic Duo. It’s weird, but it works.)

Dupuy is more of an introspective bent. He’s got marriage problems, health problems, work problems, depression and insecurity. (He’s even a bit undone by the finished quality of Berberian’s early contributions to the journal.) His chapters are more serious and sincere, but they stop short of being mopey. It’s hard to explain, but I think if you added Berberian and Dupuy together and divided by two, you’d get Jean. I’m sure the reality is nowhere near that simple, but I like the idea all the same.

And their disconnected approaches actually end up being mutually supportive. Dupuy’s darker musings balance Berberian’s sharper, more satirical bent. I can’t really decide which I liked better, because they’re so distinct, but they flow together quite nicely.

It’s not a finished narrative by any means, but the episodes and the reflections do accumulate into something that stands on its own. I liked it quite a bit.

My best memories of high school are populated by people like the title character of Aya (Drawn & Quarterly): smart, strong-willed young women with a healthy skepticism of the more conventional obsessions of the people around them. Consequently, I find Aya enormously likable, even if the book that bears her name is kind of a trifle.

In spite of her many charms, Aya is just too sensible to get into the kind of mischief that can really drive a narrative. That’s good and bad – good because her character is admirable and endearing from beginning to end, and bad because she ends up being incidental to the action.

Fortunately, she’s surrounded by people who don’t share her grounded quality. Her best friends Adjoua and Bintou are as boy-crazy and fashion-forward as Aya is level-headed, and they’re surrounded by suitors who are just as dedicated to living in the moment. Their flirtations are marked by a recognizable mixture of playfulness and cynicism that can be very funny, though it’s hard to get too invested in any of the potential outcomes.

Aya is a conscientious objector in the battle of the sexes. She’ll reluctantly help her friends out of a jam, but she’s too ambitious to waste much time or consideration on the slackers in her circle. Her indifference marks her as an oddity in the 1970s Ivory Coast society portrayed here; almost everyone just expects her to marry, and she’s routinely criticized for being too studious when there are boys to date and style to maintain.

She generally resists the urge to return the criticism in kind, though illustrator Clément Oubrerie gives her ample hooded glances and rolling of the eyes. And writer Marguerite Abouet smartly resists the urge to make her a paragon. When Aya’s patience runs too thin, she delivers common sense with blistering directness, as in a scene where she subjects herself to a decoy date on a friend’s behalf.

But for my taste, there’s not enough of her. There are charms in watching the foibles of decent but flawed people look for love (or just fun) in all the wrong places, but Aya is so captivating that she makes the rest of the crowd seem trivial by comparison. It’s not the worst flaw a story can suffer, but it makes me want to read a story that’s actually about Aya to a greater degree than the one I’ve actually got in my hands.

It’s very likable, though. Abouet’s writing combines sharp observation and generous spirit, and I’d love to see more of her stories. Oubrerie is a talented illustrator, matching Abouet’s script note for note and mining plenty of comedy and warmth out of familiar scenarios.

So, how about a sequel? Aya did say she wants to be a doctor.