The thing about observational humor is that it all depends on the person doing the observing. Everyone has his or her own standards for who constitutes good company, and I can’t think of better than Lewis Trondheim, at least based on Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella (NBM).

The one-page cartoons illustrating Trondheim’s everyday observations and encounters are really delightful – witty, astute, low-key, sweet, and polished, but never fussy. He doesn’t seem to be in love with the sound of his own voice, and he doesn’t abandon his instincts as a storyteller because the content is casual and unstructured. It’s just so perfectly in scale, and the ultimate effect is one of effortlessness.

It’s also gorgeous. Trondheim renders everyone as gently cartoonish animals, but his facial expressions are pricelessly on point. Watching exasperation, consternation, bemusement, shock and contentment light up his menagerie is a constant source of delight in miniature. Since many of the sequences focus on his travels, there are some gorgeously rendered settings as well. The use of color is remarkably rich throughout, whether Trondheim is rendering a castle in Scotland or just letting his beaky avatar pop out of the frame.

I just can’t say enough good things about this book. It’s charming, funny and sincere without being saccharine or remotely self-involved. There are plenty of cartoonists who have tried to strike this kind of personal, conversational tone, but I’ve rarely been so disappointed to see the conversation end.

I was glad to see Greg McElhatton’s critique of Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert (NBM), the second in a series of graphic novels inspired and sponsored by the Louvre. It’s a fascinating project, and I’m glad that NBM is offering the books in English. Unfortunately, I can’t share Greg’s enthusiasm for this installment.

It’s obviously a matter of taste, but I think the most effective satire comes at least partly from a place of affection. It’s a quality I find singularly lacking in Mathieu’s descent into the bowels of the museum and the psyches of its caretakers. While Mathieu cleverly (perhaps too cleverly) examines the contradictions and quirks of curatorial scholarship, there’s no flip side in evidence… no acknowledgement that these cultural repositories provide a vital resource and that the people who toil in them might do so out of a love for that culture.

It’s as though Mathieu’s critical lens is as myopic as the one he ascribes to the Kafkaesque bean-counters who absurdly and ineffectively tend and catalog the museum’s holdings. They’re just counting the dots in a Seurat painting instead of standing back and absorbing the cumulative effect, plodding down an obsessive-compulsive path that’s both endless and futile. It’s a bleak assessment and ultimately, I think, a false one.

Of course, art is subjective, and it’s entirely possible that I’m misinterpreting Mathieu’s intent, or that I’m responding too severely to a level of satirical rigor that’s just not to my taste. I certainly share Greg’s appreciation of Mathieu’s skill as an illustrator and of the Louvre’s evident commitment to freedom of artistic expression. It’s just that Mathieu’s argument as I see it is shallow and too easily contradicted. The mere fact that the Louvre conceived of this graphic novel project, a synthesis of the contemporary and the classic, is telling enough, isn’t it?

I’m so crazy about Rick Geary’s Treasury of Victorian Murder series (NBM). The Saga of the Bloody Benders is the latest, and it upholds the excellent standard that Geary has set.

I do find them kind of difficult to review, and I think that’s because Geary makes what he does seem so effortless. I know it can’t be; the books are meticulously researched and wonderfully drawn. But the chapters of history Geary chooses are so engrossingly grisly that it’s hard to imagine how they wouldn’t make a good comic.

In this case, his subject is a murderous family of Kansas settlers who set up shop in a relatively bustling byway. Unwary travelers check in to the Benders’ grocery and restaurant, never to be seen again. Even after their reign of profitable terror is ended, mysteries remain, and Geary spends a good half of the book examining the rumors and theory that swirled around the crimes.

Geary uses the crimes to articulate qualities about their era, which deepens the pleasures of the comics. There’s a subplot in The Murder Room by P.D. James about how certain crimes could only have taken place in their given historical era and setting, and Geary seems to be an adherent to that philosophy.

While I love comics like Action Philosophers (Evil Twin) that make use of the outlandish possibilities of cartooning to educate, I’m equally taken with Geary’s straightforward approach. He resists the urge to embellish or put words in people’s mouths, and he doesn’t need to. The facts in evidence and the way he presents them are gripping enough that they don’t need flourishes.