As a fan of books like Leave It to Chance and Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, I think there’s always room for more young adults navigating mysterious, supernatural landscapes. For that reason, I think Dave Roman’s Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery (Slave Labor Graphics) is a very welcome arrival.

Agnes is an orphan living in the creepy city of Legerdemain. Instead of a bucolic Central Park at its core, Legerdemain has an enormous cemetery. Agnes can communicate with the dead, benign and malignant. To make ends meet, she’s followed in her grandfather’s footsteps, opening a detective agency focused on helping the dead complete their unfinished business and the living cope with the pervasive, sometimes hostile weirdness around them.

So in addition to the aforementioned books, Agnes is following in the increasingly rich tradition of protagonists in series like Bleach, Dokebi Bride, Kindaichi Case Files, and Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. She holds her own. Agnes is a little sullen, but she’s curious and resourceful. Legerdemain is often as strange to her as it is to the reader, and watching her uncover its secrets is rewarding.

Roman has obviously invested a lot in developing Agnes and her fictional world. In addition to the four stories that showcase Agnes solving very different mysteries, Roman has included extensive text pieces that offer a wealth of insight into his heroine and her city. (If Roman isn’t considering a possible prose novel featuring Agnes, he really should.)

The book earns its anthology tag by featuring the work of four different illustrators (Roman is joined by Jason Ho, Raina Telgemeier, and Jeff Zornow). The tones of the four stories are crafted to suit the style of the collaborator. Telgemeier’s piece has her trademark loopy sweetness. Zornow’s looks and reads like something out of Priest.

It’s an audacious approach to introducing a character, but I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. The stylistic shifts have the effect of pushing Agnes into the background. While the stories cohere in the sense that they credibly occur in the same fictional world, the protagonist becomes secondary, and I’m not sure if that’s the most effective way to manage her debut.

But the package as a whole, comics and prose, ultimately makes a very convincing argument for Agnes’s appeal. She’s a well-defined, sympathetic heroine who lives in an intriguing world. I’d just like to see a more focused approach to telling her stories that lets her shine.

If Andi Watson’s script for the first issue of Paris (Slave Labor Graphics) is a bit slight, it doesn’t really matter, as it would have needed to jump through absurd hoops to compete with Simon Gane’s fabulous illustrations. Watson wisely stands back and lets Gane do the heavy lifting, presenting highly stylized, richly detailed images of the City of Lights in the 1950s.

Juliet is an American studying art. Deborah is a rich English girl visiting the city for the first time. Juliet has to churn out portrait commissions to pay her tuition. Deborah is prevented from seeing the city by her snobbish chaperone. They meet when Juliet gets a commission to paint a portrait of Deborah, and they click when Deborah has some interesting and unconventional ideas for the commission

That’s pretty much all that goes on in the first issue in terms of narrative. Watson provides solid if minimalist introductions to his characters and their circumstances. There’s nice chemistry between his leads, and the supporting cast – the frumpy chaperone, Juliet’s bloviating tutor and bohemian roommate – rounds things out with dashes of humor.

But Gane is the main attraction here. Paris doesn’t really look like any other comic on the stands, with the possible exception of Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat. Watson has scripted a number of showpieces for Gane’s lavishly detailed, imaginative style.

Establishing shots of a variety of settings are breathtaking, from sidewalk cafes to hotel lobbies to Juliet’s Latin Quarter digs. They’re glorious and numerous, but they never seem like travelogue material. Instead of interrupting the momentum of the story, big panels and splash pages contribute to its flow, immersing readers in the city and connecting them to its inhabitants.

Character design is exaggerated and appealing. Gane likes to draw characters in profile and uses the perspective to give added detail (like the chaperone, with her hawk-like nose). Wardrobes have specificity and texture, from Juliet’s rolled-up denim to Deborah’s starchy dresses. Juliet’s art-school activities allow Gane to reproduce works by Ingres and others, loyal to the source but investing them with enough of Gane’s own visual vocabulary to ground them in the comic.

So maybe Paris is an experiment in style over substance, with Watson purposely receding as a writer to let Gane do what he does best as an illustrator. Given the gorgeous results, I’ve got no problem with that.