There are certain comics that carry tremendous nostalgia for me. The squeaky teens of the Archie books and the adorable deformities of the Harvey roster take me back to long childhood hours in the station wagon headed from Cincinnati to Massachusetts or Missouri. When I think of super-heroes, images by Johns Buscema, Romita, and Byrne and George Pérez illustrate those thoughts.

In spite of relatively limited exposure to his work (The Rabbi’s Cat, Vampire Loves, a short in Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators), Joann Sfar has managed to make his way onto the list of creators whose work I feel like I’ve been happily reading forever. There are plenty of cartoonists whose work I admire and will happily seek out, but there’s something special about Sfar.

The imminent arrival of Klezmer (First Second) provides another opportunity to figure out exactly what that special quality is. It’s the first installment of a story of a ragtag group of musicians who find their way together through a shared focus on traditional Jewish songs. In it, Sfar covers familiar territory – faith, the intersection of cultures, love, death, and art.

As with his other works, there’s no apparent precision to Sfar’s storytelling. He has a tendency to wander off point and riff on subjects seemingly as they strike him. The tendency can manifest itself as a surprisingly tender and romantic look at the history of Odessa or a who’s-on-first exchange about life after the Yeshiva. But the wanderings end up contributing to the whole. In a Sfar book, you can learn as much or more about the characters when they aren’t talking about themselves as when they are.

And the cast is linked in their shared flight. The band leader saw his companions murdered. The singer is avoiding the inevitability of an arranged marriage. Two have been thrown out of their respective yeshivas. The guitarist almost died at the end of a rope.

Each is ambivalent about the world around them and the sudden arrival of companions as they travel through it. For some, klezmer is a recent discovery. It’s a useful way to make some money or simply the thing that they’ve decided to do next after their original plans fell apart. But the music and the act of performing it has the power to sneak up on them. It’s something they and their audiences can share, even if it isn’t the product of their culture or if it holds no particular nostalgia for them.

It all unfolds in a lovely way that’s both casual and powerful. More than just about any other comic creator I can think of, Sfar folds in big ideas without ever turning them into Big Ideas. His observations can be absolutely scathing, but they don’t curdle things; the tone of Klezmer is ultimately expansive, even if individual moments can be bleak.

His illustrations, done in watercolors, are perfectly in synch with the story he’s telling. Sfar’s visual style is distinct but incredibly versatile. It can be simplistic, even crude, and wonderfully expressive at the same moment.

I’m still not precisely sure how Sfar has managed to make such an impression on me so quickly. It’s enough that he always creates inviting, imaginative worlds to visit, places that are both warmly familiar and surprising.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

In a lot of juvenile fiction, the moral is the same: “Be yourself.” Don’t compromise your beliefs or values for some artificial notion of success or popularity. The moral sounds good on paper and on film, and it’s good advice in general.

Of course, these fictions are often constructed in such a way that there really isn’t any other sensible choice. Being yourself may not be the easiest path, but it’s clearly the most rewarding one. You may not score the flashy outcomes, but the really important ones –true friends, romance, self-respect, the Mathalon trophy – are within your grasp.

Reality is much messier, obviously. No matter what your age, “be yourself” isn’t always intuitively useful advice. And there are always instances where others are all too happy to make assumptions on precisely who the real you is based on the flimsiest (or laziest) of pretexts.

There’s an undeniable thread of “Be yourself” running through Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese (First Second), but he frames it with so much wit and frankness that it never seems simplistic or cliché. It’s a bracingly funny look at racism (both blatant and internalized).

He breaks the book into three stories. In the first, the Monkey King thinks his stature and accomplishments rank him as an equal among the supernatural pantheon. (The pantheon disagrees.) In the second, Jin struggles with the burdens and assumptions of being “the Chinese kid” in an overwhelmingly white school. The third is a grotesque sitcom where bland young Danny’s every step towards popularity is undone by the annual visit of Cousin Chin-Kee, a horrific amalgamation of Chinese stereotypes.

Each of the concurrent stories has its own style, from revisionist fable to coming-of-age slice of life to nightmare with canned laughter. The styles support each other, as do the stories. They accumulate into a larger view of the ways cultural and individual influences intersect and conflict. Yang’s artistic style is appealingly simple and clear throughout.

The formal intersection of the three stories isn’t entirely effective, and the ending seems a bit rushed. It’s hard to see how it could have been otherwise, because Yang isn’t telling the kind of story that can really be concluded neatly, if at all.

There’s tough, challenging material here, and Yang doesn’t diminish it by delivering it with a general lightness of tone. If anything, the comic warmth of the book makes the sharper moments more effective. Should you really have laughed at that? Would you in a different context?

(This review was based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. Yang has written a series of posts about American Born Chinese at First Second’s blog.)