THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, . . . . excuse me, I mean a narrative told in comic-strip or comic-book format — illustrations that are themselves stories, plus plot-and-character-developing words that spell out what the pictures alone cannot — is a form of literature that is rightly popular and now university-respectable.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), a Pulitzer-prize winning memoir of the author’s parents’ survival of Nazi Europe, is often considered the first serious graphic narrative.

But there was an earlier work: Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip (NYRB, $18.95).

Published first in Italian in 1968, Poem Strip: Including an Explanation of the Afterlife, has been translated into English and reprinted in 2009. Thanks to Marina Harss’s translation, the late-1960s, drug-hallucinatory, rock-music background of the book is given believable and absorbing expression.

Buzzati’s book is a bizarre concoction. Essentially a rewrite of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, we see Orfi — a rock star — descend into the subterranean hell of Milan, in search of Eura, his beloved. They meet but just as the myth insists, they also part.

Before meeting Eura, Orfi encounters a bevy of nude temptresses — who occasion some of Buzzati’s most compelling art — and he is also cajoled into giving a one-man-show rock concert for the occupants of this Milanese Hell, who are fine, really, except for the boredom that defines eternity.

Poem Strip begins with a tour of a mysterious street, Via Saterna, where, at the discotheque, Polypus, the mini-skirted "kids go wild" every night, dancing to Orfi’s latest hit, Witches in the City.

The song, which names a series of women, denizens of "smoky courtyards," "blackened scaffolding," "the murky bowels of tenements and dives" (19), etc., again permits Buzzati’s art to re-imagine pin-ups, movie posters, and even the surrealism of Salvador Dali.

After singing of bewitching sirens, Orfi goes in search of Eura. Though living, he’s permitted to enter Hades, and, as Hell goes, it’s not bad: "The night. The wind. Lamps swinging, solitude, the Kirghiz steppes, thedance floor, an old ballroom, crumbling. . . ."

Too, Orfi’s guide is a black-stockinged, high-heeled, otherwise naked belle, and even Death is imagined as "The Lady who kills pleasure, The Lady who breaks up happy gatherings."

Buzzati’s décor in Poem Strip is 1960s art of the highest sort: zesty, pop-artistic, intelligent. It’s like The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds: weird, comic, fun. But Buzzati refers directly to European artists, Italian filmmakers, and one American girly-mag publisher. Yes,it’s the unkillable 60s. Superb.

Ho Che Anderson’s King: A Comic Biography, The Special Edition (Fantagraphics, US$35), collects between hard covers the author-illustrator’s formerly, separately issued King I, II, & III, which appeared between 1993 and 2002. This 2010 edition features new material,including "an essay by the author on the making of the book, preliminary sketches, . . . deleted scenes," and a new comic-strip treatment of contemporary U.S. race relations.

Anderson is African-Canadian, raised in Toronto, and a child of the radical 1960s: He’s named for both Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.

At first, Anderson’s radical sympathies prevented him from seeing Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize laureate and leader of the U.S. civil rights movement, as a fittingly radical subject. But, as he learned more about King’s life and struggles, Anderson discovered that King (assassinated on April 4, 1968) was that most rare being — a successful revolutionary.

Now, with President Barack Obama in the White House, Anderson believes the time is right for fresh consideration of King’s advocacy of equality as "one of the greatest . . . achievements toward social justice in the 20th century."

Vitally, Anderson draws an earthy King, one who likes soul food and soulful women, but who is also capable of inspiring and challenging oratory, theological radicalism and courageous leadership, even when faced with fists, firebombs, and F.B.I. persecution.

Anderson reminds one of U.S. poet Walt Whitman: He keeps publishing the same book, in different editions.

But what a book!

George Elliott Clarke, a Nova Scotia-born author and poet, is a literature professor at University of Toronto. In 2001, he won the Governor General’s Award for poetry.