There is nothing mellow about the summer harvest of graphic novels this year. Heading the list is Jonathan Cape's reissue of The Tale of One Bad Rat (Cape, £12.99/offer £11.69) by Bryan Talbot, first published in 1995, in its Graphic Classics series. This story of Helen Potter, a girl who runs away from home and sexual abuse by her father, ultimately to end up, through homelessness in London, in the Lake District, chasing her obsession with Beatrix Potter (whose first name was Helen), is an incontrovertible and blazing masterpiece. It is a story of the redemption that art holds and its full-colour realistic drawing style is perfection of its kind. The Lake District views are exalting in their beauty.

Also in Cape's new series is another reprint, Gentleman Jim (£10.99/£9.89), by Raymond Briggs. The 28 years have not withered the simplicity and innocence of Jim Bloggs, the lavatory cleaner whose private and misguided daydreams of improving his life spill out, with heartbreaking consequences, into the public domain. Briggs wrings a deep pathos from Jim's ignorance of the outside world. Here is an ageless story of the underdog crushed by the inhumanity that man holds for man. It is a moral triumph of sorts that Jim remains the holy fool to the very end.

Talbot's work isn't the only graphic novel about child abuse. A fictionalised account of the sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Daddy's Girl (Fantagraphics, £9.99/ £9.49), by Debbie Drechsler, is psychologically more intimate than Talbot's book, and more barbed, partly because its open-endedness, in form and content, holds out little hope of salvation for its damaged protagonist. It is an excoriating piece of work, which manages a miraculous marriage of the brutal and the innocent, keeping both running concurrently. The artwork, black-heavy drawings made to resemble the weighty preciseness of woodcuts, is a visual feast, while the emerging portrait of family life and growing up is note perfect.

In The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics (Robinson, £12.99/£11.69), the editor, Paul Gravett, has done more magic digging, this time in the lost world of crime comics, and excavated 24 short pieces spanning nearly 75 years. The usual practitioners of crime are all here: Ed McBain, Will Eisner, Dashiel Hammett, Mickey Spillane, even Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, but there are genuine finds, such as the first English outing for the Milanesi Commissario Spada, by Gianluigi Gonano and Gianni De Luca, or the female detective, Ms Tree (geddit?), by Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty. A box of unmitigated delights.

From an anthology of crime short stories, we arrive at a crime “novel” with Incognegro (Vertigo, £12.99/£11.69) by Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece. It is a complex and harrowing work that holds up a mirror to a toxic chapter in American history: race lynching in the Deep South. “Going incognegro” was the term used of the risky infiltration of white mobs by light-skinned blacks to witness the murders first hand and write about them. Our hero, Zane Pinchback, is one such journalist at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. He travels to Mississippi incognegro to save his brother, accused of murdering a white woman. A twisty, flawlessly paced, rich, dense thriller, it is also a chilling social document and a layered, effortlessly entertaining meditation on identity and self-fashioning.

Talking of crime, those of us who think that Jeremy Clarkson is one of the greatest wrong turnings taken by British culture now have Rumble Strip (Myriad, £12.99/£11.69), by Woodrow Phoenix, as the perfect corrective. Drawn in crystal-clear black and white, this polemic against the car and the pervasive car culture that now infects us like an incurable disease weighs the cost of our automobile dependency to the last penny, literal and metaphorical. It is an angry essay on late-capitalist culture, an alarm bell, a long, hypnotic visual poem and a rigorous argument all rolled into one utterly original work of genius. It should be made mandatory reading for everyone, everywhere.

Funeral of the Heart (Fantagraphics, £9.99/£9.49), by Leah Hayes, is a bizarre, disturbing debut collection executed entirely in scratchboard. The stark beauty of the black-and-white medium, already hallucinatory, is intensified by the fairytale-like surrealness of the five stories that constitute the book. By turns menacing, cruel, tender and freakish, these stories, with their gallery of characters that reminds you of figures from Botero or Stanley Spencer, seem to have stepped out from Hayes's rich, febrile dreams.

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