If you’re a superhero or crime-fighting vigilante, you already know that violence is the answer—you wouldn’t be running around rooftops and pouncing on bad guys if you didn’t. But how much violence to use, and can it be applied to every problem? Sure, you can punch out criminals, but can you beat up crime itself? How about poverty, prejudice and addiction?

The Details

Shadoweyes in Love

By Ross Campbell

SLG Publishing, $13

The teenage outsiders that make up the cast of Ross Campbell’s Shadoweyes comics wrestle with these questions, debating them in realistic dialogue, in the series’ second volume, Shadoweyes in Love. The mode is deconstructionist superheroics, but the mood is one of supercharged emotions, raw and scary.

If the tone often suggests 1960s Spider-Man comics meets Lord of the Flies, the book looks like nothing so much as ’80s black-and-white independent comics. Campbell’s beautiful-looking, post-post-modern characters move through gritty, grungy urban environments, where the lightest color is gray and everything is covered in well-drawn litter.