Hunky good looks aside, it must be pretty hard to make friends when you’re Superman. Flying around with super-speed, preternatural strength and heat vision just means the rest of the planet’s nursing an inferiority complex. So the teenage Clark Kent got a lucky break when some superpowered adolescents from the future traveled back in time to invite him to hang out with them. Superman and the Legion of Superheroes (DC Comics, $24.99), written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Gary Frank and Jon Sibal, adds a new chapter to this Man of Steel mythology. Here, the grown-up Superman travels to the 31st century to reunite with his interplanetary friends after their shiny, Jetsons-style future becomes tarnished. And yes, there’s evil to fight. A group of super-thugs are using xenophobic propaganda to exile the Legionnaires and put the earth on the brink of an us-versus-the-rest-of-the-universe war. The misinformation-becoming-gospel MacGuffin is a sly bit of timely commentary, as distrust of the government and its military and intelligence-gathering branches runs high. The book is also a fine character study: Johns’s script nails Clark’s yearning to fit in, and Frank gives Superman a lanky physique, making this version of Kal-El more relatable than more muscle-bound interpretations.

Superman might feel alienated when his Legion buddies aren’t around, but if you’re looking for an übermensch with no one to turn to, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example than Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. The spawn of demons summoned by mystical Nazis to help them fight in World War II, this cloven-hoofed hero grows up to be a loner-slash-paranormal-investigator. Hellboy Library Edition Volume 1 (Dark Horse, $49.95) collates the early installments of the series, originally published in 1993, and gives you a glimpse of the demonic crime fighter in the Cold War era, long before he made his crossover to the big screen. Here, he takes on a magically revived Rasputin and Eastern European vampires while clues about the Nazi conspiracy that teleported him aboveground come to light. Hellboy often encounters nether-dwellers who call him a sellout, but that’s okay: He usually refutes this with a stone fist upside their heads.

This handsome (and heavy!) edition don’t evince much of the angst that the new film hinges on. Rather, it juxtaposes pulp bombast and Victorian horror with the hero’s almost blasé, workaday attitude. Slimy, tentacled Elder God about to breach the borders of our reality? For Hellboy, it’s just another day in the salt mines. Throughout, Mignola’s lean dialogue amplifies the moodiness of his blocky, ink-drenched art.

Of course, you don’t have to have supernatural origins to be cut off from the world, a fact that’s explored in Seiichi Hayashi’s manga classic Red Colored Elegy (Drawn and Quarterly, $24.95). The comic, originally published from 1970–71 and now being printed in English for the first time, follows the obsessive love affair between Sachiko and Ichiro, who become so entranced by one another that they lose their desires for better jobs and richer rapport with their families. The book re-creates the listlessness of this couple’s everyday life by using cartoony, almost cubist linework against photorealistic pop-icon backdrops. As Godzilla and a giant ape monster cause chaos behind them, the pair stammer through a limp break-up conversation. Hayashi’s mixture of high and low culture generates some achingly poignant moments. The result is more like a Godard movie than a sci-fi fantasy, one where we can watch an emotional universe collapse into something akin to a black hole.