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The best books are often hard to classify. Lynda Barry's autobiographical, instructional and inspirational graphic novel What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly, 210 pages, $24.95) is one of these, because it's both an intensely personal memoir of Barry's creative life and a writing guide. Oh, and it's a DIY creative activity kit too. So where to shelve it? The newly minted graphica section? Art? Psychology? Activity books? Memoir? Although the most autobiographical of Barry's books, What It Is is also a creative text presented in a very original way, so it most naturally belongs next to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

Regardless of where it's shelved, What It Is is unique. It starts with Barry herself, whose creative life has stalled. Working through and diagnosing her malaise and writer's block, she becomes introspective. "The thing I call 'my mind' seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants," she begins. Her path as an artist began in childhood and Barry establishes a connection between the importance of imaginative childhood play and art and creativity in adulthood; both, she argues, are essential to well-being.

Art and embellishment fill page after page of yellow legal paper, divided into three distinct sections identified by the colour of page borders. Over these 200 pages of dense, personal material, Barry examines the nature of imagination and memory, combines comics and collage and blurs the distinction between drawing and handwriting. It's much the same way someone might doodle while talking on the phone. Barry thinks most adults continue to do this long after they've given up on art, "because it helps us maintain a certain patient state of mind and there is a part of us which has never forgotten this ... a place where one line can still follow another without a plan."

Stamps and postmarks appear both as decoration and reminders of the passage of time when Barry considers memory and its use in creativity. Here, she poses many questions: "Is a dream autobiography or fiction?" "What makes us able to imagine something?" and the two supreme questions that haunt every artist, whatever the medium: Is this good? Does it suck?

The middle section, called Activity Book, is filled with the exercises Barry uses in her popular creativity workshops: helping others mine their creativity functions as an inspiration to her own. In the final section, Barry provides the essentials of a DIY writing kit, such as words to cut out and tips on materials (a three-ring binder and loose-leaf paper - all in Barry's unique baroque collage style.

Text and image interplay in many ways: Text lies inside an image (unlike a word balloon) and strips of found typography add texture. Ad slogans, sentence fragments, lists of names and random words become a sort of poetry, interspersed with product advertisements clipped from old newspapers and magazines and even glitter. Occasionally, Barry uses vintage primer page for practising children's letters as her sketch paper, superimposing her recurring menagerie of fish, squid, dogs and monkey sketches or cutout pictures of birds. All these images decorate Barry's text rather than merely illustrate it, like an illuminated manuscript. It's an extraordinary peek into the mind of the artist.

It's precisely Barry's brand of imagination that Joshua Cotter's young characters rely on in Skyscrapers of the Midwest (Adhouse Books, 269 pages, $19.95) to create an alternative universe. Cotter's fictional vision is darker, and the commingling of cute and dark imagery to convey a litany of petty childhood cruelties is unsettling, but interesting because of the symbols he uses.

The story concerns two children - a vaguely anthropomorphized boy and his kid brother - as they navigate the many disappointments of childhood. To escape their boredom and unhappiness, they live in their imagination, a landscape populated by strange monsters and giant robots. A stuffed toy dinosaur disemboweled by a dog becomes the pet dinosaur of their imaginary world, attacked by monsters.

Both boys are drawn with large blank eyes and cat ears which, in the fantasy sequences, also become grotesque. The protagonist's constant anxiety and frequent migraines take the form of a robotic cicada buzzing in his head.

Dash Shaw also uses subtle anthropomorphization, though it goes unexplained. In Bottomless Bellybutton (Fantagraphics, 720 pages, $29.95), Shaw's portrait of the dysfunctional Loony family, only the youngest son, Peter, has a frog head and eyes. Perhaps that's how his family perceives him, or it's the visual manifestation of his feelings of insecurity.

David and Maggie Loony gather their three grown children to their ocean-side home - Big Chill-style - for a family reunion and an announcement: After more than 40 years of marriage, they are getting divorced. This unexpected news precipitates several tiny crises for each of the children, played out over many scenes and accented with childhood flashbacks.

But what distinguishes Bottomless Bellybutton from other literary graphic novels is that it has the luxury of delving into each character at a leisurely pace: The book stretches out for more than 700 pages. Reading it truly feels like a week spent living in the Loony household, especially since Shaw conjures the house as elaborately as he does his characters by emphasizing details of its layout, playing with blueprints and cutaway diagrams to help orient the reader through the temporarily overcrowded space.

Alissa Torres also has a family story to tell: her own. American Widow (Villard, 210 pages, $25) is Torres's memoir of 9/11 bereavement as interpreted by cartoonist Sungyoon Choi. Torres's husband, Eddie, started his job at Cantor Fitzgerald. in the World Trade Center, on 9/10, when she was 7½ months pregnant. Torres narrates her story to a photo of her late husband, captured peacefully asleep, that is taped to the wall above her bed. Her memories and anecdotes about grief are many, short and elliptical, with snippets of factual information, timelines and flashbacks mixing in, which makes such a memoir more easily conveyed through such comic devices as floating heads, charts and time-lapse panels than through traditional prose. But it's a fundamentally unremarkable book about remarkable circumstances.

In contrast, The Shiniest Jewel (Springboard, 178 pages, $23.99) is the juxtaposed chronicle of the death of Marian Henley's father while she attempts to adopt a Russian baby, as she approaches the age of 50. As fits the simple narrative, Henley's style is spare, and the consistently thin line of her pen has almost no shading or blacks; what's touching is the heartfelt, plain story itself. Although the facts aren't as headline-grabbing as 9/11, the artwork and tone of cartoonist Henley's adoption memoir more closely capture her humble story.

After visits to Pyongyang and Shenzhen, Guy Delisle shifts his autobiographical travelogue shtick with Burma Chronicles (Drawn & Quarterly, 264 pages, $19.95). By now a habitué of culture shock, Delisle is chocked by nothing. His talent is noticing the peculiar mundane details of whatever latest totalitarian milieu (this time Rangoon, thanks to his partner Nadège's year-long posting with Médecins sans Frontières).

This time, their toddler son Louis is in tow and Delisle is a househusband, which enables him to add a few new notes to his repertoire of Seinfeldian nothingness, as when he pushes Louis's stroller up to armed guards at a barricade ("a white-skinned baby is a big draw here") to get close to the world's most famous political prisoner, Aung San Suu Kyi, a dissident under house arrest since 1988 and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Delisle's observations are at once banal and absurd: Currency is in denominations of 15, 45 and 90 kyats, a "nice way to drive people nuts or make them math wizards." At the supermarket, Nescafé's ubiquitous grinning cow is "the real face of globalization," and he points out the irony of a grocery store playing the songs of anorexic fatale Karen Carpenter in constant loop for ambience.

Nathalie Atkinson is a Toronto freelance journalist who very much wishes she could draw.