"The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is "one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis." Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalizing" memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, "Own...

An ongoing, episodic 'prose comic' from which the pictures are summoned by the magic of words, Goon Squad is set in a version of modern-day Manchester. Its biggest divergence from the real city is that it (along with most other large urban centers) has a team of superheroes to protect it against unusual threats with which the conventional forces of law and order would have problems. Goon Squad, Vol. 3: Old Enemies is composed of: 'Life during Wartime,'...