SINGAPORE – The reopening of the National Library Board’s (NLB) Central Public Library on Jan 12 following a revamp reminded me that during the pandemic, scores of people discovered NLB’s trove of e-books.

I was one of them and was delighted to find that its digital collection was wider than expected, especially in the realm of comics and graphic novels, pleasures that I had given up years ago because of the cost.

I have never been tempted by a Batman or Superman comic, but I gorged on NLB’s Old Man Logan collection featuring Marvel Comics’ Wolverine as a man past his prime, which was adapted for the movie Logan (2017).

The Old Man Logan comics have a griminess and toughness missing from standard superhero fare.

Here are more works that offer storytelling magic for grown-ups, all available for borrowing on mobile phones, tablets and PCs.

Some titles are a few years old, but are included here because they offer a great introduction to the writer.

The most recent works take some time to be included in the library’s collection. The newest e-books also often have longer wait times for borrowing because of their popularity, so why not dive into older material while you are waiting?

1. Hungry Ghost (2023) by Victoria Ying

People might be wary of American authors offering therapeutic literature, but I gave this winner of the 2023 Harvey Award for Best Children’s or Young Adult Book a chance, and do not regret it.

Valerie Chu is a Chinese-American teen who appears to be the perfect child, socially at ease, academically gifted and thin.

Her dirty secret is disordered eating, stemming from her need to conform to her mother’s abhorrence of the standard American physique.

In cleanly drawn panels that are light on dialogue and free of melodramatic cliches, book’s writer and illustrator Ying shows how poisonous well-meaning parental control can be. Giving a child a complex about food is especially insidious as it turns an event carried out three times a day into three daily opportunities for self-inflicted suffering, says Ying.

Extra marks for the clever title, which refers to the Chinese spiritual belief as well as Valerie’s constant but invisible state of ravenousness.

All hungry ghosts think about is food, as does Valerie.

2. Extremity Volume One (2017) and Volume Two (2018) by Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer

The two volumes bring together all 12 parts of this richly illustrated and compelling fantasy series, which in 2018 earned a nomination in the best limited series category at the Eisner Awards, the comics equivalent of the Oscars.

Volume One’s blurb says this series is where “the beauty and imagination of Studio Ghibli meet the intensity of Mad Max”. It sounds fairly apt – award-winning American writer and illustrator Daniel Warren Johnson has poured into this series a fantastical world inspired by Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind (1984), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), but with the brutality and scavenger aesthetic of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Johnson wrote, and Mike Spicer illustrated the first volume before the duo worked together on both in the second. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world populated by warring tribes who fight riding giant insects and flying machines. It follows a young warrior, Thea, as she plots vengeance against the clan that destroyed her family.

3. The Electric State (2018), Tales From The Loop (2015) and Things From The Flood (2016) by Simon Stalenhag

Stalenhag, 40, is a Swedish artist and designer whose art books show the mundane – old Volvo sedans, suburban kids on bikes – co-existing with futuristic technology such as spaceships, mechas or robots.

In The Electric State, which is being developed into a Netflix live-action film starring British actress Millie Bobby Brown and American actors Chris Pratt and Ke Huy Quan, a girl’s robot companion has the appearance of an enormous bobble-head doll – it is one example of a future made to feel comfortable, to the point of absurdity.

In Tales From The Loop, which inspired a 2020 Prime Video live-action series of the same name, a laboratory named The Loop unleashes innovations that change the trajectory of humanity.

Things From The Flood carries on from Tales From The Loop, extending the story that charts the consequences of innovation brought about by Loop scientists.

Stalenhag’s books offer gorgeous dystopias – the world is not completely ruined, just somewhat broken by hauntingly beautiful anachronisms.

The works here are not comics or graphic novels, but text-based stories enhanced by Stalenhag’s illustrations. His art offers a magnificent reminder that not every futuristic universe has to be cyberpunk, or noir-grim and packed with techno-clutter. It can be filled with stuff that exists today, made memorable by a single otherworldly object.