Here’s a cop-out for you:  in many, many places in this collection the art is so jaw-droppingly beautiful that a critical evaluation of the stories becomes difficult. Sorry.  It’s just that I get so dazzled looking through this book that I sometimes forget to turn the pages in the right direction, or find myself experiencing “lost time.”  It’s that stunning.

In short, there’s no let down here—volume 2 is every bit as impressive as last year’s debut.  And why wouldn’t it be?  It’s got basically the same cast of creative talent behind it, the same striking production and design from Daisuke Tsutsumi and Michael Knapp, and the same packaging from Villard right down to the French flaps and generously oversized trim size.  Want to try a mind-expanding version of beach reading this summer?  Look no further.

Although to use the word “reading” in the conventional sense might be stretching things:  on the whole it feels like there’s even less text on hand than in volume 1.  Another difference is that the moving-image sensibility of these animator-artists is more apparent here, both in content and style.  That means we get stories that resemble all-ages cartoon fare (“Are You the Right Color?” by Andrea Blasich), genre riffs (Willie Real’s “Plane Food” is a sunny version of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”), edgier takes on quirky-clever Nick-style kids’ TV (Jason Sadler’s “Sub Plotter” and Lizette Vega’s “Crawdaddyo”), and even head-scratching meta-commentary on moviemaking (Benoit le Pennec’s “The Youth of Jimmy”).  To me, that’s fine, or more than fine, since I’m enamored of all visual media and love work that explores overlap like this.  Fans of graphic storytelling who are more purist in bent, however, may wish that Out of Picture 2 had less of a short film- or animation-festival feel.

The movie influence is less pronounced, but still detectable, in my personal favorite, the sepia-toned, soft-focus The Antler Boy by Jake Parker.

  Like many of the creators, Parker combines genres—in this case, the campfire tale, the picture book, and a Del Toro-like dark fable—but does so with such skill that each mode dovetails perfectly with the others.  Similarly, his narrative mixes moods beautifully yet never stops being immediate and involving.  In fact, its fusion of childlike wonder with darker leanings is really a microcosm of the entire book.  A close second for me is Tsutsumi’s moving “A Dream of Kyosuke,” which embodies both of these traits in the main character, a government-engineered super-samurai who comes to find peace in an unexpected way.

And David Gordon, whose “The Wedding Present” was my favorite in the first volume, shows further evidence for why he should be considered the Don DeLillo of the group.  In “The Rupture,” Gordon again expertly juxtaposes the personal and the political (even the geopolitical), delivering fact-dense chunks of prose with scary, resonant precision and gorgeous, if eerie, visuals.  I’d love to see a full-length work from him even though I don’t know how you’d classify it by genre—actually, that would be half the fun.

My only gripe with Out of Picture 2 is that the writing doesn’t seem to be given as much space to play in as the art.  A case in point is Peter Nguyen’s engagingly twisty and insinuating tale “The Mission,” which establishes a great backdrop for its action, intriguing characters, and a palpable atmosphere of dread, but then leaves things a little too elliptical for me.  I guess I just wanted more of what Nguyen was doing.  Other stories create entire worlds that could be treated in a compelling way in a comics mini-series or a full-length picture book but instead feel rushed in the handful of pages allowed here.  Some have abrupt endings while others don’t sufficiently develop the main part of the narrative—they’re more like illustrated ideas for stories, teasers in a sense, than fully-grown stories in their own right.

Still, that’s a pretty good “problem” for a book to have:  to be so good that a reader’s major complaint involves wanting larger portions.