THESE TWO BOOKS HAVE their origins in the artists’ youth. They make sense in terms of what it was that each went on to do, but they are surprising.

The Adventuress is described as Audrey Niffenegger’s “first book”, produced before the bestselling The Time Traveler’s Wife. In fact, it was an artist’s book that she created — from aquatints to handprinted letterpress and binding — at college. The original must be exquisite, but even in reproduction the result is as haunting as Niffenegger’s fiction.

This heroine, thin, with cropped hair, wears a skirt and elbow-length gloves and nothing else. The daughter of an alchemist, she grows with the other creatures he has made: a fish woman, her tail showing beneath her skirt; a plant flowering small human heads.

When Baron von K carries her off she is married “in a church/ Amid a sea of eyes”. Ghostly hands hold her down, others, disembodied and raising champagne glasses, surround her in “Revelry”. The sexual threat is compelling and painful.

Our heroine escapes by unravelling her skirt into a cocoon and emerging from prison as a moth. “Returned to herself”, she is found by Napoleon and she gives birth to Maurice — who is a cat. When Napoleon deserts her she is stricken.

Three plates entitled Hallucination are difficult images of betrayal and loss: her head is cleaved in two; her flailing hands try to grasp her remorseful lover; her own mirror image embraces her.

It is beautiful. But it is a serious tale about the fragility of the self and the damage displayed through Niffenegger’s pictorial metaphors could be all too real.

Alison Bechdel’s book is also about damage, but hers is a tale of survival. Bechdel has said that she is pleased that a critic has invented the adjective “Bechdelian”, and it is true that there is no one like her. In 1983 she began to publish a strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. From 1987 she developed a serialised storyline for a cast of regular characters centring on the nerdish Mo who works in a wimmin’s bookstore. Over the years, Bechdel’s drawing technique has become more sophisticated, but her wit — gloomy and self-deprecating — and her skill in observing everyday failures remains merciless. Every detail is minutely realised.

It is also loving. You don’t read a Bechdelian cartoon once and I can think of many a household where old copies of DTWOF are reread in emotional crises.

Fun Home takes this a stage further. It is a memoir of Bechdel’s youth and her father who died at the age of 44. He was a teacher, a meticulous restorer of the family’s Victorian house, an ideal husband and father, a director of the Funeral Home (nicknamed Fun Home) once run by his parents, and he was a closet gay.

It is, in every sense, a queer memorial, but there is nothing funny about this tragicomic. Bechdel goes over key episodes in her childhood to reconstruct what she knew then and compare it with what she knows now. Her pictures show the surface of the past, while her commentary reveals its contradictions. These revisions are secretive and obsessive, much like her father’s secrets and obsessions. But that seems to be Bechdel’s conclusion: that much of who she is derives from a family situation that was ordinary and bizarre.

Fun Home is a profound and important book. Every home should have one.

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