Comic, Issue #1, Sean McCarthy, 20 pgs, seanmccarthyart.com, $10

In Sean McCarthy’s The Novice, a strolling snail-man is consumed, only to survive and meet worse horrors in the gullet of the beast. Things are not always what they appear to be. Both within and without this whimsy world.

Edited by Cait Gordon & Talia C. Johnson, 290 pgs, Renaissance, pressesrenaissancepress.ca, $25

With many of these speculative stories rooted in sci-fi, the line between reality and metaphor nearly disappears, playing with a reader’s inability to clearly differentiate between fact and fiction when it comes to the realities of disability.