216 pages; hard cover; black & white

Blessed with a lovely bouncy, rubbery SpongeBob SquarePants-y style, cartoonist and animator Walt Holcombe tells wildly imaginative stories of love gained and (often) lost. Things Just Get Away From You collects all of Holcombe’s late-1990s comics work, with a bonus new story, “Hails at Sea,” thrown in for good measure. It leads off with “King of Persia,” a 1001 Nights/Yiddish vaudeville-inspired graphic novella in which king Faisal Al-Ghazali must win the affection of the woman he loves by traveling to an enchanted land in search of a giant emerald, while accompanied by his faithful companion, the talking camel, Jamila.