A book about a fictitious writer includes, in its pages, a glowing New York Times review of said author by an equally fake reviewer, one “Trilly Stein.” Must a real-life Times reviewer take the bait? (A: Yes.) That Stein visits the same hooker as the made-up writer is just one of the gags in Noah Van Sciver’s graphic-novel omnibus THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FANTE BUKOWSKI (Fantagraphics, 452 pp., $39.99). As literary satires go, it’s both gleefully malicious and unrepentantly stupid — a winning combination, for the most part. Even my colleague Trilly Stein would laugh.

The scruffy Fante Bukowski (né Kelly Perkins) is a failed emo singer turned poet who quits a job at his dad’s Denver law firm and moves east, dead set on becoming “the newest literary star in the galaxy that is Columbus, Ohio.” His delusions of grandeur and clichéd rants (“Everyone who has power is a jerk”) only remind us of his lack of talent. Like an addled version of Borges’s Pierre Menard writing “Don Quixote,” Fante pounds out a story “about two men and two women living in the Czech Republic in the 1960s,” only to be told by an agent that he’s unwittingly created a “very poor Cliffs Notes version” of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Watching Fante fail upward — from his decision to self-publish 20,000 copies of his moronic “Six Poems” to his harebrained attempt to ghostwrite a Disney actress’s bio (“Chapter One: The U.F.O.”) — can be delicious fun. Van Sciver himself appears here as a needy, underappreciated cartoonist, dining out on the fact that he was once on “This American Life.”

The best joke in “The Complete Works of Fante Bukowski,” however, might be the book jacket itself: a note-for-note takeoff on the Library of America’s gleaming black covers, which enshroud the great writings of this nation’s immortal authors. The trademark red-white-and-blue stripe runs down the side, but instead of an iconic photo of, say, Henry James or Willa Cather, the publisher has slapped on the bearded visage of our hero, looking like Zach Galifianakis after a partial lobotomy. The disconnect between the sober outer trappings and the scurrilous escapades within is a running joke for Van Sciver. Originally issued separately, the three volumes of Fante’s ignoble saga (2015, 2017, 2018) bore covers mimicking David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” and the muted letterpress feel of Black Sparrow Press, the publisher that produced iconic editions of John Fante (1909-83) and Charles Bukowski (1920-94), the Los Angeles writers who serve as evergreen hipster touchstones.

Denver’s Kelly Perkins lazily fuses the names of his two role models to come up with his nom de plume. A mess of writerly epigraphs (Hemingway, Asimov) that prove of dubious provenance telegraph, too loudly, the themes along the way. In the end, for all its pleasures, “Fante Bukowski” feels like the least of Van Sciver’s achievements — a jeu d’esprit that can’t wholly charm us over 400-plus pages. In his 2018 memoir “One Dirty Tree” (Uncivilized, 110 pp., $19.95), Van Sciver relates the lingering traumas of growing up poor, one of nine kids in a large Mormon family. Noah’s anxiety over lack of money and education — crystallized by a deteriorating present-day relationship with his girlfriend — is deeply affecting, and the reader rejoices when Fantagraphics Books accepts the similarly initialed “Fante Bukowski” for publication. In this case, though, the story behind the story proves more compelling.

A handful of contemplative pages in “Fante Bukowski” have a Zen stillness reminiscent of a true hero of zine culture: John Porcellino, whose long-running “King-Cat” comics find beauty in the mundane. Porcellino himself pops up at one point, and in a sign of his benevolent influence, he materializes in another recent book, Gabrielle Bell’s story collection INAPPROPRIATE (Uncivilized, 135 pp., $19.95). In the four-page story “John Porcellino,” Gabrielle and John visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art to view several pieces by Marcel Duchamp, including the scandalous “Étant Donnés,” Porcellino’s “favorite work of art for the past 30 years.” Gabrielle’s game attempt to decode the Dada master’s infamous “Large Glass” is low-key hilarious: “I guess this here is the bride? And she’s emitting some kind of gas, or poison? And below are the bachelors. … Oh, I don’t know.” She loses track of John, then finds him not just inside the enigmatic diorama that is “Étant Donnés,” but listed as one of its variegated materials, after electric motor, cookie tin and linoleum.

“Inappropriate,” too, is a grab bag, at least compared to Bell’s graphic memoir “Everything Is Flammable” (2017), a lovely, sustained portrait of an off-the-grid community that she was inspired to write after her mother’s home in Mendocino County burned down. The constant is Bell’s cluttered yet clear tableaus and winningly neurotic narration. This new book gathers blackly humorous pieces (published in The New Yorker, Vice and elsewhere) that mix the surreal with the seemingly autobiographical — a Gabrielle figure who, say, visits a dreamy young dental student for a root canal, only to have her molars forcibly extracted by chatty mobsters later in the day. I’m reminded of what Benjamin Cheever wrote of his father John’s journals, their commitment to truth endlessly subverted by him as a “fiction machine”: “Give him a screwdriver, have him walk across the room, and he’d be holding a hammer.”

Online, Bell has been painting uproarious scenarios atop pages torn from home-furnishing catalogs (such as cats feasting on their owner’s face in a beautifully appointed living room), making for weirdly effective critiques of consumer culture. Some of the stories here begin in a similar key of outright fantasy, like an apartment “overrun with dog-sized talking rats.” As bizarre as Bell’s scenarios can be, and as verbose as her characters can get, she keeps every frame in focus. We follow these recognizable bodies as they move through dream-space — places we slowly realize we’ve visited before.