I’m sure the artist Mike Mignola has, at some point, drawn a straight line, but it wasn’t recently. In “Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown,” his work is at its most willfully cockeyed. Every tower and parapet stands at an improbable angle to all the others, every staircase appears on the cusp of collapse and the only things that look truly stable in this unfamiliar world — a new fantasy realm for Mignola, best known as the artist behind “Hellboy” — are the tree branches, the tentacles and the plentiful undead.

Mignola is justly celebrated as a visual stylist, not just of horror comics but of comics writ large. Where another artist might rely on grotesque specifics to frighten the reader, Mignola’s insinuating expanses of black ink conceal all but the most necessary details of a rich and malevolent world, filled with monstrosities, yes, but also oddities, many of them delightful.

The task of communicating complex information serially and simply challenges every cartoonist, and it requires an especially fine balance in work like this. If a page is too ornate, the reader can’t be sure what information is part of the progress from panel to panel. But if it’s too simple, there’s no way to imply or suggest something instead of stating it outright. To balance nuance and clarity, Mignola has become a kind of genius at reducing the lavish styles of his visual influences — mostly illustrators, among them Frank Frazetta and Arthur Rackham — to their essences.

His work is beautiful, marbled with pregnant shadows and full of weird, fun-to-look-at monsters, but it is also almost impossibly minimalist. Often his characters don’t even have faces because his silhouettes are so striking that he need barely draw anything inside them. And his stories barrel along at an entertaining pace, leaving us no time to wonder how, exactly, we have been conned into reading a whole page of implied noses.

As a writer, Mignola seems to have been working toward “Bowling With Corpses” for most of his career. “Hellboy” began life in 1994, when the revision and subversion of aging adventure-story archetypes were all the rage. Frank Miller was already drawing Raymond Chandler-flavored manga in “Sin City”; Gregory Maguire would fill in the salacious untold details of the Oz stories beginning in “Wicked” the following year; George R.R. Martin began having it out with H. Rider Haggard and Robert E. Howard in “A Game of Thrones” the year after that. Hellboy himself is an anti-Nazi crusader in a world largely inspired by the fiction of the notoriously racist genius of weird fiction, H.P. Lovecraft.

But where his peers preferred complementary sets of literary references, Mignola reveled in the most incongruous footnotes and allusions he could find, often to comic effect. One “Hellboy” story borrows text (recited by a ghoul) from 18th-century graveyard poetry intercut with a puppet production of “Hamlet.” Another invites comparisons between Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s Model,” about an artist whose paintings are inspired by otherworldly beings, and the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya, whose work Mignola manages to evoke without a drop of paint. (Credit where due: Mignola’s brilliant colorist Dave Stewart helps here and in the new book.) The series is garnished with all manner of footnotes and references, about half of them to some obscure bit of Russian folklore, Christian apocrypha or Poe poem, and the rest to works of Mignola’s own invention.

In “Bowling With Corpses,” Mignola finally jettisons reality. He still uses allusions to tinker with the form of his stories, though. The title tale, which opens the book, is a reasonably straightforward fable about a boy who wins a bowling competition against a gang of zombies with bad intentions, but as soon as it’s done, Mignola shifts gears and tells us a creation myth narrated by “the library ghost of Castle Yarg,” quoting the ancient texts of this made-up world. The images shift back and forth between the subjects of the story itself and images of the statuary and books in the room where our narrator is speaking, and Mignola makes it hard for us to tell whether he’s drawing the panels as himself or as some anonymous artist of Yarg. The statues and paintings look familiar, but I couldn’t tell you why.

These are the little uncertainties that make “Bowling With Corpses” so odd and so pleasant. The book is a good reminder that the history of imaginative literature is also the history of illustrated literature, and not just for children. Gustave Doré is as useful a guide to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” as he is to Charles Perrault’s fairy tales; Botticelli’s drawings and maps of hell give depth and gravity to the “Inferno” as reliably as Virgil gives directions to Dante. Every lover of high fantasy keeps one finger on the flyleaf where the map is printed.

When it comes to Mignola, the most instructive precedent may be the Irish writer Lord Dunsany’s “The Book of Wonder” (1912). Rather than writing stories and then commissioning illustrations from his friend Sidney Sime (a magazine editor and illustrator who was frustrated by his pedestrian day job), Dunsany asked Sime to send “any pictures you like” and wrote a series of stories responding to them. “I had particularly asked Mr. Sime not to tell me what the pictures were about,” Dunsany wrote in his autobiography.

The comics form reverses the usual dynamic in exactly this way: The pictures dictate the pace of the story, and the words are there chiefly to help us understand what we’re seeing. Perhaps that’s why “The Book of Wonder” is the volume “Bowling With Corpses” most evokes.

“Bowling With Corpses” is dedicated to Dunsany and other fantasy pioneers, Howard and Lovecraft among them. It glories in a silliness familiar from Mignola’s terrific one-off story collection, “The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects,” and it seems to be more purely his own project even than “Hellboy,” for which he invited other artists and writers to contribute back stories about various secret societies and tertiary characters.

No such ambiguities are resolved here. The shadows in “Bowling With Corpses” might become an evil bat; they might also host a race of dwarves hidden beneath the earth who graze their tiny cows on subterranean plains. All this is made more confounding by layers of narrative embroidery and self-interested prevarication among the characters themselves, who are always reminding us that they can’t vouch for the truthfulness of the tale being told. Perhaps in 20 years there will be a cottage industry of films and spinoff comics illuminating the dark corners of this world, too, but I hope not. Nothing could measure up to all that crooked darkness.