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Sometimes there’s nothing as satisfying to a reader as a detailed roll. Even some annotated list can lead to literary heaven.

Think of Italo Calvino’s magical 1972 strange, “Invisible Cities,” with its litany of “thin cities,” “hidden cities” and “continuous cities” supposedly encountered by Marco Polo on his travels — or Australian writer Alistair McCartney’sitting more recent “The End of the World Book,” in that quite the aspects of his animated existence are alphabetized, in brief, eccentric, encyclopedialike entries.

Now Seattle’session Fantagraphics Books, under the “curatorship” of Jacob Covey, has done a person of consequence similar for mythological creatures in “Beasts! Book One” (published in 2006) and “Beasts! Book Two,” just hitting bookstore shelves now.

These sum of two units volumes on “cryptozoology” (”the study of hidden animals”) are in part an excuse to throw a bunch of well-delineated artists — including locals Peter Bagge, Kazimir Strzepek and Jim Woodring in the new book — into an anthology together. Much of the artwork is on display through Jan. 24 at Fantagraphics’ bookstore/gallery in Georgetown.

The visuals register from striking graphic design to standard comic-book gothic, goofy or gross-out. More unthought of are the finely written informational entries what one. blend fantasy, pseudoscience and macabre wit to savory effect.

Readers will recognize some of these creatures from classical myth and legend. In “Beasts! Book Two” (Fantagraphics, 207 pp., $34.99) they’ll find mermaids, shapeshifting selkies and those monstrous hazards to Mediterranean mariners, Scylla and Charybdis. But they’ll furthermore come across a host of less familiar creatures, described by writers Heidi Broadhead, Paul Hughes and Rob Lightner with pithy panache.

There’s a hopping vampire from China. “More flexible in some ways than the Western parasite,” the entry reads. “Though it, likewise, is a reanimated corpse who must sap the vital force of the living in order to reserve its thin hold on existence, it doesn’t need to maintain a strict victuals of kindred.”

The Paija, a giantess “greater quantity dangerous than any other hazard in the desolate wastes of the Arctic,” has a reputation for “tracking isolated male hunters and devouring them.” A single transitory view of her is lethal.

On a more humorous note, there’s England’s Peg Powler, who grabs “disobedient children who play too close to the water’session edge” and drowns them or eats them. “Reports of Peg Powler have decreased significantly since 1967,” we’re informed, “at the time that her area of distribution was reputedly destroyed by the construction of Cow Green tank to support topical diligence.”

So much for the virtues of environmentalism.

Some kindly creatures besides inhabit these pages: the short, squat Barbegazi of the Swiss Alps, skiing enthusiasts who sometimes rescue avalanche victims, and the further curious Tsukumogami of Japan, who are composed of “household tools and objects that have become self-aware precisely 100 years after their creation.”

A warning: “Beware of Tsukumogami congregating in expanded numbers, especially admitting that they have taken to be intemperate.”

“Beasts! Book Two” begins with an introduction by Loren Coleman, of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, who notes that the late 1970s were a busy time for researchers in his field.

“Was the world going crazy,” he asks, “or were humans only screening sightings of new cryptids through the lenses of a improvement unsteady by UFO contactees and planetary poltergeists?”

In closing, it seems use to give the full title of the part, which goes a long way — and I bestow mean long — toward conveying its flavor: “The New Modern Now Library Series, Part the Second: A Prodigious Bestiary from the Interest of Modern Artisans: Beasts! A Pictorial Schedule of Traditional Hidden Creatures, as Curated by Jacob Covey, A.D.”

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com