SelfMadeHero, an independent publisher of graphic novels, stands out as a success story against the odds. Founded in 2007, just in time for a slump in bookselling and two recessions, the company gained a toehold with manga Shakespeare and graphic adaptations of Poe, Conrad, Kafka and Bulgakov. But Jonathan Cape and Pantheon continued to bag the big contemporary names (Sacco, Satrapi, Spiegelman, and so on) and the question was whether SelfMadeHero could ever be more than a plucky reinventor of out-of-copyright classics.

In the last few years, the company has made remarkable progress, luring David B away from the majors, offering a new UK home to Moebius and the Moomins, and publishing a broad range of new work by emerging international talents.

One such talent is the Flemish author Judith Vanistendael, whose debut, Dance by the Light of the Moon, chronicled the love affair between a Belgian girl and a Togolese political refugee. That book was good, but When David Lost His Voice is even better. It begins with an oncologist crudely sketching a man's face and the cavities inside it. "And that's your larynx," he says, pinpointing a tiny squiggle with an ominous red arrow. " which is where the tumour is." Thus the act of drawing  by the doctor as well as by Vanistendael  literally draws us into this tale of a man and his disease.

It may sound like an unappealing entertainment prospect: David, proprietor of a travel bookshop, gets laryngeal cancer and gradually dies, keeping his feelings a secret from his wife Paula and his grown-up daughter Miriam (there is also a younger daughter, nine-year-old Tamar), who must swallow their frustration and care for him as best they can. But Vanistendael's book, poignant and occasionally harrowing though it may be, is not at all depressing. It's quirky, sensual and life-affirming  unafraid of sentiment, but not sentimental, shot through with wry humour and a deep appreciation of human resilience.

All this is conveyed partly through snatches of overheard conversation (we are eavesdroppers on this family drama) but mostly through the artwork, executed with great flair in pen, inkbrush and watercolour. Many pages are word-free, yet the images invite lingering attention, and not just to speculate on their sometimes ambiguous meaning. The artist's range of inventiveness is a pleasure to savour. Dance by the Light of the Moon was done in a consistent, conventional style, whereas in this new book, Vanistendael conjures up many different kinds of art depending on the emotional context and the natures of the characters. The air of rough spontaneity  so different from the intricate deliberation exhibited by Phoebe Gloeckner, say, or David B  belies the finely calibrated judgment behind every mark.

Singling out favourite scenes is difficult, since each frame gains added resonance from those around it and the book has a cumulative effect. Among the highlights for me were Miriam's visit to David's bookshop, where she hallucinates her father as an animated skeleton, and the one-page watercolour fugue where David sits on a jetty, serenely enjoying a cigarette, before the pain reduces him to a barely recognisable shape hunched under the expanding sky. In another memorable episode, Paula flies to Finland for much-needed respite. The monochrome of her daily existence blooms into colour and she explores an unfamiliar harbourside, off the leash at last and free to indulge in a dance on the quay with a stranger who smells "like David before he was sick". A scholarly essay could be written on how water, boats, and different modes of travel function as metaphors in this book, but When David Lost His Voice wears its symbolism lightly.

David's cancer is inoperable, so you can guess how the story ends. What you can't predict is how you'll feel on the way. One of the main reasons for this is Tamar, who lights up every page she's on. With childish candour, she demands from her daddy the intimacy that eludes Paula and Miriam  and she gets it. "Who will live with me when mum dies?" she asks, during one of their confabs about death, eternity and the extinction of the stars. "Mum's going to live a lot longer," David assures her. "How do you know?" she responds, cutting straight to the core of the uncertainty that hangs over us all.

But then, being nine, Tamar comes to her own ritualistic accommodation with the imminent loss of her father, involving mermaids, balloons, and a glass vial on a string. She's full of juice, and has to get on with the adventure of living. When David Lost His Voice is a book full of such unexpected solaces, and a worthy addition to the canon of graphic gems.

 Michel Faber's The Fire Gospel is published by Canongate.

When I read the words "a moving story about cancer, and its effect on one ordinary family", my instinct, whether staring at a movie poster or the jacket of a paperback, is to run a mile. I dread mawkishness the way some people fear blue cheese or spiders. So I was trepidatious when I opened Belgian comic artist Julie Vanistendael's new book, When David Lost His Voice, which is  you guessed it  a moving story about cancer, and its effect on one ordinary family. If I caught sight of anything even remotely resembling a group hug, this one would go straight to the Salvation Army shop. I needn't have worried. This is an amazing book, one of the best published by the clever people at Self Made Hero so far.

Its author, to my huge relief, doesn't pretend that cancer isn't frightening, and she knows  I'm guessing she has first-hand experience of this  that for the friends and relatives of sufferers, it is an illness that induces anger as often as grief. In this sense, then, she has written a surprisingly tough book. Her artist's hands are, you might say, balled tightly into fists. But there is a softness here, too. It comes courtesy of her illustrations, which are delicate, intimate and extremely beautiful, and with the occasional moment of whimsy: a child who finds a mermaid at the bottom of a lake; a parent who pretends that letters are delivered by balloons rather than postmen.

David, a bookseller, has a tumour on his larynx, and does not have long to live. This news comes as a terrible shock but, as he is enfolded into the arms of exhaustion and morphine, inevitably he loses the greater part of his fear. His family, on the other hand, are plainly terrified. His grownup daughter, Miriam, has recently given birth to a child of her own, and though this affords her a certain swoony detachment, it makes her vulnerable, too, the circle of life so suddenly and starkly before her. His nine-year-old daughter, Tamar, is determined to find a way around his death, and thinks that mummification  she could keep his soul in a jam jar  might be the answer. His artist wife, Paula, seeks refuge in work, crafting a skeleton from his x-rays and ruthlessly abandoning his sick bed while she goes to teach abroad.

It's powerful, watching these three girls try to duck grief; you know their denial will slap them across the face in the end. But I was struck more by the way Vanistendael depicts their alarm at the physical changes in David. He doesn't just look or feel different; he smells different. She does it so cleverly, capturing a simple, moving truth: we start to miss a person long before they die, and it's this first loss that enables us to survive the second.