In most cases, truth is stranger than fiction. But sometimes we need strange fiction to show us the truth. My favorite works of science fiction and fantasy take place in a world that largely resembles our own, and shine a spotlight on the issues of today by blending fantastical imagination with real-world commentary.

Take “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” High school is hell (literally). Coming out (as a Slayer) is hard. The man you love could transform after sex into someone you no longer recognize (say, a vampire). Allusions to the speculative are common in everyday speech: The untested drug is a “magic pill,” the horrible boss is the “devil himself,” or the female politician is “possessed by a Jezebel spirit.” Taking these propositions seriously can shine a light on what ails us (corporate greed, worker exploitation, good old-fashioned misogyny — take your pick). It’s also what inspired me to play with the idea of actual monsters haunting an abortion clinic in my latest novel, “We Dance Upon Demons,” after I was called a “demon” while volunteering at Planned Parenthood.

When used well, speculative elements take a familiar concept that our brains might otherwise gloss over as familiar and make it just different and exciting enough that we can see new or deeper dimensions. In contemporary stories, they create a gateway for the reader to put herself in a character’s shoes. It’s hard to imagine, for example, how I would fare in the Hunger Games (poorly, I’m sure), but I definitely know what I would do if I started seeing demons at work (Google symptoms of a brain tumor).

Here are some of my favorite books that make a contemporary feast out of the simple question: What if?

Frank Stack, an art professor and painter who secretly moonlighted as Foolbert Sturgeon, the satirical cartoonist who created “The Adventures of Jesus,” a chronicle of Christ’s encounters with sanctimonious hypocrites that is widely considered the first underground comic, died on April 12 in Columbia, Mo. He was 88.

The death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Joan Stack.

Mr. Stack taught studio art at the University of Missouri and was well regarded for his intricate drawings, etchings and watercolor paintings, which he often composed alone, sitting cross-legged on a quiet riverbank.

As Foolbert Sturgeon — a persona he concealed for two decades to protect his day job — he lampooned religion, academia and the military, among other sacred tendrils of the 1960s and ’70s, signing his acerbic broadsides with his vaudevillian nom de plume.

“His comics were funny, well drawn and smart,” his friend the cartoonist R. Crumb said in an interview. “And he was a very, very fine watercolor artist and oil painter. He was the real thing.”

Mr. Stack was especially adept at nudes, once drawing Mr. Crumb’s wife, the feminist underground cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, in a state of total undress.

“He did a very fine job,” Mr. Crumb said. “He really knew anatomy.”

Mr. Stack did not become as famous (or notorious) as Mr. Crumb, a subversive and misanthropic character in San Francisco’s counterculture scene, whose heavily crosshatched, grotesquely sexual drawings came to define underground comics during the 1960s.

In contrast to Mr. Crumb, whose roguish demeanor was immortalized in the 1994 documentary “Crumb,” Mr. Stack worked secretively in the Midwest, his only notable behavioral quirk an ability to deliver astonishingly long monologues on seemingly any subject that occurred to him.

“Frank is an incredible story,” James Danky, a historian and co-author of “Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics Into Comix” (2009), said in an interview, adding: “He’s not who you think he is. He’s more than that.”

Mr. Stack got his start in creative flippancy as a writer and then the editor of Texas Ranger, the humor magazine at the University of Texas at Austin, whose staffers, known as Rangeroos, have included the gossip columnist Liz Smith, the screenwriter Robert Benton and the comic book artist and publisher Gilbert Shelton.

After graduating in 1959 with a degree in fine arts, he worked briefly at The Houston Chronicle, one desk over from Dan Rather, and joined the Army Reserve. In 1961, he enrolled at the University of Wyoming for a master’s degree in art, but was called into active duty the same year following the Berlin Wall crisis.

Attached to a data processing unit on Governors Island in New York, he rented an apartment on West 94th Street and spent his evenings attending gallery openings, plays and art house movies with Mr. Benton and Mr. Shelton, who were also living in New York. He had no use for the Army.

“My entire company was constantly grumbling, grousing, growling, snarling, moaning and whining with discontent,” Mr. Stack wrote in “The New Adventures of Jesus: The Second Coming” (2006). “CBS actually sent a film crew to the island, but they were only allowed to speak with delegated individuals who, naturally, were hardly discontented at all.”

One day, Army officers distributed patriotic pamphlets titled “Why Me?”

“The gist was something about drawing a line in the sand to save the free world from communism. It didn’t go down well at all,” Mr. Stack wrote, adding that most, “if not all, of us thought it was ridiculous and insulting.”

He responded by drawing a cartoon on the back of a computer card depicting Christian martyrs being handed a pamphlet titled “Why Me?” as they entered an arena of hungry lions. He posted it on a bulletin board. A half-hour later, it had disappeared.

Undeterred, Mr. Stack continued drawing Jesus in a series of absurd situations — being arrested, registering to vote, attending faculty parties.

In one scene, a military police officer asks Jesus to produce his identification. “I don’t have one!” Jesus says. “I don’t have anything!” In another scene, Jesus walks on water by becoming a duck.

In 1962, the Austin gang in New York went their separate ways. Mr. Stack returned to Wyoming to finish his graduate studies in art. Mr. Shelton moved back to Austin for graduate school and to edit Texas Ranger.

Mr. Shelton loved the Jesus comics and had made copies for himself. He printed a few in a newsletter that he published locally. In 1964, with help from a friend who had access to a Xerox machine at the University of Texas law school, he made an eight-page book titled “The Adventures of Jesus.”

Scholars consider it to be the first underground comic. The cover credit went to “F.S.” because Frank Stack was now teaching at the University of Missouri, where demeaning Jesus, especially in comic-book form, probably wouldn’t have looked great on a curriculum vitae.

“I’ve always loved to see my stuff in print, but I was on the horns of a dilemma,” he wrote. “Did I dare to publish the cartoons under my own name when my job was at risk if the university ever noticed that I worked in the most disgraceful of all media — the awful COMIC BOOK?”

Instead, he created the ridiculous-sounding pen name Foolbert Sturgeon, which reminded him vaguely of Gilbert Shelton. Rising through the ranks of academia, he continued publishing Jesus strips.

“I kind of liked the anonymity of it — there wasn’t anything respectable about it, so you didn’t have to be careful about what you said,” he told The Comics Journal in 1996. “And of course, as a university professor, and as a painter, and as an ‘authority’ — as a role model — you do have to be careful about what you say.”

Frank Huntington Stack was born on Oct. 31, 1937, in Houston. His father, Maurice Stack, was an oil field supply salesman, and his mother, Norma Rose (Huntington) Stack, was a teacher.

Growing up, he drew constantly — on scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, anything he could get his hands on. He loved newspaper comic strips, especially “Tarzan,” “Prince Valiant,” “Alley Oop” and “Krazy Kat.”

During high school, he visited an aunt who lived in Austin and worked at the University of Texas. There, he came across copies of Texas Ranger and decided to apply to the school, majoring in journalism before switching to fine arts. After he joined the humor magazine, one of the first artists he published was his classmate Mr. Shelton.

“He had something unusual at the time — an appreciation for things that made people laugh,” Mr. Shelton said in an interview.

Mr. Stack’s other books as Foolbert Sturgeon include “Dorman’s Doggie” (1979), about his dog, Pingy-Poo, and “Amazon Comics” (1972), an indecent retelling of Greek myths. He dropped the pen name in the late 1980s when he began collaborating with the underground comics writer Harvey Pekar on his “American Splendor” series.

In 1994, Mr. Stack illustrated “Our Cancer Year,” an autobiographical graphic novel by Mr. Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, recounting Mr. Pekar’s battle with lymphoma.

The “narrative is by turns amusing, frightening, moving and quietly entertaining,” Publisher’s Weekly said in its review. “Stack’s brisk and elegantly gestural black-and-white drawings wonderfully delineate this captivating story of love, community, recuperation and international friendship.”

Mr. Stack married Mildred Powell in 1959. She died in 1998.

In addition to their daughter, he is survived by their son, Robert; six grandchildren; and his brother, Stephen.

Writing in “The New Adventures of Jesus,” Mr. Stack reflected on spending so many years as Foolbert Sturgeon.

“If I’d stuck by my guns maybe I’d be out of a job, disinherited, back in New York (not Texas, for sure) and dead by now,” he wrote. “But I ain’t apologizing. Who would I apologize to? God and Jesus? Why would they care?”

Judith Barnard, a freelance writer who stumbled on a second career as a best-selling author at 50, when she teamed with her husband, Michael Fain, a onetime aerospace engineer, to publish a potboiler novel under the pen name Judith Michael, died on May 6 in Chicago. She was 94.

Her death, at a hospital near her home, was caused by heart failure, her daughter, Cynthia Barnard, said.

Combining their first names to create the pseudonym Judith Michael, the couple published 11 commercially successful novels over the years, starting with “Deceptions,” an out-of-nowhere hit, in 1982.

Equal parts romance and thriller, “Deceptions” concerned identical twin sisters — Sabrina, a globe-trotting socialite living in London, and Stephanie, a suburban Illinois housewife — whose fleeting experiment with swapping lives proved to be less fleeting than expected.

Entertaining, yes. A Kirkus review called it “a strenuously inventive, big-budget” romance.

High literature? Not so much. The same review described the book as “glossily seamless nonsense” but noted its potential as fodder for a TV movie — an observation that proved prescient when NBC adapted it in 1985 as a two-part mini-series with Stefanie Powers, of “Hart to Hart” fame, playing the twins.

Then again, their plan had never been to give Thomas Pynchon a run for his money.

Ms. Barnard had already taken a stab at a literary career, publishing her first novel, “The Past and Present of Solomon Sorge,” in 1967. An introspective tale about a Midwestern university professor whose wife of 30 years abruptly abandons him, the book sold only a few thousand copies, leading Ms. Barnard to turn to freelance work on educational films and textbooks, as well as writing articles for Chicago magazines and newspapers.

Her literary horizons expanded after she married Mr. Fain, her second husband, in 1979. “We were looking for something we could do together,” she recalled in a 1991 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “Michael had written technical articles and liked the process but hadn’t found a field he was happy in.”

They began by writing articles about marriage and family for newspapers and magazines, including Good Housekeeping and Redbook. “We had such a good time working together that one day Michael said, ‘Enough of this! Why don’t we write a book?’” Ms. Barnard recalled in a 1999 interview with The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla.

With “Deceptions,” they discovered a winning formula that they employed with many of their following books — what they called universal fantasies, about ordinary, if strong-willed, people who, by a stroke of fate, escape a quotidian existence to taste a life of wealth and adventure, only to face unforeseen challenges along the way.

In “Possessions” (1984), for example, a Vancouver mother of two, whose shady businessman of a husband vanishes, begins a glamorous new life as a jewelry designer in San Francisco, only to fall in with the wealthy family that he had concealed from her.

Similarly, in “Pot of Gold” (1993), a Connecticut housewife must learn for herself whether more money really does mean more problems after she wins a $60 million lottery.

Like their characters, Ms. Barnard and Mr. Fain found their lives transformed by unexpected success. As novel after novel climbed the best-seller lists, they traveled the world to research their books and divided their time between a spacious 16th-floor apartment overlooking Lincoln Park in Chicago and a second home in Aspen, Colo.

Also like their characters, they learned that success can be complicated — in their case, because it required juggling the usual pressures of marriage with the inevitable Lennon-McCartney-style tug of war that comes with creative collaboration.

As Ms. Barnard told The Ledger, “It’s very difficult to have a working relationship with this person who you think has done really dumb things that day and is going to be in your bed.”

Judith Goldman was born on Feb. 17, 1932, in Denver, the elder of two children of Samuel Goldman, who owned a shoe store, and Ruth (Eisenstat) Goldman.

After her parents divorced when she was a child, her mother married Harry Barnard, a prominent historian and biographer, and moved with her children to Chicago.

The family temporarily relocated to Ohio when she was in high school, and she graduated from Fremont Ross High School in 1949. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the Ohio State University in 1953. The same year, she married Jerre Papier, an electrical engineer. They divorced in 1970.

She met Mr. Fain by chance at a hospital, where both were visiting his ailing mother, a friend of Ms. Barnard’s. “Bittersweet times, as Michael’s mother was dying and we were falling in love,” she told The Ledger.

Once the couple decided to bet on a publishing career, there was no turning back. “We burned all our bridges, both quit our jobs, lived on our savings for one year,” Ms. Barnard said in a 1997 interview with The Oklahoman newspaper of Oklahoma City.

“We didn’t know how hard it would be,” she added. “We just thought it would be wonderful to work together. And it was, after a while.”

In addition to her daughter, Ms. Barnard is survived by Mr. Fain; her son, Andrew Sharpe; five grandchildren; and a brother, David Barnard.

It helped that the couple adhered to a strict division of labor. After what could be months of plotting and laying down a basic outline together, Ms. Barnard then did the writing, while Mr. Fain served as the editor.

“He’s a superb one,” she said in a 1988 interview with The Houston Chronicle. “And sometimes a harsh critic.”

Each book might require five or six drafts, with endless fiddling. When the inevitable disagreements arose, Mr. Fain, an amateur photographer, would disappear into his darkroom to cool off, he told The Ledger, while Ms. Barnard headed to the kitchen to “knead bread and take out her aggressions.”

Then again, their shared career also proved a marital blessing.

As Ms. Barnard once put it, “It probably kept us married because we always had a book to finish.”