“A few months ago Eddie Campbell and I got married,” Audrey Niffenegger writes in the introduction to her new book, which is itself another form of collaboration with her new husband. In Bizarre Romance art and love have combined in person and on the page.

Niffenegger, best known for her novel The Time Traveler’s Wife but also a sometime graphic novelist in her own right (The Night Bookmobile and The Three Incestuous Sisters), and Campbell, the Scots-born cartoonist who worked with Alan Moore on From Hell (and whose own biographical Alec strips were highlights of the early 1980s British comics scene), have come together to give us a book of short stories about romance.

Some are prose with illustrations, others full-on comic strips; all bring Niffenegger’s trademark interest in fairy tales and their deconstruction to bear on the subject of romance. Bizarre is a suitable word for the results in these 13 stories. Sly, slight, and sweet would also all apply at various points.

Here are hamsters and cats (some of them in freezers, some of them being juggled) and angels and Red Riding Hood and controlling fairy girlfriends.

You could argue that in her interest in remaking fairy tales to expose and challenge their sometimes traditional take on gender roles, Niffenegger is very much a child of Angela Carter. But there’s a lightness to Niffengger’s writing that rubs off here on her husband.

If Campbell is best known for the inky scratchiness of his art on From Hell, here the register is lighter, more playful. He’s playing with digital imagery at points which feels fresh but also, sometimes, a little lightweight. It’s possibly significant that the story that succeeds best visually is Motion Studies: Getting Out of Bed, which draws on Campbell’s more familiar illustrative skills.

In fact, it is one of the best tales in the collection. It tells the story of Blanche Epler, a 19th-century life model working for the photographer Eadweard Muybridge on his pioneering studies of motion (“capturing thirty-six tiny Blanches in silver …” as Niffenegger writes).

It’s the simplest story here in terms of its cast. There are no angels or fairies (though there are juggled cats). It is a story of art, the people who make it and the people who help them do so. And in its combination of pictures and words it has an elusive thrill to it, a sense of something you can’t quite put your finger on. A sense that the story leaves you with more questions than answers.

I’m not sure it qualifies as bizarre, but I think you can call it beautiful.

Bizarre Romance, by Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell, Jonathan Cape, £16.99