Chicago-based cartoonist Jessica Abel makes a Xeric-financed leap from minis to full-sized comics, and if the stories in Artbabe #5 are any indication, she could be around for a long time.

Two of the four stories (the issue is subtitled “The Four Seasons,” and consists of one story per season) are particularly strong. “Jack London,” which focuses on the musings of a disaffected office worker during a particularly hushed, snowy Chicago day, is elegant and thoughtful. Abel strikes a really nice balance between the content of the notebooks the protagonist is filling, and the role that both the thoughts and the act of writing play in her day. The other exemplary story, springtime’s “Viva!,” shares with “Jack London” a subtle formal touch or two. Set in a crowded bar, Abel effectively captures a scene and its characters using offhand, natural dialogue.

It’s really nice to encounter a cartoonist — particularly a young one — whose comics are straight fiction rather than autobio and whose art is more in the Crumb/Collier school rather than simplistic or fanciful. Abel’s panel-to-panel transitions are strong in every story. She uses slight changes in focus to alter the emphasis of a speaker’s statement, and changes the view to include more participants or a better sense of place. I have no idea what the rest of Abel’s work is like (she’s doing an alternative weekly strip and cartoons for Chicago-based publications), but I’ll read stories in this vein as long as she wants to produce them.

Comic book readers often like to talk about the potential of the medium for education, literary significance and, once in a while, social change. But most readers are hard pressed to point out particular comic books that have had any kind of marked effect on things.

There are some that come to mind, however. Former Governor Wilder handed out copies of Batman: Seduction of the Gun to members of the Virginia Legislature to help passage of a gun-control law. There is also the CIA-produced “how-to” comic book on guerrilla sabotage that was handed out to the Contras in Nicaragua. This book had a powerful social effect, both directly, in causing pain and injury (and perhaps even deaths), and also indirectly, as copies of the book surfaced and revealed to the public some of the horrible lengths to which the American intelligence machine was willing to go.

But it could be said that the effectiveness of a comic book (or comic books) on society is more intimately achieved — that some comics can influence a person’s beliefs and thus cause that person to do things that may affect the rest of the world. This can be achieved by exploring social themes in “entertainment”-type comics, from simple telegraphed sermons on prejudice in the latest issue of X-Men, to the sublime portraits of humanity expressed in a Will Eisner graphic novel or an issue of Love and Rockets.

The introduction to Activists! mentions a comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, produced in the late-’50s for the Fellowship of Reconcilation organization by the Al Capp studios. Thousands of copies were distributed throughout the south via church groups and local civil rights organizations.

In 1960, four teenagers staged the first “sit-in” at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina that lasted 80 days and steamrolled into a movement that would eventually smash legal segregation from the south. One of the teenagers credited the King comic book as an inspiration for his belief in non-violent action. Copies of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story very rarely turn up these days, because most of them were destroyed. It was, quite literally, a dangerous book to own back then.

The effect of the King comic book was not unlike tossing a pebble into a big brook, with the little ripples turning into tidal waves. Joyce Brabner hoped to have the same effect with Activists! While much of her previous efforts in comic books were socially significant, the stories in books like Brought to Light and Real War Stories were mostly meant to create a sense of outrage. Activists! is different in that each of the four stories in the comic point to successful non-violent actions by ordinary people.

“What if…?,” the lead story in the book, suffers with a confusing premise, but readers who stick through to the end are rewarded for their patience. Brabner’s script, clearly drawn by former The ’Nam artist Wayne Vansant, explores what purports to be a fictional story of what might have happened in the United States under a repressive dictatorship. She relates the underground non-violent activities, especially by young people, that over a long period of time eventually topple the dictatorship. Then at the end, she reveals that the story is fact, not fiction, and that with a few minor cosmetic alterations, was what actually did occur in Czechoslovakia.

“What If…?” is similar to Gilbert Shelton’s piece in the 1970 comic, Hydrogen Bomb Funnies, showing how people are repressed in “some countries,” full of examples of concurrent outrages being performed by the government in the United States. But the resemblance is only superficial, as the Shelton story was played for shock value and outrage, and the Brabner/Vansant story ends with an example of non-violent doggedness and determination winning out against the mightiest dictatorship of modern times.

The second tale, “Reflections of a Rock Lobster,” drawn by Mark Badger and scripted by Brabner from Aaron Fricke’s 1980 book of the same name, tells the tale of a young man’s successful struggle to win the right to take his boyfriend to his school’s prom. The story is a familiar one to anyone who has had to face repression for any reason, be it sexual orientation, political beliefs, skin color, religion or even economic status. What is special here is that Fricke’s story is being retold for a new generation of young people who might also be suffering some sort of repression and have no clear-cut examples of effective paths to overcoming it. Badger’s computer generated color pages utilize familiar, solid storytelling techniques that communicate a lot in a short space.

The third of the four stories in Activists! may be the strongest of the bunch. “Firebrand” by Brabner and Vansant relates the little-known history of Barbara Johns, a teenager who led other students in a struggle against the inequities of “separate but equal” schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Johns was a remarkable individual who specifically excluded adults from her actions. She led the entire student body on a strike that eventually involved her school district in the Brown vs. Board of Education case that struck the death knell to segregated public schools in America. Vansant varies the panels’ points of view between individual and group reactions, closing in at oblique angles for whispered, secretive disparity between the black and white schools. Barbara Johns herself stands out visually — her determined single-mindedness readily apparent on her face throughout the story makes her an inspiring figure. Vansant’s use of heavy shadows and night spots gives the story an atmosphere of Johns’ struggle against darkness, but Johns is always shown brightly, symbolic of her role as a firebrand. Joyce Brabner told me that she was tempted to put in changes in the dialogue, especially for some of the adults in the story, but as it turned out, virtually every word of dialogue can be attributed to somebody.

The last story, “Survivin’-N-Da-Hood,” finishes off the book solidly, being the only tale to deal with a contemporary group of young people making non-violent activism work on a day-to-day basis. Brabner and Badger worked extensively on this story with La’rie McGruder and Duke Porter, two of the founding members of Survivin’-N-Da-Hood, a mediation and conflict resolution group that has been successfully countering street and gang violence in New Haven, Connecticut. The story builds from the kids moving from “Klan country” to New Haven, and finding violence and distrust an ingrained part of the system, with school officials at a loss for any way to stop it. The two youngsters came up with a board game that became a popular all-purpose mediation and self-counseling tool and they named their volunteer group after the game.

Do I really need to say anything more than “R. Crumb”? This is the first all-new Crumb book since Self-Loathing Comics #1 almost two years ago, and while it isn’t really a comic, it is one of Crumb’s most interesting and fascinating projects ever. The book features 35 brand new character studys, almost all of which are of so-called “Crumb women,” each with annotations from the artist and accompanying quotes on art from various sources, all hand-lettered and crafted by Crumb.

In a way, this could be considered Crumb’s manifesto. As pointed out, this self-titled magazine about “Art & Beauty” is preoccupied with the very figures that have for so long been at the root of Crumb’s most id-reflective art, yet here these women are intellectualized in a way that seems at odds with the more instinctive and sexually-base presentations of similarly-formed women in Crumb’s comics (and for which he is best known).

Crumb defends his obsession with the female physique very tenderly and passionately in Art & Beauty, revealing a man who is as clearly motivated by the didactic nature of great art as well as the more personal desire to satisfy the id. Of course these are still objectifications, but Crumb would be a lesser artist if he tried to deny his obsession with the female form than if he tried to understand it.

To extend the obvious Freudian interpretation, these lavish character studys offer the most tempered filtration of the artist’s id and ego ever seen. Crumb states that his own “imagination is stimulated by such pictures, which give[s] him the high level of motivation required for his meticulously detailed pen-and-ink rendering technique,” but what gives him the motivation and ability to so articulately express with words his own artistic obsessions? It might be the desire to become a greater artist, or it may not — either way, that has been the result of it and has characterized Crumb’s pre-eminence not only as an underground cartoonist, but as one of the 20th Century’s most important artists.

Ashley Holt’s Bedbugs is a collection of “dream diary” strips that originally ran in a weekly paper in Savannah, Georgia. In a format similar to Winsor McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, its half-page episodes read like mostly self-contained accounts of individual dreams, meandering but narrative. As in other dream-documenting comics, Holt himself is present as artist/dreamer, his likeness the only real constant from strip to strip.

Dream-based comics as a group run the risk of becoming too self-indulgent, their language of personal symbols being too opaque for general accessibility. Bedbugs avoids this partly because Holt’s dreams, far from being dark and anxiety-ridden, are whimsical and bizarre, and often genuinely funny. A further aid to accessibility lies in his use of pop culture icons as instantly-recognizable visual symbols, which plays up beautifully to the artist’s remarkable talent for caricature. Max Von Sydow, Robert Tilton, Sigmund Freud, Dolly Parton, Woody Allen, Carl Jung, and Joseph Beuys are among those who make an appearance here.

What will win you over, ultimately, is Holt’s lush brushwork, bold and direct and a pleasure for the eyes. This, along with his increasingly experimental layouts and inventive touches, makes Bedbugs an indispensible delight.

Berlin is Jason Lutes’ followup to his unmistakably ambitious two-volume graphic novel, Jar of Fools. While Jar’s first volume evoked widespread, and well-deserved, critical acclaim, the second volume was met with puzzling (and for Lutes, undoubtedly frustrating) silence. The indifferent response to Jar’s second volume seemed to indicate a falling-off, or relaxation of the formidable cartooning skills Lutes brought to bear in the first volume, which still stands as a benchmark of Lutes’ achievement. If its companion volume, or, for that matter, Berlin fails to reach it, it’s as important to acknowledge that early success as it is to note that, while Berlin still falls short of Lutes’ personal best, it’s nonetheless a competently conceived and executed read.

Geography and psychology are interchangable for Lutes — the places in which his characters find themselves are invariably related to their lives and emotional conditions. Jar of Fools was set in rainy Seattle; much of that book took place in the dark beneath elevated portions of the I-5, where the characters’ invisibility from the traffic overhead served as a reflection on their marginal lives. Berlin is not set in the present day, but in Germany, circa 1928. Two strangers, man and woman, meet on a train bound for Berlin. Kurt Severing is a journalist returning to the city from a clandestine visit to an airfield where military planes are being tested, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which prohibits Germany from maintaining an air force. Marthe Müller is an artist from the small city of Koln, who might simply be travelling for pleasure, though Lutes hints that she is more likely fleeing an incident in her past involving her father, a major in the German army. Kurt and Marthe talk together on the train, wander through Berlin’s streets, and finally arrive at separate destinations: Severing at the offices of his employer, the daily paper Die Weltbuhne, and Müller at the home of Herr Wolzendorf, an ex-soldier who formerly served under her father’s command.

Two lovely full-page panels dominate Berlin’s first issue: an elevated shot of the train carrying Kurt and Marthe toward Berlin; and, later on, a bird’s eye view of the city’s downtown core. These images illuminate two of Berlin’s central themes: the impossibility of escaping from time and one’s past; and the productive opportunities a cultural center like Berlin offers to expand one’s life beyond the bounds of what a smaller sity like Koln can offer. In both instances, Lutes uses rail tracks to symbolize different conceptions of time. In Berlin’s first sequence — a long conversation between Kurt and Marthe inside a train car bound for Berlin — time, like the tracks under the train, only moves forward, toward the future. A completely black page, blank save for the story’s title, separates this opening sequence from the train’s arrival in Berlin. But the black page also alludes to the as-yet unexplained relationship between Marthe and her father, which Lutes at one point represents as a vast darkness inside Marthe’s skull, broken by a soldier’s silhouette, whose back is turned to us. Lutes’ juxtaposition of the soldier’s figure with darkness in turn links the all-black page with the still-recent First World War, whose signs are scattered everywhere in the September countryside, like harbingers of the Second World War to come. In the second full-page panel, rail tracks fork and branch off through Berlin, symbolizing the variety of life choices offered by the specifically European notion of the great city. Lutes marks the richness and variety of Berlin life in a number of ways. “There is more of everything and everything moves faster than ever before,” says Kurt to Marthe during their train conversation, and his observation is later confirmed as the two walk along Berlin’s streets. “Into the flow of [the city] as into a river. Through warring currents of flesh and smell: cigars and sausage, lavender and roses, the sourness of neglect.” Lutes’ panels encompass a number of historically accurate details: street architecture; expressions on the faces of passersby; the nearby clamor of traffic and streetcars. “I am losing myself,” thinks Marthe, and, as if to underscore her observation, Lutes’ camera pulls back to a full-page view of Berlin and its branching streets, from an angle so high that Kurt and Marthe vanish in the rush.

There’s real pleasure in Lutes’ detailed evocation of Berlin’s streets. A brief acknowledgement calls attention to Lutes’ judicious citation of photographs by August Sander, and art works by Otto Dix, Rudolf Dischinger, and other Weimar Republic artists. And in the book’s most impressive sequence, Lutes employs a kind of literary expressionism, reminiscent of the early chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, to map the thoughts of the “poor fellow” operating the signals at a traffic roundabout, whose disgust with the drivers below him is contrasted with Kurt and Marthe’s enthusiastic views of the city.

Not all of Berlin is as successful as this sequence, which to my mind ranks with Lutes’ best. In particular, I note two tendencies in Berlin which represent a step down from Lutes’ best work. First is Lutes’ inclusion of panels whose odd angles seem designed not to simply convey information, but to inflect readers’ responses to them. For example, a tall panel on page 11 depicts Kurt and Marthe walking through the Berlin train station. The panel’s point of view is skewed to emphasize the sunlight falling through the station’s high windows overhead, which seems unneccessary. In this case, Lutes seems to think that the components of the scene aren’t sufficient to influence readers’ responses to it, so he interferes, and the panel consequently stands out from his more dispassionate views elsewhere. A second, related problem is Lutes’ pacing. Some scenes, like Kurt and Marthe’s long conversation on the train, are punctuated by panels that don’t provide any new visual information, but rather seem inserted arbitrarily, to pace the sequence more slowly. Obviously Lutes is trying to develop slower, more complicated rhythms than the stylish cuts of Jar of Fools’ action sequences. But I don’t think his present solutions to this problem are successful. As David Mamet indicates in On Directing Film (a tiny book which, page for page, provides more useful information for professional cartoonists than all of Burne Hogarth and Will Eisner’s books do together), cuts can pace a slow scene just as effectively as a fast one. Lutes needs to think more carefully about how his signature cuts (which he employs to good effect in sequences like the one involving the traffic light controller) can contribute to his newfound interest in slower, subtler scenes.

Problems like these give Berlin a kind of workbook quality. I find myself less interested in the story’s characters than in Lutes’ thoughtful play with different kinds of pacing. Coming after Jar of Fools’ bravura pacing, this can’t help but feel like a bit of a letdown. But Lutes’ commitment to experimentation and to refining his storytelling techniques bodes well for his continued development as a cartoonist. I’m consequently willing to accept my minor reservations about Berlin for now, in return for the more innovative work that Lutes’ present experiments promise in the future.

The Big Town is drawn in a simple but effective style, emphasizing the boxy faces of the characters, often with minimal background detail. The writing is an energetic mixture of Beat and pulp, at points ironically overwrought, the characters being steeped as they are in the slang of an earlier time — NYC of the Depression and the old Bowery. The book is also nicely-produced (thanks in part to a Xeric grant), complete with historic map endpapers, postscript epigraphs, and two of the most priceless author photos ever.

I was going to Hit List this anthology when it came out late last year, but I didn’t because of an apparently misguided confidence in the comic book community. Upon its triumphant return from a several-year hiatus, I was convinced that Blab #8 would be heralded as a masterpiece of aesthetic choice on editor Monte Beauchamp’s part, the best single-issue anthology since the last RAW some four or five years ago. As I turned the pages of the Comics Buyer’s Guide every Monday and The Comics Journal every month, however, my resolve wore down considerably, and I felt a social and professional responsibility to - ahem - blab effusively about my favorite comic of 1995.

Simply put, Blab looks like a fuckin’ million bucks. Chris Ware’s cover is predictably brilliant, a contemporary homage to a few classic newspaper strips like “Nancy” and “Little Orphan Annie.” Inside, there’s lots of familiar, dependable favorites: Richard Sala, Doug Allen, Spain, Jeff Johnson, Frank Stack, and even Denis Kitchen, who still makes me wish he would draw more often. For every dependable favorite, there’s a progressive, surprising, and equally rewarding contributor: Archer Prewitt (the Next Big Thing?), Walter Minus & Charles Berberian (with a cool, Johnny Craig-esque Crime Suspense Story for the ’90s), and Peter Hoey (who draws with a Ware-like industrial precision that’s hard to take your eyes off of). I can’t think of a better sampler of great, contemporary cartooning. There are issues of Snake Eyes, RAW, Zero Zero, Weirdo, etc. which are comparably well done, but Blab wins hands-down: it’s got quantity, quality, and its finger to the pulse of today’s comics scene.

Beauchamp’s a great editor because he approaches Blab from a cartooning perspective (a more radical agenda than it sounds), clearly emphasizing aesthetics over intellectuality. The book is pure eye candy, perhaps best exemplified by the stunning, yet completely devoid of content, section devoted to cosmetic product labels from the ’20s and ’30s. The colors are radiant, and the bold illustrative technique and sharp design sensibilities coalesce with the rest of the book nicely, whether in regard to Archer Prewitt’s four-color tour de force, Drew Friedman’s mind-boggling stippling effects, Gary Leib’s muted, autumnal, idiot scene... That said, Blab is as smart as anything out there. Terry LaBan, an extremely talented cartoonist with a clear, thoughtful voice, contributes one of his finest stories ever: “The Mating Game,” a hilarious look at how society usurps man’s more animalistic qualities (or is it the other way around?). Frank Stack’s anecdotal history of the obscure, early-17th Century Italian painter Caravaggio is as enlightening as it is entertaining. Peter Kuper contributes a sensitive, autobiographical piece as good as everything else he does in the autobiographical genre (and he’s been one of the best for years).

More often than not, anthologies are riddled with problems, whether they be in the form of comics, recordings, literature, whatever. Inconsistency reigns, good artists contribute leftovers, a lack of editorial guidance amounts to an overwhelming lack of cohesion... Blab’s only drawback is that it’s $16.95. It is worth it, though, as hard as it is to plop down that much for any funnybook.

With issue #8 of his self-published and distributed mini-comic, New York City-based cartoonist Alex Robinson continues the strong, appealing serial whose earlier installments found favor with Eightball’s Dan Clowes, Cerebus’ Dave Sim, and the Journal’s own Robert Boyd. Further, the story in #8 (“Horrible as are the Dead”) lacks the jerky, stop-and-start quality of earlier issues; Robinson seems to have made a commitment to a longer story and to taking his time in telling it.

As a result, plot developments in issue #8 come from groundwork laid in previous issues: aspiring cartoonist Ed’s workplace dynamic with new employer Irving Flavor is explored, de facto lead character Sherman and Dorothy dance around the parameters of their just-started relationship, even painter Jane and her boyfriend Stephen’s opinions of the Sherman/Dorothy coupling can be traced to well-established emotional and situatonal reference points. Robinson is letting his characters tell the story according to their needs and motivations. In comparison, some stories in previous issues seemed like forced marches —Êa fact Robinson himself may acknowledge in issue #8 by having writer Sherman struggle with a story not unlike that found in one of those issues.

As a comic about people between the age of 18 and 30 in New York City, Box Office Poison may be an interesting companion piece to Bob Fingerman’s Minimum Wage. But as Clowes and Robinson himself note, the recent comic Poison most resembles is Terry LaBan’s first series Unsupervised Existence. And while Robinson isn’t the artist LaBan is — his figures look rough at times, and a few exaggerated panels in #8 indicate he’s still playing with style — the sweetness of Box Office Poison doesn’t seem forced. Indeed, it may be that sincerity which sets Box Office Poison apart from slicker comics in better formats.

Weighing in at 240 comic-soaked pages, Bud Plant’s latest commercial compendium is a feast for the comics cognoscenti. This mail order behemoth opens with art books, races through children’s books, pitches trading cards and calendars, and lingers over erotica and cheese cake. Thankfully, the primary focus is on comic books and graphic novels, all the way from comic strip reprints to lesser-known European titles and Batman. In between the romanticist art books and the naughty nudes lie some real bargains for serious collectors. These include William Savage’s deft survey of Comic Books and America (listed at $6.95); various Marvel Masterworks; the legendary Photo-Journal volumes, featuring thousands of reproductions of Silver and Golden Age comic book covers; and the C.C. Beck collection, The Monster Society of Evil, available for only $110 (original price $135). Plant’s own visual aesthetic comes across as a little naff for my money but there’s plenty in here to satisfy the most discriminating of customers.

(With Apologies to Harper’s Magazine)

The following is information compiled from Krause Publications’ collection of Peter David’s essays, But I Digress, from the Comics Buyer’s Guide column of the same name.

Number of times Harlan Ellison uses the word “essayist” in his introduction: 19

Number of times Harlan Ellison uses the word “columnist” in his introduction: 1

References to Wolverine: 17

References to the Punisher: 11

References to Spawn: 8

References to Quantum Leap: 4

References to Night Nurse: 2

Denigrating references to Marvel’s character Cable: 6

Pointless references to David’s “feud” with John Byrne: numerous

Number of Hulk references cited in the index: 44

Fawning references to Stan Lee: 4

Fawning references to Jack Kirby: 2

Total number of references to Love and Rockets: 2

Friendly references to Love and Rockets: 1

Sales-conscious references to Love and Rockets: 1

References to Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, or Julie Doucet: 0

References to Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, or Joe Matt: 0

References to Joe Sacco, Ho Che Anderson, or Howard Cruse: 0

References to Tom Cruise: 1

References to Ted Danson: 1

References to Kitchen Sink Press: 0

References to underground comix: 0

Patronizing references to Fantagraphics: 1

Incidental references to Fantagraphics: 1

Hostile references to Gary Groth: 6

Veiled hostile references to Gary Groth: numerous

Number of illustrations: 21

Number of photographs of handicapped Romanians: 2

Number of tables of responses to survey questions: 20

Percentage of pages repeating the phrase “writer of stuff”: 17

Percentage of columns featuring nasty references to Brits: 4

Percentage of columns featuring unfriendly references to Marvel: 4

Gratuitous name-dropping of George Takei: 4

Tasteless recitations of Steven Wright jokes: 1

Number of jokes repeated twice: 13

Number of jokes told three times: 4

Salacious references to movie actresses: 4

Jokey references to pornography: 1

Unamused encounters with pornography: 1

References to specific 14-year-old girls as “nubile”: 1

The main problem with Buzzard is that it is all attitude and little real substance. A number of its strips attempt a relentless in-your-face lambasting of right-wing politics and economics — which is fine if you can pull it off, but it requires a lot more than just mouthing “correct” political sentiments.

For example, Steve Lafler’s “Dog Boy” (a regular feature) offers two pages of simplistic, self-righteous whining about Slick Willie, Phil Graham (sic), and geo-political corporate chicanery. But it is done so witlessly and with such a heavy hand that it is more likely to have the perverse effect of making people sympathetic to predatory capitalism. For some reason Lafler seems to believe that readers are looking to Dog Boy for guidance — in fact, this episode is sub-titled “Preaching to the Choir.” This is pretty scary if true, since he assumes that the “choir” needs to be told what GATT is before being told what opinion they should hold of this particular bit of perfidy. Since no reasoned analysis or argument is articulated, there is really no more reason to pay attention to his polemic than to some fellow wearing a sandwich board haranguing passersby at a busy intersection.

Another example of Buzzard’s cutting wit is R.L. Crabb’s “Dick Dromedary,” which delivers an attack on cigarette manufacturers that is so obvious (they offer frequent smoker coupons for things like tombstones) that Mad would have rejected it 20 years ago as being old hat.

The only feature with any bite to it is Lloyd Dangle’s “Troubletown,” featuring “More Republican Urban Legends” and “Understanding the Economy.” Although they are a bit text-heavy and look like they were drawn with a toothpick dipped in ink, they are pretty clever — a funny and vitriolic blend of the real and the outrageous.

Aside from the political humor, the rest of the magazine is a bit of a hodgepodge — biographical pieces rub shoulders with some very simply written or drawn shorter pieces and uninteresting bits of artwork and collages. These non-biographical pieces are often devoid of any narrative coherence and in most cases are poorly drawn to boot.

Mark Martin’s “Camelot” has the most technically accomplished artwork in Buzzard but the story itself consists of two rather silly pages of rhymed nonsense. A number of other simple one-page poems are also illustrated, such as “Pie,” which goes: “The stars all play in outer space/By day they only stare/At a little girl whose pretty face/Is covered with hair,” and “Ain’t It the Truth,” which is rendered in a style reminiscent of children’s storybooks of the 1950s. While these poems are pleasant enough, there isn’t much to them and they seem out of place next to “Dog Boy” or “Troubletown.”

Then there are strips like “Magic Boy,” a prime specimen of the sort of brazenly dumb humor found in many current alternative comics. Drawn in a style that makes Cathy Guisewite look like Daumier, the plot involves Magic Boy being asked for some fairy dust by Teen Robot who shakes him and yells, “Gimme that dust” when Magic Boy demurs. The end. What is the point of even printing such idiocy? Equally pointless are some other short strips like “Good Mole, Bad Mole” and “Vegetable Head on the Inner Side” and the majority of the non-narrative graphic pieces that are sprinkled about. On the plus side, expressive portraits by Jim Blanchard of a sweating G. Gordon Liddy and a smiling Charles Bukowski are very nicely handled. But they stand isolated from any accompanying text.

“It’s 40 Hour man, Part 7, Man” chronicles editor Stephen Beaupre’s career as a struggling drone rebelling against a series of meaningless jobs. This series has potential — at least it’s based upon the author’s own experiences, and some aspects of his tale are amusing — but is marred by some of the same assumptions of the more overtly political stuff. We are apparently supposed to empathize or identify with the rather smug narrator simply because he’s not a gross corporate “executoid.” But since all he wants to do is get by or get high, he comes off as somewhat obnoxious, a point the narrator seems utterly unaware of. By the end of the story, you are beginning to think that a stint in the Marine Corps is just what this boy needs.

It is a sad state of affairs when the best thing about a comic book is its text features. “Frank & Ken” by David Greenberger is a touching chronicle of the friendship of two men at the Duplex nursing home, their “prematurely declining health” a result of fast living in earlier days. It is the only story that displays any complexity or depth of feeling. Why it appears as a text piece instead of being in comic strip form, as the stories in Duplex Planet Illustrated are, is not revealed.

The funniest thing in the book is the inside front cover, an amusing and bitter parody of the ruthless empire building of companies like Marvel. Opening with a saccharine tribute to a “beautiful industry,” which it describes as a “family of nurturing dream weavers,” it goes on to portentously announce Cat-Head’s takeover of its own exclusive distribution company and then lays down a series of insane and humiliating retailer mandates. I wish the rest of the satire in Buzzard worked as well as this brief bit.

Buzzard suffers most from the fact that just about everything in the magazine — from sleazy autobiography to ripping social/political satire to expressionistic punk graphics — is being done much better elsewhere by the likes of Clowes, Griffith, Eichhorn, Tompkins, Kaz, to mention just a few cartoonists who are working in roughly the same genres. Buzzard is not entirely devoid of merit, but it needs to improve considerably in order to demonstrate that it serves any useful purpose in continuing to exist.

Paul Pope’s European-influenced comics invasion continues. After initially publishing in album formats (Sin Titulo, The Ballad of Dr. Richardson), and reviving Moebius-style light fantasy for American audiences with his massive (and as yet uncompleted) THB, Pope offers up the long-promised anthology/news/culture magazine, more in the style of something like A Suivre than any American comics magazine. It’s one fine-looking package, attractively oversized with a well-executed design and a reasonably eclectic mix of material — a Moebius story (in French) and a Pope/Jay Stephens jam strip share space with a Hugo Pratt remembrance and a brief interview with art historian/theorist Rudolph Arnheim. It’s be a bargain at twice the price.

In 1994, Larry Gonick released the second volume of his Cartoon History of the Universe, and as near as I can tell, the comics world slept. Gonick’s massive project is entertaining, engaging history and damn fine comics. Book one took us from the Big Bang to Alexander the Great. Book two backs up a bit and covers ancient India, continuing on through the fall of Rome and the exploits of an odd little cult called Christianity. Gonick’s cartooning is familiar and comfortable. The art is delightfully inappropriate to the subjects at hand, like war, murder, infanticide. Characters in early episodes are round and friendly, like Hi and Lois. In later chapters, figures become angular and severe. This may be a result of deadline pressures or of Gonick’s disillusionment with mankind; either way, it is a subtle shift that makes the later chapters a bit darker and gives the book a more distinct identity.