On the first page of Fleep, a man steps off of an empty sidewalk and into a telephone booth. On page two, that character awakens in the dark, striken with amnesia. He finds a door and, unable to open it, closes it. A light comes on and the man sees that he is inside a telephone booth encased in concrete, the word "Fleep" where the word "Phone" should be above the door.

The challenge that the man in the telephone booth, Jimmy Yee, is faced with is escape. But the challenge is not Jimmy's alone. By beginning his story with a character trapped in a concrete-covered phone booth, Shiga has essentially trapped himself in that phone booth. From page two on, Shiga has to write his way out of that phone booth. The way in which he attacks this problem reveals a cartoonist of great inventiveness, and the way in which he attacks the greater problem at the book's end reveals a cartoonist of remarkable narrative vision.

Jimmy tries the obvious options first -- searching for holes in the concrete, screaming for help and, finally, the telephone. By creating an origami ballon from the paper at hand, he surmizes that he has 56 hours of air in the phone booth. Jimmy then empties his pockets and begins formulating a plan with the tools available.

What follows is a narrative exercise played out to near perfection. Jimmy makes assumptions -- some correct, some incorrect -- and slowly, through trial and error, has the truth about his situation revealed to him. Items he dismisses upon unloading his pockets, such as a dictionary which translates Russian to an unidentified language, prove to be far more useful than items such as the two ballpoint pens he lifts like a trophy and proclaims to be his greatest tools. The most enjoyable aspect of Fleep is the chance to watch Jimmy's mind at work as he uses these tools to fashion his escape. If Shiga seems to push the boundaries of believability with Jimmy's ability to calculate latitude based on the rate of torsion in a makeshift pendulum or to use the inverse-square law to judge the thickness of a concrete wall, he does so with purpose. The more Jimmy reveals himself to be capable of such uncommon calculations, the more one begins to realize that Jimmy is more than an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.

The problem with trapping a character in a box is that eventually you have to free that character from the box. The only other option is to have the character fail. Either way, the reader will feel cheated. It is the same problem inherent in war stories or sports stories -- in stories where the conflict boils down to a win-or-lose scenario, neither ending feels satisfying. The victory will seem trite. The failure will also seem trite, as it will appear to be a knee-jerk attempt to avoid appearing trite. By placing himself in this situation, Shiga's predicament is actually more dire than Jimmy's -- not only does Shiga have to get Jimmy out of the phone booth, he has to decide whether or not he wants Jimmy out of the phone booth.

Shiga circumvents the no-win scenario by cheating. He lifts the responsibility of having to decide whether or not Jimmy should leave the booth off of his own shoulders and places it squarely on those of his protagonist. At this point Fleep becomes more than a thrill ride in which the character displays astonishing survival instincts. It becomes a vibrant story about a character at a position that all great characters find themselves in -- at a crossroads, with his future in his own hands.

My greatest personal problem with wordless comics is that I read them too fast. I find myself having to make a conscious effort to stop and consider each drawing before turning the page. This effort alone is enough to take my mind out of the book to the point where I become more focused on my reading than on the comic I'm reading. This proves the beginning of a vicious cycle in which I make note of my attention having been diverted, sink into deeper depression and repeat until I end up with the book face down in front of me, staring blankly ahead, hands in my lap.

For those with my particular disease, Greg Cook provides, if not salvation, a brief respite in the form of Sty-Row-Foam. Cook's solution to the problem of keeping his more impatient readers from treating his comic like a flip book is a simple one: Make the drawings so damn attractive that the reader has no choice but to spend a moment staring at each one.

Cook is a cartoonist of incredible grace. His figures are not just beautifully drawn, but move or refrain from movement with purpose. A hippo approaching a garbage can holding a Styrofoam container is rendered so perfectly that on the following page, when the hippo passes the garbage can, still holding the container, the reader moves forward knowing with absolute certainty that this Styrofoam container is a prop of vast importance.

What the container turns out to be is a vessel that the hippo uses to cross a body of water to a jungle island. The reader anticipates fanciful adventures through the unknown to follow, and Cook, manipulating his audience like any skilled artist, feeds this notion when the hippo encounters a cheetah asleep in a tree. The cheetah leaps down toward the hippo, and for a brief moment it seems that the worst is about to occur. This makes it all the more surprising when the cheetah, rather than adhering to its role in nature as a predator, takes the hippo in a loving embrace. The two lovers then dance their way through the jungle to a private space deep within a cave, and the joy the two take in this moment is all the more satisfying to observe after the uncertainty felt in the previous moment. But even this charm is a ruse, as Cook uses the warmth this scene and the ones following emanate to set the reader up for greater heartache when the book ends in quiet betrayal. The melancholy tone of Sty-Row-Foam's final moments demands, like the artist's style, to be savored. Cook knows this, and he displays a impressive ability to use all of the tools at his disposal to reach this last sad note.

Britton Walters' approach to comics can be best summed up in a line from his letter to the reader in the second issue: "Sure getting a coffee cup thrown at you by your boss doesn't seem funny at first, but replace that boss with a squirrel and you have comic gold!"

Walters' sense of humor is actually more sophisticated than that, but the boss and squirrel scenario is reasonably indicative of Walters' method. Huzzah! is stuffed full of talking animals, giant robots, mutants and martians populating a world that exists somewhere between the everyday world and the world of adventure comics. Yes, Walters' characters fight aliens and criminal gangs with futuristic weapons, but they also ride the bus, defecate in phone booths and duke it out with seafood-restaurant employees.

The world in which all of this occurs is one of flexible boundaries, but through repetitive use of his characters, Walters gives the impression that these chimps, college students and domesticated werewolves all inhabit the same world, without actually having them interact. The effect is achieved partially through sheer volume: both issues of Huzzah! consist mostly of one-page pieces. The repetition of the format creates an inviting atmosphere. By having the different characters in such close proximity to each other (nearly all of them present in both issues, some of them showing up multiple times in an issue) Walters creates an illusion of a shared world. These characters, though they are all single-gimmick jokes, all seem to live in the same place, and this false sense of community makes them more appealing as characters.

The effect is not unlike that which Evan Dorkin has acheived in Dork. The jokes they dish out aren't too different, either: Earl the Kid With the Sandwich For a Head, Magic Duckie and Moxie Man follow the same rules as Myron the Living Voodoo Doll, Phil the Disco Skinhead and The Murder Family. Walters' approach to a joke is the same as Dorkin's. Walters' characters often indulge in intensely self-aware toilet humor. At other times, he will project disturbed behavior onto an already irregular character, just to see how far he has to twist the situation before he gets a laugh. In one strip from the first issue, a duck in a wizard's cap sits next to a monkey wearing a cape, mask and wife-beater. The duck is asking the monkey about his exercise routine, and the monkey replies, "There really isn't much to it. I start off each day with a good breakfast, and after that I go completely nuts."

While Walters' comics are in the same vein as Dorkin's, they are not necessarily on the same level. Walters comics are self-aware, but not to the point that Dorkin's are, the level of self-awareness that led to Dork #7. Walters' drawing style is not nearly as refined as Dorkin's, but the art serves the strips well, and it is hard to imagine how it could do a better job of that. Huzzah! is more than promising early work, but still less than that of the master funnyman cartoonists.

In Erikville Erik Knutson runs the gamut from gross-out hillbilly mutant jokes to domestic wackiness to boot camp-intense hipster education. It all ties together with a Rivers Cuomo joke in the end. Who doesn't love a good joke about Rivers Cuomo?

Knutson has a decent sense of humor, but not a killer one. He does however have an ultra-slick drawing style and a good feel for how to navigate a comics page. This is more apparent in the latter part of Erikville than in the first two strips. "Cluck and Rimbaud" is the story of two brothers sharing the same body, each with his own head. Cluck's head is a talking rooster and Rimbaud's is a mute hillbilly retard. Rimbaud falls in love with a leech. Hilarity follows.

"The Molehills" is a more routine sitcom-style mix of charm and predictability. The mom cleans the son's room, finds a pornographic video and goes nuts. The dad tries to talk to the son man to man, and is relieved when the son responds with silent indifference to the his fatherly gesture. The only thing that keeps this from being Malcom in the Middle material is the fact that the Molehills seem to be furry creatures that live in the sewer. This aspect of the strip is not exploited once in even the most minute way, and one can only assume that the author presented the characters as sewer-dwelling critters in order to spice up a paper-thin concept.

The most serious problem with these two strips however is the way Knutson clutters his panels, choking off the stories. Knutson's drawings are at times so busy that they are hard to read clearly, so that it is not possible to give his writing a fair shake. This makes the third strip, "Dear Jawbreaker", all the more puzzling, for while the art not only clears up but actually displays some inventive qualities, the writing shifts from innocuous to headache-inducing.

"Dear Jawbreaker" is a love letter to '90's pop-punk idols Jawbreaker, as delivered by a wretched, self-absorbed record-store clerk. As a history of the band, "Dear Jawbreaker" serves its purpose of delivering a quick chronicle to developing music geeks who may be unfamiliar with the band, while staying visually tricky enough to keep those in the know reading (hiding the cover to Dear You in a window, an X-ray style shot of Blake Schwarzenbach's throat cancer, etc.). But because of Knutson's narrative choices, "Dear Jawbreaker" is far more painful than a harmless fan homage. Knutson's annoying record-store clerk is so gratingly preachy that he makes the reader hate the band just for attracting this guy as a fan. If he were an actual record-store clerk, he would either be self-rightous and full of shit if you knew what he was talking about, or self-righteous and terrifying if you didn't. At any rate, he is not the type of ambassador one should use when the goal is to get people into your favorite band, and that appears to be all that Knutson is aiming for here.

But that Rivers Cuomo strip at the end is a hoot.