If Little Black is just one room in the house that is Reporter, close study of that room gives no indication as to just how big the house might be. No story arc is apparent in Little Black; rather, the strips are individual lines that intersect at surprising angles. A character from one strip might be mentioned in a conversation between two other characters several strips later, or sit down next to yet another on a bus. As these characters all appear to have recurring roles in the as of yet unclear larger story arc, the intersections of their lives give the illusion of movement in that larger story. The movement is an illusion because, although information is divulged, the reader has no idea to what end it is divulged. In revealing these relationships, Williams hints at the plot yet to come, but opts not to dirty his hands with it just yet.

Williams' best strips exploit this approach to its fullest. "Rain Comes Down" and "Lazy Man" rely heavily on it, and by far are the best strips in the collection. By no coincidence, these stories rely on the same structure: a frame in which the character Ivar listens to another character tell a story. Williams executes the frame perfectly, and has created in Ivar the perfect character through which to do so. Ivar is a non-intrusive listener, but also manages to show off a queer sense of humor and introspective nature that are just enough to make the reader want to see more of him. Williams is fully aware of this, and shortly after "Lazy Man" comes "Shoes," in which the reader receives a tantalizing scrap of Ivar's life story.

The thing Little Black does best is keep the reader hungry for more. Williams is a taskmaster of a storyteller, serving vital information in the smallest of portions. He flirts with the reader, raising the skirt on Reporter inch by inch, never giving in to the temptation to rip the whole dress off in one coarse motion.

But how long he can keep this striptease going is a question that bears asking. As mentioned before, not all of these strips are on the same level. In the weaker strips, Williams appears either to be marking time in the march toward the unveiling of his plot or forcing the introduction of characters that somehow figure into that story but do not quite fit into the world which has developed from it. Because each strip is part of the larger story, the weak ones cannot be dismissed as mere exceptions to an otherwise strong collection. They are instead the soft spots in the attic floor that must be danced around in order to keep from falling through.

Then there is the question of the Reporter Notes, a prologue and series of brief character biographies that only serves to muddy the waters. If the story Williams describes in the prologue really is the one he intends Little Black to be the first chapter of, it would not be an overestimation to say that it will take him between 40 and 50 such collections to finish it. The story in Little Black appears to be one of lives intersecting in Altmanesque fashion, while Notes gives the impression of a grand epic with "a cast of thousands." How Williams will reconcile his approach with his concept -- if he chooses to pursue that concept to its end -- will be interesting to watch.

Residue collects the politically and socially conscious strips by Roger Lootine that run in Minneapolis' Pulse and other alternative weeklies under the same name. While the best alternative-weekly strips are either wickedly funny or chillingly informative, Residue is neither. Lootine is able to squeeze neither humor nor insight from his fuck-the-man-for-the-sake-of-fucking-the-man ethic. He beats on the same targets -- Republicans, cops, SUVs, etc. -- ad nauseam, telling you repeatedly that they suck, but never digging deeply into why the suck. Cops, for instance, are portrayed as (surprise!) pigs. They are usually shown beating or shooting someone, but Lootine never bothers to explore the seeds of the problem of police brutality. Cops don't come down hard on blacks, pot smokers and bicyclists (?) because of the problems inherent in placing the responsibility of social order in the hands of a paramilitary organization that must flaunt its authority to use potentially deadly force as an enticement to recruit warm bodies to an otherwise thankless profession. Cops just come down hard because they're pigs, man.

If there was humor in Lootine's portrayal, he might be able to squeak some mileage out of it. But the rage he relies on for relevance is also what he relies on for comedy, and it is a rage that is questionable in its sincerity. Lootine's comics have all the thoughtfulness of a fraternity brother who just got busted for possession, trying to do an impression of the cop that nabbed him for the boys back at the house, overusing the words "fat" and "fuck." A vague understanding of the reasons for throwing these cartoon bombs is displayed, but it really just comes down to being on the opposite side of the line from their targets.

In the opening to a lengthy introduction, Jack Turnbull informs the reader that most of Apollo Astro #5 was created during his junior year of high school. Though he does not appear to divulge this information for the purpose of setting the rest of the book in a particular context, that is exactly what he does. One either finds the creative endeavors of teenagers more annoying or more endearing because of the trappings of their age. Turnbull's work is the latter.

Apollo Astro #5 is made up of several vignettes and one longer piece. The vignettes are the strength of the collection. Turnbull nails teenage longing in all of its stomach churning, self-important aching in "The Girl From Outer Space" and "Meet Nichole" with impressive clarity. He then turns on childhood memories with "Hug #1 (My Father)" and ties the collection up with the cartoony fun "Blood Brothers: Part One," featuring a rectangle with eyes and a circle with hair.

Between "Meet Nichole" and "Hug #1 (My Father)" falls the less successful but still interesting "The Night I Met You Everything Changed." The strip warrants extra attention, not because it falls short of the artistic level reached in the other strips, but for two other reasons: First, at 40 pages, "Night" is obviously the centerpiece of this collection. Second, "Night" represents something of an artistic step past the nostalgic strips, as it relies on that nostalgia to misdirect the reader.

"Night" is a zombie story disguised in the skin of a story about the pressures of fitting in during high school. Turnbell's decision to replace typical party behavior of drinking and drug use with a scene of cute teenagers eagerly devouring a 13-year-old boy is questionable in its execution. The final scene, in which the protagonist saves two middle-school kids from being eaten, gives them his skateboard and yells after them, "Don't stop skating!" as zombies close in is over-the-top at best. Still, the use of the drug and alcohol proxy yields some genuinely arresting moments, such as early in the story when what looks like a bag of weed is revealed to be a bag of human fingernails. The last of these moments comes at the party, when the 13-year-old boy is brought out from the basement. In the moment before the reader realizes what the teens are about to do to their younger peer, the intrigue is at a peak. When the kids start devouring the boy, Turnbull takes it one step too far, and the strip slips into cheesiness.

What is most interesting is that Turnbull does not make this misstep until late in the story. For the first 22 pages, "Night" has all the appearances of a fairly ordinary tale of teen longing, save a few moments of foreshadowing that are far more shrewd than the events which they foretell. Turnbull slips the fingernails in so gracefully in the first half that the reader does not realize until the last moment that they will prove to be the crux of the story. While Turnbull takes his plot twist too far, he does a deft job of hiding it in plain sight. "Night" is more noteworthy not for what it fails to accomplish, but for where it succeeds.

The five stories in the second issue of Artfly are taken from five prisoners' dreams collected by Peter Conrad and Jesse Reklaw. One artist takes responsibility for the transcription and penciling of each story, then passes the strip to another member of the Artfly collective to be inked. Of the resulting strips, the strongest are, not surprisingly, the ones taken from the most coherent dreams.

"Hungry Mike," by Conrad and Brandt, tells the story of a prisoner who never starts trouble but, either in spite of or because of his intimidating size, always manages to find it. The strip works as a vignette, and manages in a short amount of space to paint a portrait of a sad, quiet character who may be smarter than he looks, the most well defined character in the collection.

Reklaw and Williams' "Recidivist" is, at two pages, the shortest strip, but also the most introspective. The dream related portrays the criminal as someone who feels cornered and desperate, and is frightened at the way in way in which he reacts to those feelings. The portrayal of violence in "Recidivist" is the most harrowing of any of the strips, as rather than being dreamlike, it is portrayed in realistic terms. While violence is part of almost all of these stories, it is portrayed elsewhere as either a fact of prison life or in romanticized dreamlike visions.

The other dreams in Tales are of the more meandering, incoherent variety, but only one suffers because of this. "What I Want" puts the humorously unreal on display, as the main character and Burt Reynolds scour an office for a bong and some nude pictures. Like "Recidivist," Brandt and Reklaw's "Eternal Night" reveals a character wrestling with his own violent nature as he walks through lushly illustrated dreamscapes that may be the most compelling artwork of the book.

"Eternal Night" flirts with the vague, epic sensation of dreaming without falling into the quagmire of incoherence that Conrad and Brandt are unable to avoid in "The Poison of Suspicion." Conrad and Brandt are the only pair to work together on two strips in Big House, and it is understandable that the approach chosen in "Suspicion" would be so radically different from that in "Hungry Mike." The clean A-to-B narrative that is the strength of "Hungry Mike" fits well with the Conrad and Brandt's uncomplicated figure drawings. But the wandering "Suspicion" needs more needs more dressing up, the way Brandt and Reklaw pull the reader in by the eyeballs with "Eternal Night."

Though they read like strong exercises, the strips in Artfly still read like exercises; the nature of the stories -- the fact that they are not stories at all, but rather the real dreams of real people -- makes a certain amount of laziness seem permissible. There is nothing particularly wrong with "Recidivist," for example, but one wishes that its concepts were explored to greater depths. It is understood that each of the Artfly artists has his own individual comics pursuits, but why congregate if not to attempt to create something greater than the sum of its parts?