There is a character in She's a Nightmare named Hacker Jones. He's a computer hacker. He's a computer hacker named Hacker Jones.

For the record, there is also a sniper named Scope, a cab-driving sidekick named Scooter and a knife-throwing thug named Knives ("Like the immortal Elvis I go by only one name. Knives."). One half expects a clown named Clowny or a retard named Tard to show up.

It is hard to tell if She's a Nightmare is a success because what it aspires to be is so terrible. Can it really be called success if one desires to create crap and then succeeds in doing so? And if one fails to meet the stupefyingly low creative standards one sets for oneself, is it absolutely necessary to dissect crap -- to dirty one's hands differentiating between awful crap and even worse crap?

Of course it is. Comics criticism would not even exist if writers were not compelled to roll in the hog pen and then boldly proclaim it to be inferior to the chicken coop. That Jesse Chen's aspirations are so uninspired and that he falls so miserably short of them is worth noting because it sheds light on just how bad She's a Nightmare is. It is bad art that makes other bad art look accomplished.

She's a Nightmare is an action-adventure tale filled with hard-boiled, police-detective types and the kinds of one-dimensional idiots that are usually placed around and in opposition to those characters. Scope, Scooter, Knives, Hacker and the gang are all as flat and predictable as their names imply.

But bad names alone do not a clunker make. She's a Nightmare assaults the intelligence on multiple levels at once, leaving the reader punch drunk and mentally stumbling. Just as you believe you're beginning to accept the mind-numbing stupidity that could lead to the creation of a character like Hacker Jones, the author throws at you a fatal virus that sounds a lot like AIDS, but is dubbed SKODD.

Then the author asks the reader to swallow his plot, in which a renegade pharmaceutical researcher has found a cure for SKODD, only to have her research stolen. The plot is lousy with holes, which is not unexpected, considering that She's a Nightmare appears to be modeled after Hollywood action movies -- and here is where the hair splitting begins. The producers of Hollywood action movies generally use plot as a flimsy pillar against which they prop expensive stunts and special effects. Even smart action movies are about the action. Otherwise they wouldn't be action movies.

But Chen doesn't understand that one can't enjoy what one can't see. The "She" in She's a Nightmare is the much talked about Lydia LaMorn. LaMorn is some kind of bounty hunter or assassin, but a bounty hunter-assassin with a heart of gold. She is, supposedly, feared by the criminal underworld. Other, less well-intentioned bounty hunter-assassins refer to her as a nightmare (natch) or legend. There is so much build-up around LaMorn that it is obvious that seeing her fight is going to be the rich chocolate center of She's a Nightmare.

So, naturally, Chen never bothers with a Lydia LaMorn fight scene. Oh, there's lots of fighting, but most of it involves Chris, Lydia's partner and unskilled muscle. Twice Chen sets up a big fight scene for Lydia, and twice he shies away from it. Chen abandons the scene at the moment of confrontation, picking up later, showing only the aftermath.

The letdown is staggering. Imagine watching a Van Damme movie -- dialogue so bad that it fails as amusing camp, and okay fight scenes. Now imagine watching a Van Damme movie in which those okay fight scenes have been edited out.

One has to assume that Chen opts not to show Lydia fight because he is unable to compose a fight scene worthy of the amount of build-up he applies to her skills. The fight scenes that are already in She's a Nightmare are doubtlessly the best that Chen is capable of, and because Lydia is supposed to be a better fighter than any of the participants in those fights, Chen has no choice but to leave her talents unseen.

Which leaves the reader no choice but to judge She's a Nightmare to be not merely crap, but infuriatingly bad crap.

When someone says that a cartoonist's art looks "stiff," they usually mean to be disparaging. The underlying assertion is that the artist did not intend for the art to be stiff; the artist was aspiring to some degree of looseness. Of course, there are a number of exceptions to the "loose is good" rule. Daniel Clowes' work could easily and rightfully be called stiff, but that stiffness is essential to his art. There is a constant nervous tension in his characters, an awkwardness that is crucial. Alison Elizabeth Taylor comes from the Clowes school of cartooning. Her work is good stiff, not bad stiff. She could, occasionally, be accused of mimicking Clowes. However, Taylor is no swipe artist. Clowes is merely the preeminent influence on her visual vocabulary. Taylor has her own muse to follow.

Synthetic Universe #3 is a collection of strips, the most intriguing being "Thrifting in the 2020's," part one of a continuing story. "Thrifting" is the story of two teenage friends, Brad and Molly. Both are misfits, but Brad has recently bolted for the popular crowd. Brad's desertion leaves Molly aimless and lonely. She is, like many teenagers, prone to rash decisions that put her in situations that develop beyond her control. With Brad no longer filling up her free time, Molly longs for anything or anyone to latch on to.

Brad, meanwhile, has his own problems. He is being courted by a popular girl whose friends don't approve of him. He finds himself the outsider in her group. His outsider status is exacerbated by the fact that Brad, unlike his new friends, has hair. Having one's hair removed is the newest fad in the 2020's. Having hair is considered passé by some, barbaric by others.

This sort of use of the trappings of the futuristic setting shows an encouraging talent for invention from Taylor. Cloned arms, rocket-pack sports and fads such as hair removal are more than just window dressing. They serve purposes.

Taylor finds a median between relying too heavily on the futuristic elements and not asking them to earn their keep. Just as Brad's shaggy mane marks him as an outsider, so does the way he acts and his apparent economic status -- the same things that would mark a teenager as an outsider in any story, regardless of setting. This balance is important, as it necessitates the setting but keeps the story from veering off into an imaginary world understood only by the author. Taylor might be on to something with "Thrifting."

The other strips show Taylor poking around her comics interests, not yet settled on a singular voice. All the strips are marked by a mixture of humor, absurdity and the macabre. Some are funnier than others, some more macabre. The impression they leave is that Taylor is a promising talent whose work lacks polish.

Taylor may still be searching for her own voice, but one can tell by reading Synthetic Universe that she is looking in all the right places.

Like She's a Nightmare, Jack Rabbit is a hard-boiled police-detective story with a flare for the obvious. The main character, Jack, is a rabbit. His prostitute friend, Glamour, is a beaver. His partner, Sugar Brown, is a black guy with an afro.

Though it is no better than Nightmare, Jack Rabbit is bad for its own special reasons. The most special reason is that Zwirek apparently believes that his work is fascinating because the reader gets to see funny animals doing dirty things for the ten-thousandth time.

Jack Rabbit reeks of an annoying strain of naughtiness. At first there appears to be no reason for half the characters to be talking animals. But the more one reads Jack Rabbit, the closer one comes to discovering the purpose. Zwirek's thrilling detective story is so boring and muddled that the author must be aware of its weaknesses. One can only assume that Zwirek draws his characters as animals because he needs something to make his clichés stand up. He incorrectly assumes that by making his stereotypical broken-down cop a rabbit, his stereotypical mean pimp a fox and his stereotypical hooker with a heart of gold a beaver he somehow imbues them with the originality that their actions lack. What the author fails to realize is that dirty funny-animal cartoons are just as clichéd as boozy cop stories.

The wacky fairy godmother story is all the rage. Cartoon Network's Grim and Evil and Nickelodeon's Fairly Odd Parents both center on the idea -- kids with super-powered friends whose job is, ostensibly, to be benevolent, but who have quirks of their own. These cartoons follow in the footsteps of Disney's Aladdin, the last Disney film to put a noteworthy twist on the old company formula, but strip away much of the sugar-coating that Aladdin, as a Disney film, bore.

Alex Gross and Morgan Slade's "The Bug and The Boy" from their comic book Leap, follows this model. Though it has its own saccharine flavor, Slade and Grossman inject their creation with a healthy dose of mean-spiritedness.

The contrasting flavors make for a somewhat schizophrenic story. "The Bug and The Boy" starts out all candy-coated shell. The unnamed protagonist is an elementary school kid who has a crush on a pretty girl and indulges in Li'l Walter Mitty fantasies. On the day of a field trip to the Museum of Natural History, the boy (referred to in the story usually as "Hey, kid") gets continually bullied by a bigger boy named Jeff Pomerantz. The kid cowers in the face of Jeff's bullying, even obliging Jeff by saying, "I'm a loser," after Jeff steals his lunch ticket. Jeff rewards his obedience by tossing the stolen lunch ticket into one of the exhibits and walking off laughing. As the kid searches for his lunch ticket, The Bug shows up, and hell follows with him. The Bug tells the kids to let him deal with Jeff, to which the kid replies, "No! Listen, I don't want you to eat anybody." The Bug assures him that no one will get eaten, and the kid agrees. The kid then returns to his class tour group just as the group comes across Jeff's severed head on a spear.

At this point, it appears that The Bug has taken his fairy godmothering a little too far, but there's more. The Bug pins the rap for Jeff's murder on the kid. When the kid tries to explain that the giant bug that follows him around murdered Jeff, he winds up belted to a gurney in a psychiatric hospital. In the end, The Bug shows up to torture the immobilized kid with a candy bar.

The Bug isn't just a wacky fairy godmother. He is a malevolent one. Rather than being out of step with reality but well-meaning, like Robin Williams' Genie, The Bug is very much in step with reality, taking pleasure from tricking his young charge into initiating his own downfall. He is, however, still a fairy godmother. The Bug could not have attacked Jeff without the kid's permission.

The further twisting of the familiar twist makes for a fun ride, but "The Bug and The Boy" shifts gears too suddenly for it to be as funny as it could be. Too much of the early part of the story is taken up by daydreams and cute nostalgia trips. Gross and Slade would do better to adopt the poisoned tone of the last few pages throughout the entire strip the next time they take these characters out for a spin.