Though Daniels' The Changers is good at being what it is, its most pleasant surprise is what it is not: Changers is high-concept science fiction in which the heroes are time travelers from Earth's distant future, come to the past (the early 21st century) to alter the fate of humanity. What Changers is not is schlock.

The idea sounds like a pitch for a Vertigo book, but Changers is written and drawn in a style that has more in common with artcomics than their mainstream cousins. The aesthetic puts a fresh spin on a plot that is as common today as stranger-rides-into-town Westerns once were -- the same fundamental plot as Back to the Future or The Terminator. But in The Changers, the style and language make the book look less like what the reader expects it to be and thus more palatable.

Because so much of the epic sci-fi genre in comics is so bad, the expectations that come with it are a handicap that must be overcome. The success of Changers as a graphic novel can be judged fairly in how well it manages to overcome that handicap. Beyond his aesthetic, the author does a decent job of making his time-traveling heroes characters that the reader can invest interest in.

In part, this is because of the nature of their mission. In order to change the course of humanity, the laboratory creations Bisso and Geaza need only to survive half of their expected 200-year lifespan in the 21st century. Their bodies secrete an oil that, once absorbed into the environment, will provide an evolutionary catalyst that will force humans to physically adapt to the Earth's environment. (In Bisso and Geaza's future, humanity adapts the environment to itself with unimpressive results.) Basically, the heroes' quest is to stay alive.

With survival as their only mandate, Bisso and Geaza are left to spend their lives coping with the same basic problems -- relationships, chores, pastimes -- that everyone else in their adopted society has to deal with. Instead of acting like strange pioneers from a future age, Bisso and Geaza act very much like normal people, which makes it easy for the reader to identify with them.

The author establishes the status quo in the story's first chapter, then jumps ahead two years, to the moment when Bisso and Geaza's futuristic nature breaks up the routine of their lives. A visitor from the altered future arrives in the 21st century, ostensibly to thank Bisso and Geaza for their part in changing the course of human history. At the same time as the visitor's arrival, Geaza discovers that his perfect human body is beginning to fall apart.

Book one is the first of two Changers books, and thus, presumably, exists to set the stage for the second chapter. Toward this goal, the first book performs admirably. Daniels establishes the norm for his characters, then introduces the element of change. Book two will, presumably, find the characters dealing with the ramifications of that change. Whether or not this turns out to be the case will be worth finding out.

Shpilkes #1 is split into two parts. The first strip, "Fight the Power," lampoons self-righteous hipsters with a touch of relationship humor. The second, longer strip, "Last of the Hapsburgs" targets crazy rednecks.

Though the rednecks get more pages, Frederick Noland seems more comfortable working with the hipster/relationship material. "Fight the Power" is funny and vicious without being condescending. The hipster character at the center of the strip is a believable asshole. The reader can laugh at his behavior because, although it is farcical, there is a ring of truth to it. It is regular human behavior with the volume cranked up.

The older, decidedly less hip character at the beginning and end of the strip, from whom most of the relationship humor springs, is a buffoon, but a buffoon with legitimate gripes. He has absurd but realistic relationship problems, and responds to them in an absurd yet realistic way. It is the touch of truth woven into the silliness of "Fight the Power" that makes it funny.

Which is not to say that gun-toting Confederate retards do not exist, or that they do not deserve to be made fun of. But there seems to be less sincerity in "Last of the Hapsburgs," where most of the humor comes from laughing at those so ignorant that they fall outside of mainstream society, than in "Fight the Power," where the themes that generate the humor feel more universal. One approach is not necessarily better than the other, but this particular cartoonist appears to get more mileage out of that which the reader can more easily identify with.

Noland's cartooning is grotesque and detailed, occasionally resembling a comedic Al Columbia. Though his writing is not bad, it appears aimless at times. But the humor in the drawings provides an anchor to hold the reader's attention. The artist's well-developed sense of humor is so obvious in his cartooning that one can easily imagine him becoming dangerous should his writing ever catch up.

Plastic Farm #1 begins with a car crash, and it's the best thing to happen in the book. Roberts has his moments, but the alcohol-warped dream of a marshmallow car on the first page of his ongoing story is his most impressive. Everything that follows pales in comparison, and much of it is deeply flawed.

This comic is interesting because of the moments, such as the car crash, where the artist's ability shines through the muck he has created. Most of these moments are visual. Plastic Farm drifts between fantasy and reality, and excels only at its most fantastic. A splash page in which a cowboy rides a dinosaur up to the hitching post outside a tavern excites the eye and holds the reader's attention for an extra moment. But once the cowboy enters the bar, the reader must labor to overcome the artist's failure to obey simple rules of perspective and anatomy, to portray movement convincingly, or to draw more than a few remotely appealing figures. The story told demands that the art succeed in these areas. The visual style implies that he is searching for this success, but only occasionally does he find it.

The story succeeds and fails in a fashion similar to the drawing. Plastic Farm flows best when the author is trying to convey his highest concepts. It fails when he attempts to tie them to a working narrative. There is admirable imagination to be found in the magically charmed hero, the tortured narrator and the places and people surrounding them. But when these characters attempt to interact with their surroundings, the life slips out of them. The language these characters use is not the most stilted you will find in comics, but it is close enough.

In the introduction to the short story collection Queen of the Black Black, Megan Kelso tells of how she serialized the long epic Bottlecap in six issues of the comic book Girl Hero, and created short strips to use as filler in the extra pages of each issue. "Surprise, surprise!" she writes, "The short stories turned out a lot better than the epic."

The flashes of promise in Plastic Farm show that Roberts is not necessarily a bad artist, but rather one with some potential and a motherlode of kinks to work out. Whether or not he succeeds in mastering his craft will depend largely on the route he takes. At this stage in his development, he does not appear ready to tackle a sprawling epic -- the first two chapters of the one he is working on now are failures -- but he may learn from the process.

For whatever reason, Roberts is currently publishing stories by other artists as back-up strips in Plastic Farm. He may be better served by using that space to create short comics that will force him to think beyond his epic. Like Kelso, he may find it to be a more worthwhile venture than that in which he is currently engaged.

Frayed Ends tells the story of Paul, a man inconsolably burned by lost love who becomes entangled in adventure when his childhood imaginary friend reenters his life. It is a seriously flawed story revolving around a one-dimensional character.

Many of the flaws in Frayed are a result of Paul's single-minded focus on his departed lover, Rachel. Paul is so hurt that he can't even carry on a conversation with his best friend, Jelayne, without being distracted by his own lovesickness. In moderation this could be cute, but as Paul's preoccupation with Rachel extends to every part of the story, it becomes unbearable. Paul is the sort of sad sap who inspires the reader to sympathize with the poor woman who put up with him for all those years, not with him.

When his imaginary friend Edward enters the picture, the reader is presumably meant to question whether or not Paul has gone mad with lovesickness. Paul does little questioning himself. He readily accepts his own madness, then blindly follows his imaginary friend into a fantasy world on a quest to find Edward's lost heart.

The fantasy world the author conceives shows flashes of imagination, but in many ways is too ordinary to be especially interesting. Paul takes a break from being distracted by Rachel in order to spend time being distracted by political unrest in Edward's realm. The author applies to Paul a superficial interest in a law that would revoke the natives' rights to carry concealed weapons. Why Paul would care about this law when he has shown little interest in anything else about the unfamiliar landscape he finds himself in is a mystery. (Later we learn that Rachel left Paul to take a job in Texas with the National Rifle Association, but this revelation is unconvincing, tacked on long after the fact.)

After Paul passes out and awakes to find himself returned to his own world, he goes immediately back to wondering the streets, daydreaming about Rachel. He seems to care little about the fantastic journey he has just returned from, or the possibility that it may have been a delusion spawned by encroaching mental illness. This reaction, or lack thereof, ventures too far outside of what can be reasonably expected from a character in this situation for the reader to see it as anything other than a miscalculation on the part of the author.

Brightman wants the reader to sympathize with Paul, to identify with this lonely man and hope that he finds joy on the other side of this adventure. Unfortunately, Paul is more like an annoying friend who keeps bending your ear in search of sympathy long after he has run out of emotional currency, until the only option left is to abandon him to his misery.