This quote from Steven Weissman appears on the Highwater Books website promoting Greg Cook's Catch as Catch Can:

In a desperate attempt to describe the feeling inspired by Tom Neeley's One Fine Day, I'll swipe a little from Weissman: Looking at Tom Neeley's work is like looking at the prettiest girl in class. One Fine Day is what it's like when she opens her mouth and you find out that she has a vile worldview.

There is nothing particularly off-putting about the story in the first issue of One Fine Day. It is a love letter to the silent-film age and the style that dominated animation houses (particularly Disney) in the pre-World War II era. It would be an easy task to come up short in, but Neeley has the drawing chops to pull it off. His characters evoke the feel of animation's early days without sacrificing modernity. They look both classic and contemporary at once. The narrative has about as much depth as those old Disney cartoons -- maybe even less -- but this is about homage and nostalgia, not storytelling. Neely's art is playful enough to sustain the strip and justify its existence.

Neely warns on the first page of both books that there are some potentially offensive images inside. "They are not intended to offend," Neely writes. "It is a stylistic choice made to fit within the historical context of the story."

The "stylistic choice" the author is referring to is his decision to use hateful iconography in his portrayal of African-Americans. It is an unfortunate decision, because after the appearance of these characters, their presence becomes the dominant issue in the reader's mind. As much as I want to give Neely the benefit of the doubt, as much as I believe that he really does think that his use of this imagery is justified in the context of his story, the author's careless handling of such emotionally-charged imagery is impossible to overlook.

For one thing, there is no evidence of any sort of "historical context" in One Fine Day. Yes, there are stylistic nods to a period when minstrelsy and coon imagery were widely accepted. The cops wear bowlers. The prisoners wear stripes. But other characters look like they could be walking the streets in 2004. The most glaring sign that this story takes place in the present and not the past comes in the beginning, when the protagonist first sees the object of his desire: a box clearly marked, "Records, 50˘."

The label is not hidden somewhere in the corner of the page, in small type. The signage is placed squarely in the center of the page, facing the reader as if seen through the eyes of the character. The author makes a point of telling the reader exactly how much money the protagonist needs to buy these records -- and it is far more than one could expect to pay during the Depression.

But even if that 50˘ sign is the product of a mental gaffe, even if the author intends this comic to be set in the early 20th century, there is no justification for his portrayal of black characters. These images do not contribute to the strip. In Daniel Clowes' "Gynecology" the coon image is central to the story. It would be impossible to create a story about a character who is fixated on that iconography without portraying it within the comic. In One Fine Day, similar imagery contributes nothing to the story. The strip actually would have benefited from a different portrayal of black characters, as the portrayal used serves only to distract and call the author's motives into question.

The author may contend that his use of coon imagery is necessary to his story because it fits the visual motif of the era that inspired it. This argument assumes that everything about a particular period in an artform is valuable. What Neely is doing in One Fine Day is not archival work. It is not necessary to preserve every detail of the era that the strip draws visual inspiration from.

Neely could have easily drawn these characters in a style that would fit in with his early-animation motif without opening this wound. For inspiration, he could have looked to Henry Kiyama's Four Immigrants Manga. There Kiyama's portrayal of Japanese-American characters sans buck teeth and other Asian stereotypes popular in the early days of comics still maintains the classic look of the age in which it was created (and serves to inadvertently highlight Kiyama's unfortunate use of racist imagery in his portrayal of blacks and Chinese -- imagery that the Japanese-born Kiyama obviously knew was degrading, since he left similar visuals out of his portrayal of Japanese characters).

By dusting off the coon image, and making no comment on it in the process, Neely is perpetuating the stereotype. In One Fine Day it is the condescending, "positive" Uncle Remus stereotype -- the carefree country-bumpkin Negro -- that is perpetuated.

A cartoonist is in the business of creating pictures that stimulate a reaction. To assume that people will react to coon imagery in the same way that a vast number of people reacted to it 80 years ago shows extraordinary naiveté. An artist -- a cartoonist especially -- can not deal in emotionally charged images and ignore their history. Neely, as a contemporary artist, must deal with images in their contemporary context, and all the baggage that comes with them.

The tacit implication of Neely's portrayal of African-Americans is that such portrayals are charming, and that charm overrides whatever strong feelings people, particularly African-Americans, have about what they historically represent. In One Fine Day they are not included for purposes of parody or commentary. They are meant only to be aesthetically pleasing. Thus reading the comic is like walking into a house full of mammy figurines, Confederate flags or World War II-era Nazi memorabilia and being told by the owner that he only collects this stuff because it's interesting. He's not really a racist, or anything.

Bullshit.

Dream comics are something of a vanity. Asking a reader to appreciate an artistic interpretation of what is, essentially, a jumble of psychological refuse makes about as much sense as emptying a bag of Cheetos at someone's feet and asking what they think of the orange patterns. Considering one's own dreams may be perfectly legitimate naval gazing, but if you want anyone else to care, you may have to spice things up a little.

I won't try to interpret David Heatley's dreams, but I like what he's done with them. Rather than trying to recreate the look of his dreams, Heatley adapts them to a childlike cartooning style. He also employs a coloring technique that evokes the feel of crayon drawings (though I suspect it's actually water color or colored pencil). The result is a world that looks less like a dream than like a child's interpretation of a dream -- but preserves all the violence, sexuality and intensity of the author's adult dream world.

This would be gimmicky if Heatley wasn't so good. The childlike quality of his cartooning does not diminish its maturity and polish.

It also flavors the disturbing nature of his dreams -- homosexual and heterosexual fantasies riddled with violence. In his dreams, Heatley is often on the run from hateful rednecks who want to beat him for being a "fag" or for cuddling with musician Stephin Merritt. He also encounters child rape, bestiality and murder as filtered through the fragmenting lens of dreams that veer off into unexpected directions. It makes for a disturbing effect. These being dreams and not traditional narratives, trying to apply logic to the action only dampens effect of reading them. It is best just to sit back and see where the author takes you.

The world of Heatley's comics is a world worth exploring. It may not be the same one that the author sees when he closes his eyes, but the reading these strips is probably more like having a dream than reading most dream comics is.

Funnyman is a surprisingly sharp comment on the connections between voyeurism, art and entertainment. It's surprising because rarely does a minicomic with such a surreal flavor speak with such clarity to the reader.

Comics in this vein -- from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron to Terratoid Heights -- often make conflicting demands of the reader: Expend considerable energy trying to make sense of this, but understand that the it defies definition. The appeal of these comics is in the way they set the mind spinning off in 1,000 directions.

Funnyman follows this tradition in method, but strives toward a different end. The minicomic consists of six vignettes that revolve around a character referred to only as the Amputee Comedian. Most of the hard storytelling occurs in the second vignette, "Novelty's Lengthy Hangover," in which we learn that the Comedian struggled in his personal and professional lives, until fame and success found him shortly after he had his arms and legs amputated. He became a married man and star of his own sitcom. Success proved to be fleeting, however. His show is cancelled and his wife, we learn later in "Pet Name," comes to despise him. He winds up living in the same conditions he lived in before he hit it big, only without his limbs. In the spectacularly creepy closing piece the Comedian further perverts himself in what appears to be a double entendre -- an attempt to please his father and to apply meaning to his life.

The Comedian allows himself to literally be transformed into a work of art. The final scene -- in which the character's father, arm around his son's wife, shows the Comedian to a prospective buyer -- works because it speaks at once to all the points brought up in the previous vignettes. These pieces address private fetishes and popular entertainment side by side, pointing out that the line separating the two barely exists. Parlor games, television shows, high art and sexual fetish are all the same thing. The strip closes as the buyer admires the Comedian hanging on a wall: "An excellent piece. Quite erotic. And quite humorous." It is a perfect final stroke.