Chances are that Dyke Strippers will sell like whipped cream-slathered hotcakes at gay/lesbian bookstores around the country (the niche market in publishing these days, in case you hadn’t heard). It is, as far as I know, the only book in print that collects work by lesbian cartoonists, and some of the work in it is world-class. Editor Roz Warren — previously editor of the mostly unfunny humor books Women’s Glib and Women’s Glibber — has the makings of a great thing here. Unfortunately, the book lacks focus: its standards are dubious and its intended audience is vaguely defined.

Dyke Strippers is published by Cleis Press, which usually prints high-quality novels and non-fiction by and about women, rarely venturing into art books of any kind (though they do produce Diane DiMassa’s paperbacks). Presumably, given the nature of their backlist, Cleis does not plan to distribute Dyke Strippers to comic book stores, but is aiming at women’s bookstores and gay/lesbian bookstores. There, Warren’s new opus will share shelf space with Dykes to Watch Out For calendars and Hothead Paisan coffee mugs, not to mention back issues of Oh…, Twisted Sisters, and Gay Comics. Does Dyke Strippers offer its audience anything new?

It would be awfully nice to have a comprehensive collection of comics by lesbians, but Dyke Strippers isn’t it. It ignores work by lesbian cartoonists from outside the English-speaking world — where are the Italians, Mexicans and Spaniards? Furthermore, Warren seems to conflate cartoon with funny, so that she omits artists (such as Hope, Lee Kennedy, and the fabulous Tristam Puppy) whose work is dramatic or autobiographical. She does not even mention queer artists and writers working in mainstream comics, let alone reprint their work. At the same time, newer and more experimental work — most notably by Roxxie of Girljock — also is absent from Dyke Strippers. Maybe Warren and her publisher sensed no demand for an encyclopedia of lesbian comics, niche market or not. The field still awaits its Trina Robbins.

On the other hand, Dyke Strippers is not a best-of-the-lesbian-cartoonists either, even though some of the work it reprints is quite wonderful. The collection might have been turned into such a book — for which the market, I’m certain, does exist — with a little more ruthlessness and a lot more taste. It already devotes long sections to Diane DiMassa and Alison Bechdel, the most popular producers of lesbian graphic narrative. It also offers space to slightly less well-known but equally talented artists like Joan Hilty, Leanne Franson, Angela Bocage and Kris Kovick; however, Franson, and especially Hilty, would have been better served by a lengthier and more diverse selection of their wide-ranging work. It includes pages by Ellen Forney and Roberta Gregory, who will be totally unfamiliar to lesbians who aren’t also comics fans (my local gay/lesbian bookstore doesn’t stock Tomato or Naughty Bits). Dyke Strippers even has short interviews with some of the bigger names here, like Bechdel and DiMassa. And it prints some of the cartoonists’ comments on their own work — providing captions to the captions, you might say — in a useful and sometimes amusing fashion.

But Dyke Strippers is not really a greatest-hits collection either. Despite its elaborate structure of introductions and autobiographies for every contributor, it seems to go out of its way to present the cartoons themselves in the least appealing possible format. Panels of no great visual interest float alone on some pages, while delicate and detailed strips huddle three to the page. Even worse, because Warren insists on humor, she ex-cludes some of Roberta Gregory’s best and angriest work, Kris Kovick’s weirdest and most delicate illustrations, and Joan Hilty’s deadpan expansion of the superhero canon.

But the real problem is that a lot of the work in this book stinks. Now, some lesbian cartoonists have limited art skills and make that into a style, like Andrea Natalie. Jennifer Camper even turns her struggles with the boundaries of the form into subject matter. That’s fine. But almost a third of the cartoonists in Dyke Strippers, to judge only by their work in the book, can neither draw nor tell stories, have no sense of humor, and lack the slightest interest in comics as a medium. These women make really stupid cartoons, often with no lesbian content. One especially hapless contributor introduces herself with the remark that she avoids dealing with “gay-specific” issues, which are “too limiting.” So what is she doing here? It isn’t worth it to name the guilty parties — leaf through the book and you will see what I mean. Warren recycled some of this really rotten stuff, notably the penis jokes, from her previous collections. Was she being cheap or lazy? In any case there was no reason to print much of Dyke Strippers even once.

Warren, by the way, was describing herself as straight (“married with children”) in the back pages of her last few books, which may be why she finds penis jokes funny. Me, I prefer dildo jokes — which brings us back to that pesky question of intended audience. To whom is it news that there are a lot of lesbian cartoonists out there, addressing all sorts of issues in all sorts of styles and at wildly various degrees of ability? Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in a women’s bookstore over the past five years already knows that. What the lesbian audience needed was either new work or truly complete coverage of the field. On the other hand, the number and variety of lesbian/bisexual cartoonists would certainly come as a revelation to the predominantly straight male world of independent and mainstream comics, and I bet they would appreciate penis-related humor too. But then why should the boys care that so many women are making such bad drawings? What the comics world needed was a beautifully produced, extensive selection of the really good cartoonists who can be found in Dyke Strippers without all the accompanying dross.

Sooner or later — we are a booming niche market, after all — somebody will put together these lovely and important imaginary collections. Meanwhile, ignore this one.

P. Craig Russell is proof that it is still possible to make a beautiful and innovative mainstream comic. He has been adapting Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories off and on for over a decade, and Stormbringer is the last of the series. Russell combines beautiful draftsmanship and an amazing design sense in this series. He also toys with the whole iconic/representative axis of comics. Whenever a character is seen from a distance, he or she is simplified into a clear line style that could have been drawn by Hergé himself. Some characters retain this “cartooniness” even up close. Others become very detailed — accurate chiaroscuro and anatomy as well as individualized features. Indeed, certain characters are clearly real people — Queen Yishana, Kargan Sharpeyes and Hozel of Argimiliar. This last character, in fact, is obviously modelled after one of Russell’s main collaborators on this project, colorist Lovern Kindzierski. Kindzierski deserves special mention because the coloring here is truly a feast. Weird candy colors vie with earthy rusts and browns. No character or location has an inherent color — time of day, mood and dramatic effect are all factors determining how color will appear in a given panel.

The story — ah, well, the story is kind of silly. Elric’s bride is kidnapped by a monster called the Dead God. He must rescue her, but first he must help Queen Yishana fight against the combined armies of Dharijor and Pan Tang. You get the point. No one, not even Moorcock himself, would consider this serious literature (and Moorcock has written other books that do qualify). But it’s pretty good pulp — Moorcock combines Lovecraftian purple prose and unsavory subject matter with traditional sword and sorcery. Russell maintains this in both his drawings and dialogue. In addition to being beautiful to look at, Stormbringer is a far better than average example of its genre. In other words — a great mainstream comic book.

There’s nothing worse than mediocre work from a creator with talent. If the work is barraged with the negative criticism it deserves, the budding genius might grow fat with bitterness and his work will suffer. If critics decide to encourage the artist despite his flaws, he tends to grow fat with ego and the work suffers. Then there’s the worst case scenario: the artist is torpedoed and shuts down for good, meaning we’ve lost an artist period, for better or for worse.

It would be for the worse in the case of Nabiel Kanan. The second issue of Exit is the only work of his I’ve seen, and it’s sort of like watching a promising actor like Leonardo DiCaprio on network television pap like Growing Pains — there might be something there, but it’ll take a few years and better material to show itself.

Some of Kanan’s strengths are obvious. He possesses a definite — if overwhelming — sense of design. Throughout Exit, Kanan uses the panel layout — as well as the orientation of each panel — to suggest movement, while his characters remain static. He renders faces well, with a wide range of expressions. He’s chosen a distinct style for Exit and maintains it throughout. He also shows a gift for characterization, which when used, is the best thing about his work. I’ll get more into that later.

Exit is about two British young adults named Karl and Louise, who have a sicko friends/more-than-friends/just friends relationship. Karl is a pussy-boy anti-social who sits around looking pretty between vandalizing cars and breaking into houses. Louise seems to be mostly a foil for Karl. A good part of the plot is about her father, and we see that more through Karl’s eyes. Karl has been spying on Louise’s father, who is supposed to be in Germany. He — the father — is really having an affair across town. While spying, Karl runs across a pretty blonde thief breaking into a house. She runs off, leaving a camcorder which Karl ends taking for himself. Karl makes an audio tape of these revelations for Louise because she once told him to if he ever couldn’t talk.

We go to “thursday morning” — the first part (gee, neat title) — and Karl and Louise are riding in Louise’s sister Rachel’s car. Kanan’s handling of their conversation makes for some of the best characterization I’ve seen in a comic this month. It’s really strong stuff. Kanan relates more of Kurt and Louise’s relationship in three panels on page three than in the entire two pages of exposition that preceded it. Did I mention he’s good at drawing faces?

They pull into a parking lot and the women leave the car, leaving Karl alone. Louise and Rachel walk around a shop, discussing Louise’s imminent move to France, as well as Louise’s reasons for not telling Karl about it. He’s gone when they get back, nabbed by a group of thugs related to the burglar he met earlier. Her boss wants that camcorder — dammit — but when Karl is dragged before them, she denies he’s the guy who has it. How strange... “friday afternoon” continues the story with Karl lurking around and Louise’s father trying to call her. This lasts for four pages. Louise tells Karl she’s leaving for France the next day. He takes it well.

The climax of the issue — as it of all things — is “saturday night.” The gang takes Louise to the train depot, and stops at a party. Karl tries to tell Louise about her father. She gets pissed because Karl always invents a crisis every time she’s about to travel. Louise stalks off, and Karl asks about the bathroom. We then see a mysterious hand takes a scout knife to Louise’s car. Thus, Louise can’t get to the airport. Karl offers a knife to help her cut her bags down. The same knife he used to puncture the tires. Karl stands revealed as the vandal — to the readers, that is —Êand our issue ends.

The whole enterprise comes off like a teen drama. Too much so. Though its subject matter is close to real life, so much of Exit is derived from movies, television and other comics it’s hardly real at all. There’s nothing wrong with being selectively derivative — Quentin Tarentino is making a career of it — but Kanan has taken wholesale, without thinking through what’s he’s taken or applying any of it to his own reality. The result is inconsistency in plot. For example, how did the thugs who kidnapped Karl know to nab him? A close-up of the license plate of the car suggests that’s how they found him, but it isn’t his car. And in the single, genuine mystery in the comic, the only person who’s seen Karl denies he’s the one they want. All this for a camcorder. There must be some pretty impressive videotape in there. The sequence which bothered me the most was the one in which the car’s tires are slashed. First, anyone who has ever punctured a tire with a knife can testify to the loud bang it makes. Ever popped a balloon? Imagine that sound at 32 psi.

Besides that, Kanan makes the dubious choice of not revealing who punctured the tire for two pages. One would suspect he is going for suspense, but why only sustain it for two pages? Karl has already been established as a passive-aggressive anti-social type who hurts Louise to prove he loves her. He’s also the only reasonable suspect. If Karl wasn’t the only suspect, the identity of the tire slasher could have been far more important to Exit. Kanan just needed to put a little more thought into it.

The only other reason he might have had would have been to fill space. If that’s so, I guess I should be grateful, because Kanan uses the most black space this side of Chester Brown, and any more would overwhelm the work. Almost 25% of the issue is black ink, and along with two splash pages and an abundance of repeated panels — stats maybe? I’d hate to accuse him of photocopying — I got the distinct impression of an artist struggling to fill an issue.

This leads us to Exit’s other problem. Kanan’s art is just as derivative as his story, though his influences have been digested less thoroughly. The hyper-lit panels recall Ho Che Anderson’s King. The seas of black behind his paneled art recall Yummy Fur. Exit is so far away from either of those works in both scope and quality, the realization of who Kanan is absorbing his art from comes as quite a surprise.

Nabiel Kanan has potential for good work, but Exit sure isn’t it. It’ll be nice to see what Kanan does once he’s finished with Exit. For $2.95, you can have the fanboy/collector thrill of being on the ground floor. But you can get what he does for free on Fox television or NBC Thursday night. God willing, this series will only be useful in the future to gauge how far he’s come.

With a lifetime Harvey Award right around the corner, Moebius is now such an established figure it’s hard to remember just how intoxicatingly fresh his work was when it first began appearing, first in Métal Hurlant, then in its American cousin Heavy Metal. Dark Horse and Moebius’s Stateside editors Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier have had the capital idea of repackaging the best of these 20-year-old stories (including, in its own separate volume, the legendary “Arzach”) in a series of inexpensive, compact, but beautifully produced paperbacks. Exotics’ two major stories, the Earthman-abroad metamorphosis comedy “Shore Leave on Pharagonesia” and the porno-romp “The Horny Goof,” are among the most freewheeling ever to flow from Moebius’s pen. Panel by panel and page by page, the craftsmanship is miraculous (especially on “Goof,” a story many U.S. readers will not be familiar with). Purists may miss the black-and-white crispness of the originals — the stories no longer seem torn right out of Moebius’s sketchbook, ink still wet, for the reader’s personal delectation — but Moebius’s graphics are so confident that his black-and-white stories can withstand the application of color without that tell-tale muddiness one often sees in “colorized” comics. (And, to be fair, the colors are lovely.) As always, Moebius’s introductions to the stories range from informative and revealing to ingenuously self-indulgent (“When I was finished with the story, I was so happy with myself it was almost painful”), but you can skip them if they really annoy you. (It is definitely a good idea to skip the editors’ foreword, unless you’re really in the mood for 300 words on How Moebius’s Comics Are Like Mushrooms.) All in all, a fine job.

As a 24-year-old male, I am almost incensed at how stupid and calculated Father & Son is, because I think I’m supposed to be demographically friendly to this type of material. The subtitle of Father & Son reads “The Generation Gap Ain’t What it Used to Be!,” which is somewhat reaffirmed by the empty domestic beer cans stacked next to my computer’s modem. Welcome to the late ’90s, where alternative comic book companies publish comics for targeted demographics. In Father & Son, never have so many blatant commercial considerations been made in an alternative comic. Of course, this could be excused if the book were any good.

I don’t have time to actually count all of the clichés (at least 13 in the first seven pages!), but the stories are insipid enough to be summed up briefly. “Great Jobs” continues with Father kicking Son out of his office, but then runs into Son at every turn. Father runs out of the building to get a cab, and Son is driving the cab (cliché alert: Son drives so fast Father demands to be let out). Father goes to a restaurant to get food, where Christopher waits on him. Etc.

At various points in the series, Son engages in such original activity as: watching music videos, starting an alternative music fanzine, sleeping on the couch, band practice, late sleeping, buying Big Glugs at the local convenience store, eating giant bowls of sugary cereal, spilling junk food on the hard drive, remembering Sesame Street… it’s fucking relentless.

Neither Father or Son are in the least bit interesting. They’re both physically unattractive, and their personalities are annoying. Father rails about things every Father rails about. Son has disruptive speech ticks — he says “like,” “wow,” “cool,” “yeah, really,” and “whoa” much too often — this may work for a character in a movie where there’s more room for nuances in acting, but in this limited context it’s simply grating.

Father & Son is obviously an attempt to create a book that will attract television and film studios looking for the next hot property. There’s no other explanation. Certainly Nicholson isn’t pouring his soul out on the paper here.

None of this is to say that Kitchen Sink Press or even Jeff Nicholson can’t pursue commercial properties to stay afloat. But there’s an uncomfortable and unprecedented disingenousness to this book on both creator and publisher’s part. KSP’s line identity is becoming hopelessly diluted. Watching Denis Kitchen get up in front of a crowd and say how pleased he is to announce pre-production on The Crow 2 is disheartening enough, but Father & Son is a new low.

Family Man, the second limited series in the Paradox Mystery group, should have been terrible. Dark, urban, mob-based stories have been hashed and rehashed in movies, television, novels, and comic books to the point that whenever something of any merit is produced, it is heralded as the next Godfather. While Family Man hasn’t been heralded much at all, and isn’t the next Godfather, it does tell a unique story.

Any description of the story given here would make it sound like all the poorly written Raymond Chandler knock-offs you try to avoid. Suffice it to say that Charyn is able to craft a near-future, urban mystery that keeps the reader wondering “Whodunnit?”; or, more precisely, “Who couldn’t have dunnit?” It also doesn’t pay much lip service to clichés; not many stories feature a gun-toting, dictatorial priest.

Staton’s art ably conveys the urban decay that serves as the story’s backdrop; there’s enough cross-hatching to choke a horse. Admittedly, there are panels with no more background than a field of diagonal lines, but these are rare.

The $4.95 cover price for 95 digest-format pages (three issues, no less) might have stopped you from buying Family Man. Give it a shot, you won’t be disappointed.

The latest issue of Fireball I was able to pick up in a local comics store, #5, is broken into three stories. The first and third are incredibly brief, simple vignettes. The first is only three pages long: a giant robot is standing in the city, he gets shot in the stomach by a tank, and a number of faceless humans celebrate in and about his fallen body. The third is also brief: robot comes out of the earth, devours some policemen, tosses a bus into the distance and receives the worship of some faceless humans from a throne made of city buildings. One gets the sense that the entire run of Fireball is made up of “robots showing up/they are defeated or not” stories, and that the enjoyment is in the variation and execution of the individual story. Part of what makes these two shorts entertaining is that they look lovely. The robots are splendid old school metal clunkers with barrel chests, buildings hit by the robots snap in two like Styrofoam models, and brief action scenes like the tossing of the bus are fundamentally well-executed. It’s like watching silent films with cheesy but stylish 1950s sci-fi production values.

The second story in Fireball #5 is longer and more impressive, most obviously because it’s done in a scratch board style that drives home even further the anachronistic qualities of the stories and the weight of the individual characters. The story, again a variation on the invasion theme, shows a masked wrestler winning a match over a human opponent and then stepping outside the building to stop another splendidly-designed robot who’s wreaking havoc on the city. Ralph provides a wonderfully choreographed fight scenes: every action in the confrontation between wrestler and robot is made clear without belaboring a single point. One also gets the sense that size plays in these stories. Not only does the size of the individuals play a role, but the size of the arena in which that contest takes place is important as is the way the characters find a place within those arenas. The story ends with the promise of an even bigger arena and contest about to unfold.

This study of size as a psychological underpinning to a child’s fascination with comic book icons evokes David Mazzucchelli’s much-praised “Big Man.” The second story in Fireball #5 has the same sort of pleasures to offer longtime comics readers that Mazzucchelli’s story did. In a time when comics readers are clamoring for old-time stories, they could do much, much worse than look past the reams of four-color crap and at Brian Ralph’s $1 dollar attractively matte-covered minicomic. While it’s perfectly reasonable to dismiss the slight stories and subject matter (hey, some people just can’t get into giant robot stories), looking past this comic because of format is your loss.

When Ghost Ship #1 came out, a comic book store owner commented to me that he felt it was the worst book of 1996. I couldn’t really argue with him. I was a big fan of Lewis’ True Swamp series, but Ghost Ship just had me dumbfounded.

As I read issue #2, something just “clicked” inside me, and I found myself startled and amazed by its brilliance. Ghost Ship is simply the most daring comic I’ve ever read.

Panels and their confining borders have been eliminated. The narrative freely floats around the page. The reader finds himself in a position where he has to make a choice: read in one direction to follow this narrative path, or read in another direction to follow a divergent narrative. I found this very intoxicating.

The bulk of issue #2 concerns the adventures of a really fucking bizarre bunch of pirates. Morceaux is a man-sized, solid silver animate pear who was once human but is now the ship’s anchor. Mr. Parrot is a gross little naked man who keeps trying to perch on his Captain’s shoulder. Suffice it to say that the crew is a screwed up bunch of freaks.

Every aspect of the book — the plot, the art, the characters, the humor — is wildly inventive and highly intelligent. Lewis is creating a book so fresh, so daring, that he risks leaving the readers far behind his racing mind.

Any comics fan who doesn’t like Jay Stephens’ work is a clod. That said, this book isn’t the nirvana of The Land of Nod, the greatest kiddie work for adults on the stands. Go Power instead collects Stephens’ silly superhero work from his Atomic City Tales series, with some Maniac Gang strips from Black Eye’s superlative, short-lived Sputnik anthology thrown in.

Even second-tier Stephens can make milk come out of your nose. When Skinman upbraids a colleague with “Quit goofing off Z-Girl! We’ve got a lot of evil to do tonight!” — and when mood maestro Mike Mignola pens a fannish introduction — you know you’re onto a good thing. Atomic City Tales probably suffered by sharing the market with Mike Allred’s Madman, which also drained attention away from another superior romp, Don Simpson’s Bizarre Heroes. But Stephens far outdoes Allred in the laughs department, and if Kitchen Sink would spring for some color we might get a real horse race going here. On the other hand, better we keep Stephens focused on The Land of Nod, his true claim to comic genius. So buy this book — c’mon, ya gotta — but if you see Jay, tell him you only kinda sorta loved it. Liked it, I mean.

Bagge has stated publicly that he’s conceived of Hate in approximately 15-issue cycles. The latest cycle finds former Seattle scenesters Buddy and Lisa living with Buddy’s family in New Jersey. Issue #23 continues the growing trend within this cycle to let Lisa’s character development and motivations drive the story. If Buddy suffers from general occupational drift and feelings of worthlessness and insecurity, then Lisa suffers from all of that in addition to absolute, crushing boredom. The impact on their relationship, such as it is, has been a subplot for several issues — particularly the characters’ sex life (or lack thereof).

Both characters deal with these problems using typically poor judgment: Buddy embarrasses himself by aggressively declaring he’s “totally in love” with a casual acquaintance; Lisa has a session of jackhammer sex with Buddy’s creepy ex-brother-in-law during her lunch break. Lisa’s actions are given more pages, having as much to do with their visual appeal (the sex scene is a perfect chance for Bagge to cut loose with his exaggerated style) as the fact that Lisa seems to have sunk lower faster than Buddy (granted, she may have had a head start). Letting a longstanding supporting character share the protagonist’s spotlight makes for more interesting comics in the long run; the exhaustion of the last few issues of the Seattle cycle of Hate may have been related to its sole spotlight on Buddy.

The remainder of the issue deals briefly with the aftermath. Bagge accomplishes this by twisting convention much, much harder than any “mainstream” writer would dare. The inevitable “talking things through” scene not only ends abruptly with absolutely nothing resolved, but the way the characters act indicates they’re relieved that nothing was resolved. When the characters do have sex on the last page, Bagge undercuts anything positive about the renewed physical relationship with an unrepentant thought balloon from Lisa that practically guarantees a continuance of both her actions and Buddy’s humiliation. This is a bit more severe than “no hugs, no learning,” not to mention more insightful. It is that insight which makes Bagge so funny, and his characters so honestly pathetic. How many characters in any serial form can you name that have resisted becoming more admirable and likeable as they’ve gone along as effectively as Buddy Bradley?

Hate #23 is well-written throughout, and like most of the recent issues is very thoroughly written. The pages are dialogue-heavy, with nine to 15 panels per page and usually a healthy dose of dialogue per panel. The tiny panels, along with Blanchard’s supertight inks and the color, are bound to disappoint those who were fond of Bagge’s super-expressive style (this story does contain more exaggerated moments than most). The sex scene mentioned earlier was memorable because it was a near rarity; most issues since #16, in fact, contain one or two big panels which leap off of the page in part due to the context of the tightly-structured work all around them. The up side of this choice is that the scenes play out much more effectively, each with their own payoff, while staying within the larger whole. The scene between Buddy and unfortunate acquaintance Doris can be broken down into several different units — half-pages, full-pages, three-panels, multi-pages. That all of them work indicates an impressive understanding of pacing and structure.

The one down side to this story is that its focus on the inner lives of Buddy and Lisa indicates potential roadblocks ahead. Early issues of Hate were driven by situations deriving from character conflict (i.e., Buddy manages a band despite Stinky’s interference), not character development. Despite a number of promising prospective comic foils — Joel and Mom Bradley in this issue, Jimmy Foley and Jay in recent issues — none of them have been able to engage Buddy the way the characters in the first cycle did. It may be that Buddy is no longer the “no bullshit” kind of guy whose interaction with people full of shit provided the dynamic for the first story arc. And will the shift in emphasis continue to work? Readers have known Buddy Bradley an awfully long time to start mining his character as a fresh source for humor. A shift in focus to include characters like Lisa helps, but such explorations are even more short-lived in secondary characters.

If Peter Bagge is selling out, then he’s going about it in an extremely strange way. Moving your characters from Seattle to New Jersey, shifting from situation-based to character-based humor, and heaping as much abuse on your popular lead as you can is not a recipe for success. It does, however, make for terrific, dark comedy.

As possibly the only honest heir to Jack Kirby’s suspense work of 1960s, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy deserves greater recognition, and widespread critical acclaim. Hellboy is a seven foot tall, bright red demon with a square jaw, great big rocky fists, an ill-fitting trenchcoat, and a utility belt containing, among other things, a really big gun. His opponents include nasty Nazis, werewolves, fairies, and various Lovecraftian Things From Other Realms. Played for laughs, or completely straight, much of this might read like grade-Z schlock: Stephen King meets Plan Nine From Outer Space. Mignola chooses a third, appealing option: Hellboy is a thoughtful individual with a refreshingly dry sense of humor, a fully fleshed-out character in a world populated by refugees from cheap paperbacks and made-for-TV movies.

In The Corpse, Hellboy has to transport a semianimate, talking corpse to a churchyard grave before dawn. But most nearby churchyards are already full, and Hellboy’s burial attempts are met by the local inhabitants turning out in full force to protest - skeletons and spirits rise from the ground, chorusing, “NO ROOM!” In The Iron Shoes, Hellboy takes on “ the most bloodthirsty of the old border goblins,” whose footwear looks like it was designed by Ted McKeever or Bill Sienkiewicz.

Mignola, like his Legend stablemate Paul Chadwick, is producing thoughtful, funny work employing a character we might not initially associate with subtlety. Mignola’s art has grown more complex since his early days at DC, and Matt Hollingsworth’s coloring perfectly captures the gloomy ambiance of Hellboy’s world. Hellboy is one of the wittiest, most enjoyable series in recent memory. The Corpse and The Iron Shoes gracefully demonstrates Hellboy and Mignola at their very best.

Hail the Hepman! Fans of Martin Wagner’s Hepcats will undoubtedly want to check out the web site for the delightful series, where Wagner reluctantly fills in his information-starved readership about the earth-shattering developments at Hepcat Headquarters (“newsflash: Wagner authorizes cocktail napkins,” etc. etc.). Although Wagner has a reputation for being somewhat tight-lipped and modest in print about the firestorm of acclaim that surrounds Hepcats, the digital format allows the Hepman to let slip at least a few details about his work. For example, in “The Journal Push Continues,” Wagner spills the beans about our big three-paragraph Hepcats newsbrief, thereby robbing the piece of some of its power when it came out in TCJ #187.

Other features among the dozen Hepcategories on the site detail Wagner’s lunch schedule, where curious folk can learn about his tipping habits and taste in salad dressing. If you happen to find Wagner’s drawing style to be absolutely grotesque, Wagner provides visual distraction from his artwork (which is selling so fast that interested collectors had better act now or kick themselves later) with a stunning shoulder-baring photo (remember, photos of cartoonists are completely in line with the literary tradition of author photos on bookjackets, and the use here is well within those boundaries). Hopefully, projects of this sort will finally put to rest the infrequent but occasionally-whispered rumor that Wagner is a self-aggrandizing doorknob.