With the exception of four one-pagers at the end, there is not a complete strip in Sad Planet. The closest Gray comes to finishing what he starts is in the opening strip, Community Service League: Civic Duty. The bulk of Sad Planet is taken up with what the cartoonist refers to as sneak previews. Presented as pieces of either works in progress or completed work that the artist for some reason does not want to reveal, these so-called previews read like incomplete beginnings to stories that the author has no intention of completing -- unless someone decides to drop a bag of cash in his lap to convince him to do so. Having never talked to anyone with a bag of cash, I don't know where those people like to put their money. Still, I think Gray is going to have to try a little harder to wrestle that pot of gold away from the suit-wearing, round-bellied, cigar-chomping titans of the comics world.

Of the previews, only Plato Plotts resembles even the germ of an idea. In five pages Gray introduces his protagonist and two supporting characters. The supporting characters shown have sharply defined (if one-dimensional) pesonalities, which are set up like booby traps for the protagonist. This being a preview, the reader doesn't get a chance to see those traps go off, but just having them there shows a level of sophistication in Gray's writing that is otherwise absent in Sad Planet. As for Plato Plotts himself, the best he manages to do is look bewildered in his confrontations with the two aforementioned booby traps. Being as he's a cartoon duck in a tie, an admittedly cute and expressive duck, one gets the feeling that if this strip were to ever become more than a preview, Plato would just keep on looking bewildered and getting badgered. But one can only assume.

The other previews are worth mentioning only for the purpose of dismissal. Hotwire and Saucer Girls both look like samples of hot girl drawings that Gray would use in a pitch to Marvel for the chance to draw hot girls for a living. Nothing about these strips gives any indication that Gray has any attachments to these particular hot girls (poor Hotwire only appears in one panel of her two-page preview, with all the screen time going to her sluttier nemesis, Poser). George is more anthropomorphic office fair, this time with a gorilla. George doesn't make it past page two, and the preview cuts off so abruptly, seemingly in mid-joke, that it's impossible to tell if it would be funny. The content of these four previews seems to indicate a desire on Gray's part to showcase his versatility to would-be employers -- he can draw funny animals and sexy ladies. And who can blame Gray for this approach? Isn't that 95 percent of comics, anyway?

If any one of the strips in Sad Planet is meant to be more than an advertisement for its creator's marketable skills, it would be Community Service League: Civic Duty. One is tempted to say that being more fully fleshed out, Community is the best strip of the bunch, but the concepts in Community are so tired, having been done so many times so badly already, that one has to concede that title to the great, unfinished Plato Plotts.

Civic Duty works two angles, both standards in mainstream comics. In the beginning the strip looks like its playing the "What's it like over in this odd corner of the superhero universe?" game, the kind of material done by upper echelon superhero writers whose idea of stretching themselves artistically is telling a story about a day in the life of Jarvis, the butler to the Avengers (with Jarvis renamed, refurbished proxies standing in for the Avengers and some second-banana mainstream publisher's logo on the front of the book). In this case, the corner inspected is that of a public defender forced to defend supercriminals. Gray does a manageable job with this premise, and the ground covered is still fertile enough to yield a couple stale laughs. The problem comes after the trial, when Gray drops the lawyer and follows the client into a realm already settled by scores upon scores of hacks -- the team of reluctant superheroes. The defendant loses his case and is sentenced to serve 700 years in a state-sponsored team of super-powered ex-criminals run by a Plastic Man clone. From there the story spirals into an absolute yawner, and one is grateful to see the bemused face of Plato Potts on the page that follows.

If Sad Planet actually is nothing more than a portfolio to use in search of work as a mainstream comics artist, then perhaps it's worth considering how successfully it might serve as such. Anyone browsing the offerings of the Big Two at the local retailer knows that both still employ a great number of astonishingly bad artists. Gray's art, not being astonishingly bad, may therefore be well received by these companies, or not. As previously said, his sexy women are sexy and his funny animals are funny. But both are rendered in a style that leans a bit to the cartoony side of what the mainstreams tend to publish. In that case Doug Gray may be trapped in comics limbo -- too good for mainstream hackwork, too fixated with rear ends and office monkeys for anything else.

Cannery Row is a brief vignette in the that-summer mode -- this particular summer having taken place in an abandoned Monterey industrial waterfront circa 1979. The events depicted can hardly be called events. The strip relies heavily on voiceover-style, redundant captions paired with images that serve as examples of what the prose narrator is describing. The approach is familiar, akin to one taken in Eddie Campbell's Alec strips and Adrian Tomine's early work. The implication by the narrator that events such as the ones shown occurred with regularity breathes life into the nostalgic Frankenstein that the author attempts to construct from the fragmented moments of a long, dead time. When an event occurs once, it is extraordinary, a tale to tell. When an event occurs so many times, so long ago that the separate occurrences blend together in the narrator's mind, the narrator can present those occurrences as a single event repeated for the purpose of establishing tone. Sheppard understands this, but to what end he works toward in establishing that tone is unclear.

Cannery Row shifts gears near the end. Descriptions of repeated events give way to the inevitable moment of exception -- the one time something happened that only happened one time. The problem is that Sheppard's event of note is not that noteworthy. The boys around which the strip rotates take a trek through a chain of abandoned canneries and emerge unscathed. The build-up Sheppard applies with tales of the ordinary incidents of that year raises expectations too high for the mundane action at the end. Worsening matters, Sheppard undermine the significance of his already weak momentous event by having the characters return immediately to life as usual at the event's end. The strip opens with the boys throwing newspapers at local hippies from a rooftop. When the boys leave the cannery and climb to the roof to again throw newspapers, the author revels the events that just occurred to have had no impact on the characters that just experienced them. The story is thus for naught, as unimportant as if it had been a dream. This is troubling because Sheppard obviously intended to show the trek through the cannery as having a lack of impact on the boys. There is no time glossed over between the moment they leave the cannery and the moment they begin pelting people with papers again. The two actions take place immediately one after another, with one boy still climbing out of the cannery as another reaches for a paper to throw. This return to redundancy represents a gross miscalculation on Sheppard's part. When Sheppard has the boys enter the cannery, he deviates from the commonplace. At that point there can be no turning back. The event that only happens once must be more important than the events that happen every day. When Sheppard returns to the everyday, he implies the reverse. But if everyday activity is more important than a unique event, why bother telling the story of that event? If nostalgia is meant to be the focus of the strip, let it stay the focus of the strip. If the strip is meant to be event-driven, then let the event drive it.

James Lloyd takes a number of approaches in Other Stuff #3, and shows himself to be adept in all of them. Lloyd changes up visual style from strip to strip in this collection of one-page strips (excluding the three-page John Henry and the Inky-Poo). His figures loosen and become more cartoonish or tighten up and take on a more deliberate feel as need dictates. A humorist who understands that there is more than one way to tell a joke, Lloyd also is an able cartoonist who realizes that if one wants to tell different kinds of jokes, different drawing styles are necessary.

His jokes span a fair range. He squeezes a laugh out of a folk-record advertisement in one strip, takes a shot at bubblegum feminism in another and manages to fit a gag at the expense of daytime talk shows in between. Lloyd makes style adjustments with each strip. The advertisement for Stompin' Tom's Lonesome Bleedin' Heart is rendered in a conservative, realistic-leaning style, while the figures in Sally Jesse Fonzarelli are drawn with more exaggerated features suited to the over the top nature of the gag. More impressive than Stompin' Tom and Sally Jesse is Girl Cartoonist. The strip mocks the silly girl-power attitude and behavior of teen girls, but does so through a disjointed approach to pacing and verbiage and a more primitive drawing style that looks to have elements in common with cartoonists such as Ron Regé or Ben Jones.

The only serious strip included is a one page tribute to Charles Schulz recalling the time when Schulz was called away from boot camp as a young man to go home and watch his mother die. At a time when tributes to Schulz are appearing ad nauseam even years after the man's death, Lloyd delivers with a short tribute that, unlike so many others, is worthy of its subject. The final panel alone, a silhouetted, vaguely Charlie Brown-ish character lying on top of a bunk, is by itself enough to redeem Lloyd for having the audacity to add his voice to the ever growing chorus of mostly marginal Schulz mourners. Above the character the caption reads, "That night he cried alone in his bunk in the barracks." And then, below the character, "A few months later he was sent overseas to help liberate Europe."

It is this feel for dramatic melancholy that serves as Lloyd's greatest tool in his humor. His funniest strips are based on the principle of establishing a tone of sadness and then pushing it to a level of absurdity. Isolation Funnies, What World is This, and Valentine's Day 1978 all abide by this principle. It is best demonstrated in Life, a 32 panel one-pager that follows a character from birth to death. Life offers glimpses of the character's first steps, first date, returning home from war, wedding, etc. As the strip progresses the slow, grinding way in which life begins to end is put on display as the character loses his wife and is then put into a nursing home by a happy son. Life then takes a wild turn a mere seven panels from the end, when the character escapes from the nursing home, sells himself into slavery, and winds up being boiled alive by two cruise ship cooks. It is that proximity to sadness that makes the events of the end funny. A man being boiled alive by itself is not funny. But a many being boiled alive after escaping the prison of old age and being used as a tool for back room arousal is very funny. In Lloyd's hands it's even funnier than it sounds.