Toby Morris makes two apologies in the afterword to Dreamboat Dreamboat. Morris first asks forgiveness for what he perceives as "the stop-start nature of its pacing." The second apology comes for the heavy-handed feel of a comic that addresses a loaded social issue through fiction, a practice the author claims to despise as a reader.

Dreamboat was originally published one page at a time as a weekly serial in two New Zealand magazines. However, any apologies related to the pacing of the book are unnecessary. Morris is an accomplished artist who works with one eye on ensuring that each page makes sense on its own and an eye on weaving the units together to appear seamless. Dreamboat has an inviting rhythm, well suited for a story of its length. Rarely does a scene span more than one page. A lesser artist would struggle in this structure, forcing together scenes that do not mesh, but Morris flourishes under such tight restrictions. The author squeezes every bit of plot possible out of the space allotted. The resulting pages are works of beauty -- not necessarily experimental, but daring in composition and layout. Together they form a meaty, satisfying story.

Apologies for heavy-handedness will, unfortunately, be accepted. Morris' story of a teenage rock and roll band in 1958 small-town New Zealand progresses without a hitch until he sabotages it with good intentions on page nine. One cannot criticize Morris' motives in writing about rape. His intentions are undeniably honorable -- to raise awareness of rape, particularly (based on the afterword and the narrator's closing remarks) as a men's issue. The problem is that Morris fails to avoid the traps that the social-issue comics that he generally groans at (to borrow the author's own verbiage) fall into. As soon as the event of the rape is introduced into the story, the broader issue of rape overpowers the event. As the rape is played out in the shadows, Morris distracts the reader from the savagery of the act with heavy narration. By cluttering the page with these captions, Morris appears to be either unable or unwilling to attempt to relate the impact of the event within the context of the present action. Instead he pushes the event into a corner and chooses to talk about it in the past tense. This is not to say that Morris should put the rape on display in voyeuristic fashion. His use of the silhouette, a shadow figure lowering itself down onto another, fist raised, is powerful and says all that needs to be said. But Morris' narration sucks the urgency out of the event. The various blocks overflowing with words skew the image to the point that it loses its power, drawing the eye away from the frightening figure. If Morris wants to impress upon the reader the horror of rape, he needs to allow the reader to be horrified. The words only intensify the damage. Nowhere is Morris' writing as weak as it is in the rape scene. "We knew rape was the most brutal, most gross thing one person could impose on another, but we thought rapists were madmen in dark alleys of big cities: Davey was someone we knew, we trusted."

Which brings us to Davey. When the narrator says that Davey was someone who had earned the trust of the characters of the story, she is not being truthful. From beginning to end, Davey is played as a stock bad boy, complete with motorcycle, greaser haircut, cigarettes and booze. When one character asks what brought him to town, Davey answers in regulation drifter fashion, "Oh... you know, I just follow my nose." When the narrator writes a song about him, she extols his dangerous qualities, then belts out, "He looks like trouble but I don't care!" If there is one person in the story who would perpetrate rape, it's him. There are no other candidates for the crime, and he is not much of a candidate for anything else.

Morris counters the bad seed with the Buddy Holly looks and wholesome attitude of Jim Leyton, the only other male character of note in the story. Jim serves as a tenderhearted sounding board for the two female leads, always ready with a smile and a supportive comment. He lacks any identity outside of this role until the moment when that role is expanded from sympathetic friend to instrument of justice. The strip ends with Jim delivering a manly knockout punch to the villain on the second to last page. Jim stands over the fallen criminal, fists clinched, and delivers the lines, "You're finished, bastard -- it's over." He repeats "It's over," for emphasis in the final panel, this time with the women folk standing behind him wearing mixed expressions of confusion, awe and relief. In this moment Jim makes the move from vapid shell to invidious scene-stealer. In a morality play that attempts to make a statement about the need for victimized women to muster the courage to face their attackers, Morris does these women a disservice by stealing final justice from the female characters and delivering it so clumsily into the hands of a male character who lacks any meaningful role otherwise.

The female leads -- Mandy, the narrator, and Therese, the victim -- offer much more than the men in terms of character development. Both start out promising. The two are best friends, and their interactions early in the story reveal nuances to their relationship that serve as rough outlines for their personalities. Only Mandy's character develops into more than an outline. Once the rape occurs, Therese becomes little more than the victim. As the timeline of the story extends only a few weeks past the rape, it is believable that Therese's personality traits would become warped or disappear altogether in the wake of the tragedy. The problem is not that she acts like a victim, but rather that Morris uses her as a victim. After the rape Therese serves no purpose in the story other than to reach out to her friends for help. Her screen time is also dramatically reduced. Focus is shifted from Mandy and Therese to Mandy alone, as the reader is forced to watch in dread, wondering if Davey will strike at Mandy next. This is a disservice to Therese's character, and to the reader, who has been asked to feel sympathy for Therese and consider the ramifications this event would have on her life. A story can't make such unabashed pleas for an emotional response and then have the character that the reader is asked to pull for turned into a plot device.

Morris should not be so ready to apologize for presenting the reader with a comic that takes on an issue this pressing, but rather should learn from the mistakes made in the types of stories he complains about and present the reader with a different approach. By apologizing, Morris seems aware that telling a socially conscious story in which the social consciousness supercedes the story is counterproductive, but he is going to do it anyway to clear his own conscience. He believes he is doing the right thing, and he can't be faulted for his desire to use his art to contribute to a cause of great immediacy and relevance in modern society. What he either forgets or chooses to ignore is the fact that a more memorable story will occur when the author asks hard questions, approaches an event from multiple angles and lends depth to all characters. A more memorable story, in turn, will do more to raise awareness than an afterschool special will.

For some reason, 22 years after Raymond Carver's "Gazebo," people keep trying to write break-up stories. Sean McKeever, who writes stories about the Incredible Hulk and Spider Girl, teams with artist Tom Williams to raid the corpse one more time with Looking at the Front Door.

McKeever's take is as flat and predictable as the assistant editor of your high school literary magazine's probably was. Jimmy watches football and takes no joy in life. This is revealed on page one, where we find Jimmy watching football and taking no joy in life. On page two, he blames Kate for this, and promises the reader that one day he is going to up and leave. On page three, Kate is introduced. No more lifeless, shrill puppet has ever been dreamed up in the secret journals of depressed high-school jocks. Kate is not the type of woman you leave. Kate is the type of woman you kill.

Jimmy is no prize himself, also worthy of murderous contempt, capable only of sitting around and looking mournful. Most of his character is delivered through internal monologue, and his thoughts all amount to laying his unhappiness square on Kate's shoulders. This unhappiness manifests itself in the aforementioned silent pouting, and that's all the reader gets. Jimmy doesn't like to play anymore, and it's that bitch Kate's fault.

McKeever throws in two characters from Jimmy's office in an attempt to thicken his vodka-thin plot, but they end up just as flat and annoying as Jimmy and Kate, and even more purposeless. The unnamed office redhead is offered up as a tantalizing alternative to Kate the shrew, but McKeever never gives Jimmy a chance to take the bait, rendering her plot role null. It is just as well, as any more time devoted to this stock, office-slut fantasy would be even more time spent making the reader nauseous. Even more obnoxious is Smitty, Jimmy's office pal whose name sums up his personality with more brevity and accuracy than can be mustered here. Every back Smitty slaps and lewd comment he makes is a shotgun blast to Front Door's readability, but at least he serves a plot function, working as set-up man for the redhead. That's more than anyone else in the story accomplishes.

The most disappointing aspect of Front Door is that while McKeever's writing looks to be in an early stage of development (the stage where swear words are used frequently and in an uncomfortable manner that shows the writer has spent little time thinking about how people who swear with gusto get it done), Williams appears to be an accomplished and more than capable cartoonist worthy of better writing than what McKeever supplies. His art is fun to absorb, easy to follow and slick without being annoying. His characters are attractive but not too attractive. Williams draws realistically good-looking people -- the kind you see on the street, as compared to the kind you see on TV. He also knows enough not to draw everyone attractive. None of his characters are ugly per se, but you can tell who is supposed to be more alluring than whom. His panels progress in a step-by-step fashion, and Williams has an obvious grasp for leading the reader's eye. If his future work is coupled with better material than what he is saddled with in Front Door, it will be worth checking out.