To believe M@b's press is to wonder when comics artists will stop meticulously documenting the lives of young white urbanites. Toronto's Eye magazine, which publishes a weekly version of the M@b strip, writes, "Confused yet amused by the absurdities of urban existence? Or find your circle of friends your surrogate family? M@b is a comic about your life." Your life and the life of every 20-something cartoonist in North America, buster. Fortunately, M@b is more than the good people at Eye, in all their good intentions, make it out to be. Matt Blackett goes to the well with a different bucket than that of the typical urban-hipster cartoonist, and manages to draw from it a wholly different drink.

M@b is not a daily comic strip, but it reads like one. Each issue is a collection of three-panel strips, and the only thing to tip the reader off that the books are not collections of a syndicated daily is the occasional profanity or reference to drugs or sex. The three-panel format and the artistic style, obviously closest in kinship to the modern newsprint minimalists, encourages the reader to approach the material in the same way one would the comics in a local daily. M@b benefits from being read in such a context. Not only is Blackett's writing sharper and his art more expressive than that found in M@b's syndicated cousins, but its source material seems unique by comparison.

Unlike the world of alt comics, where urban people-watching and close attention to the relationship dynamics among groups of friends are common elements, in the world of the short newspaper-style strip the motifs of M@b are a deviation from the norm. While many syndicated cartoonists deal in family dynamics or wacky pets that talk, M@b appeals to a demographic that lacks representation in most funny pages: the type of urban 20-something who might be caught reading alt comics. This deviation is just enough to pique the reader's interest on initial reading. The familiarity of format and artistic style contrasted with the relatively unique subject matter smells suspiciously like artistic innovation, a rarity in comics of this breed.

What keeps the reader coming back to M@b is solid, understated art coupled with Blackett's uncanny ability to place his finger squarely on what it is that makes the things peoples say sound so weird. In one strip a character refers to a new coworker as "The type of guy who eats live frogs from a bucket." In another strip a stranger at a bar tells someone, "I kid you not, I was recruited in 1979 to spy for Poland."

But the beauty of Blackett's writing is not merely that he can come up with stuff this quirkily absurd; it is that these are his punchlines. Almost every M@b strip ends this way -- with a character saying something that appears to make no sense, but in which the reader can identify a small grain of truth. You probably do have a guy at your office that eats live frogs. That guy you talked to at the bar last night probably was a Polish spy. You just never thought of it before Blackett pointed it out to you, and he does so like a man sitting across from you, trying to direct your attention to something using only his eyes.

Instead of his eyes, though, Blackett is armed with the rhythm of the three-panel format. In one strip Blackett depicts a teenage boy and a priest. The first panel reads, "I passed a young man and a priest talking this afternoon." In the second panel, "I have no doubt about it, I heard the priest say." Finally, in the third panel, "The un-dead walk among us." The strip works because Blackett is able to manipulate situation, format and punchline to make the reader wonder as to why a priest would say that. There could be any number of reasons, any number of unseen contexts in which that line would be delivered in conversation, and the fact that the reader would take the time to consider them is a testimony to Blackett's mastery of comic timing and phrasing.

Though the art is uncomplicated, M@b is far from being the hipster Dilbert. While the writing is strong enough to carry the strip, Blackett's facial expressions are the foundation on which the writing stands. The cartoon version of Blackett, the strip's main character, has a blank, open facial expression that is surprisingly versatile. It is not blank in any negative connotation, but rather blank like a theater screen, ready to have any possible situation projected onto it. The reader becomes so familiar with this expression that even the slightest variation shakes the strip at its foundations. Few cartoonists would be able to get so much mileage out of changing nothing but curve at the end of the tiny line of a character's mouth. Such slight manipulations rattle the strip like a low-flying airliner over an elementary school.

Such is the sensation one is overcome by when reading M@b: thunderous quiet. If only the strips Blackett imitates were able to arouse this feeling, the daily comics page alone would be worth the price of subscription to your local news rag.

If Zook and Max ain't what they used to be, one can only hope that what they used to be was better than what they are now. Zook and Max is a book so head-scratchingly bad that you find yourself hoping against hope that it will show signs of improvement as you read on, just so you can walk away with the assurance that this is not the best that the author -- or any author -- can do.

If there is one comfort that can be gleaned from Zook and Max, it is that it does not look like Tim Kelly is trying very hard. The art looks as tossed-off as one can imagine (the last few pages of strips even look like they were drawn on ruled-notebook paper). Some of the jokes -- though not many -- look like the initial idea behind them might have had potential to be funny, but that no care was given in their execution. One gets the distinct feeling that when Kelly made this, he was just putting whatever popped into his head down on paper as quickly as possible without any thought as to how it would turn out.

To think otherwise is just too depressing.

Phonzie Davis plays with retro-'70s design elements as well as anyone I can think of, and to open a review of his work by saying that is to do him an injustice. If Davis merely had a firm understanding of kitsch, that might make him someone worth watching for in the future. But Young Phreak-Hoppers in Love reveals an inventive artist with a gift for dialogue who must be watched right now, at all costs.

Young Phreak-Hoppers in Love consists of two strips, "Aullie" and an untitled strip that may or may not be a strip within the "Aullie" strip. This is unclear but inconsequential. The end of "Aullie" serves as a natural lead in for the untitled strip, but the two can be read separately without either being diminished. "Aullie" is the story of a young filmmaker shooting a high-school class project. Like any good young artist, Aullie is a good-looking, likeable, self-absorbed procrastinator. People flock to him. He is, like Cormac McCarthy's John Grady Cole, a charmed character that can cause something to happen just by expecting it to. At one point, Aullie convinces a janitor to rap on camera not by asking, but by waiting for him to do so, as if the freestyle outburst was an inevitability.

Aullie also wears his youth on his sleeve. In one scene, he discusses his film class with a female admirer. After a while, the girl suggests that Aullie join her painting class, then says, "I've been messing with line and all sorts of techniques like your movie." The girl obviously wants Aullie to take the sort of interest in her painting that she has just expressed for his film. The next panel shows Aullie looking slightly annoyed with the idea. The panel that follows is a tight close-up of Aullie's eyes, more than a little terrible beauty in them. He says, "I don't want to paint." The vanity Aullie belies in missing the point so completely is staggering, a wonderful moment for the strip.

"Aullie" is not much in the way of a complete story, but if the reader feels that the strip is cut short too soon, it is only because Davis has created in Aullie a character that the reader gravitates toward, whose place in the world is made perfectly clear. From what little Davis provides in terms of story, the reader understands Aullie's character well enough to have a clear idea as to how he would treat his mother, what kind of friends he would have, what his grades would look like and so on. Davis must be encouraged to go further with this character.

The untitled strip that follows may or may not be Aullie's film project. The year is 2050, the NBA has gone belly-up and basketball is now a sport where teams play in community-based leagues for the sake of competition (a world far better than our own, to be sure). Davis follows the Pinballers, a group of kids getting ready to take on the toughest team in the league. The story is predictable -- everyone tells the Pinballers that they are outgunned, and in the end they pull off the upset. But the story isn't the thing. The basketball strip is a chance for Davis to empty his artistic bag of tricks onto the page while conducting some serious experiments with dialogue. The story of the big game is the lathe unto which Davis applies the stucco of visuals and wordplay.

The same stretching, bending figures Davis draws in "Aullie" are present in the basketball strip, but here are presented more as two-dimensional graphic images rather than three-dimensional figures. Every page is an experiment in visual composition, and Davis reaps far more successful results from playing with the aesthetics of the Yellow Submarine or Jackson Five cartoons than one would expects now that '70s nostalgia has been sufficiently strip-mined by the mass culture. One only wishes that Davis had the opportunity to present this work in color, as it obviously screams for such treatment.

Just as impressive as the look of the basketball strip is the way in which Davis experiments with slang. First, the author takes the rhythms of "Aullie" and cranks up the volume. Then, Davis creates his own language, stringing words together based on sound rather than definition. Like the illustrations, the results of the wordplay are shockingly positive. Davis is able to communicate clearly with the reader while using more words outside of their proper context than within. Even more impressive, this mutated dialogue is entertaining, inviting the reader in with a rhythm that is impossible to resist. One hardly cares that the outcome of the story is about as surprising as Rocky beating the Russian.

As exciting as the experiments in composition and language are, "Aullie" is too promising not too hope that it represents an interest on Davis' part to pursue character-driven narrative. The basketball strip shows Davis' tool box to be generously stocked, and the idea of him putting those tools to work on a more ambitious story is too enticing not too wish for.