Her gender notwithstanding, Hazel Mandujano makes what Tom Spurgeon might call "lonely boy" comics. Mandujano relies on the rhythms of her dialogue coupled with charming design to imbue her minicomics with tones of sadness, heartbreak and nostalgia. When this approach works, as it does in No Bigger Than a Teardrop, it yields an experience similar to catching a whiff of a forgotten smell that sparks a pleasant memory. When it fails, such as in the three untitled minicomics also considered here, the odor is not so agreeable.

No Bigger Than a Teardrop reveals Mandujano to be a writer with an enviable ability to string dialogue together for an off-kilter affect. The dialogue takes place between an owl and a blackbird as they have a small adventure in the woods. Mandujano's birds speak in a style that is both lyrically playful and completely believable. The book opens with the owl saying, "I can't sleep. It's like handwriting, non-stop. I can't stop thinking." But the tiny explosions that these two characters' lines create when they collide are a large part of what makes No Bigger Than a Teardrop special. In one sequence, the bird tells the owl, "Let's go for a walk." The owl answers, "No. I'm afraid of Sasquatches," to which the bird immediately replies, "Don't worry. We won't go into the mountain." In another sequence, the owl whispers to the bird, "What's wrong?" and the bird answers, "I feel sad like Charlie Bucket." The owl, not missing a beat, responds, "I can't sleep." Later, when the bird asks the owl if he knows who Charlie Bucket is, the owl simply answers, "No."

While lines like "I feel sad like Charlie Bucket," or, "No, I'm afraid of Sasquatches," may not represent realistic speech, the responses to those lines shows the characters to have a familiarity with each other and their surroundings that is representative of real-world relationships people have with other people and with places. When the owl expresses his fear of Sasquatches, the blackbird knows enough to answer that they will avoid the mountain, implying that the blackbird knows where Sasquatches are and how to avoid them. More importantly, the fact that the blackbird announces rather than suggests that they will not go into the mountain shows that the two characters have a relationship in which they can speak directly to each other, forgoing some of the niceties of etiquette. Likewise, when the owl simply answers, "No," to the blackbird's question about Charlie Bucket, it represents a similar form of friendly honesty. There is no socially conscious, "I think the name sounds familiar," answer. The owl knows the blackbird well enough to know that if he answers, "No," the blackbird will explain it for him.

It is more than the implication of a shared bond between the characters that forms the appeal of No Bigger Than a Teardrop. The story is presented in such a way, through the design of the book, that the reader feels privy to a private experience. Mandujano's comics feel homemade in the best sense of the term. The earth-tone paper, doubled-over and bound with string that each comic is made of gives the reader the feeling that the comic in-hand is a personal note from the author to the reader. No Bigger Than a Teardrop thus becomes an unusually warm affair between characters, author and audience.

Unfortunately the gambles Mandujano makes in her attempt to create an intimate vignette with Teardrop come up busted in her three untitled books based on a relationship between a young boy and his elderly female caretaker. The same elements that prove to be strengths when coupled with sharp writing come off as obnoxious conceits when the writing turns bad. Mandujano attempts to weave a clear portrait of a relationship from fragments related in three separate minicomics. The effort is laudable, but the author adopts a florid, heavy prose style that suffocates the details with its wordiness. When the prose goes from sharp and heartbreaking to haughty and dull, the design features that once seemed so charming only serve to betray Mandujano's weaknesses. These books come across as cute, but soulless. Moreover, the carefully crafted nature of design, once used as a masking agent rather than a complement, appears suddenly to be masking everything. Mandujano's sparse artwork appears to be less in service of an aesthetic and looks to be more the result of a plain inability to draw.

What study of Mandujano's comics teaches is the need for careful attention to prose style and draftsmanship. No Bigger Than a Teardrop benefits from its creator's ability to craft a complete visual package, but its greatest strength is in its heart-felt writing. Likewise, when the quality of the written word vanishes, what once appeared to be clever artistry becomes an indulgent contrivance, and the author's seeming inability to draw an appealing picture is laid bare. It is a lesson more young cartoonists should take heed of.

It says something about the minds behinds Walkabout that two comic strips make up the first 31 pages, while the last 17 are comprised of advertisements and character pinups. What this says is not exactly clear, but, certainly, it must mean something. Assuming that critical response to pinups and advertisements would be extraneous, the two stories, by default, must be examined. This is unfortunate, as one suspects that the advertisement for Nacho Mama's Mexican restaurant in Augusta, Ga. may be the most artistically valid piece in Walkabout.

In "Missy and Meg," Jon Jaffe and Xavier O. Jones present the story of "Missy -- a vicious blood sucking vampire girl," and, "Meg -- a silent zombie girl with amnesia." It is fortunate that Jaffe and Jones cue us in on who these characters are beforehand, as it is difficult to tell once the story is rolling. Missy announces she is a vampire while hacking people to bits with a chainsaw -- but not eating them or drinking their blood. She bares her fangs only once, in the last panel in which she appears. Meg is certainly silent, and her amnesia is made clear from the first page, but the only hint at her zombie nature is the vague note, "Dear Diary, I am dead," with which the story begins. This point is not expanded on, and it is only natural that the reader would assume Meg means she is figuratively dead, not literally dead. Jaffe and Jones invite the reader to, "Join this undead duo as they take the ultimate road trip across the dark back roads of America." Obviously, the artists mean for us to join them in the next installment, as the first barely qualifies as an introduction, cut off at a particularly awkward moment in an especially abrupt manner.

Clumsy as "Missy and Meg" may be, it is not crippled. Sadly, its anthology-mate, "Sector 5", may never walk again. Travis Hollaway and Sheldon Eastman (who gets inking assistance from something called Team Rushbrook), deliver a reluctant-hero-with-superpowers story that makes one long for the comparatively airtight plots of Chris Claremont. While it is tempting to simply list the missteps Hollaway makes in this story (an entire article could be written on the moment in which the hero, unprovoked, attacks a girl that appears to be the intended victim of three street thugs and the irrational implications of that moment), it is more pressing that the broader problems be addressed.

Eastman appears to be a somewhat capable action/adventure artist, but Hollaway writes as if he resents the necessity of his presence in the creative process. He suffocates the first three pages in long, badly written captions, mistaking nicely paced panels without dialogue for an opportunity to deliver boring, useless back-story.

Hollaway foregoes the big payoff scene in which the full scope of the hero's powers would be revealed, skipping to a scene with the hero's sister, miles away, thereby indicating that he intends "Sector 5" to be character driven, not action driven. The problem is that while Hollaway gives a lot of information about his hero through the narrative captions, he never reveals anything of substance regarding who he is as a character. The author wants the mysterious nature of his protagonist to drive the story, but does not want to give the reader a clear glimpse of either the character or his mysterious nature (nature meaning supernatural powers).

It is with a reluctant heart that I write this, but the creators of Walkabout could learn a lot from the contemporary Marvel bullpen. That does not mean that they should, only that they could, which says all about their work that needs to be said.

I like hotdogs. I also like comics. So what is the answer to this SAT question?

Daniel Holloway is to C. Cilla as ___ is to Wayne Stayskal?

If you answered "half-literate jackass," you just picked up ten points on your verbal. Good job, college boy!

While the cross-section of half-literates and jackasses is probably enough to keep Stayskal in filet mignon, hot-dog lovers and comics fans come together to form an audience barely big enough to buy Cilla a pack of ballpark franks. But one does not have to be a member of that target market to appreciate Cilla's weenie-themed gags. His cartoons exist in that hard-to-define gray area of, "So not funny that it's funny," which is entirely different from the, "So awful that it's great," gray area explored ad nauseam in the Ghost World movie. There is a dryness to Cilla's humor, a dryness that seems absolutely absurd when one considers that his subject is the hot dog. From that absurdity springs laughter, and from that laughter springs desire -- desire for hot dogs.

Cilla appears to love hot dogs so honestly and openly that you have to wonder if the whole thing is a lark. Who draws an instructional cartoon on how to use a punch-card clock to keep hot dogs warm? And therein lies the clue -- who uses a punch-card clock anymore? Cilla is not merely using comics as a medium through which to express his enthusiasm for hot dogs. He is consciously playing with the most ridiculous subject imaginable in an effort to squeeze some hard-earned laughs out of it.

The best hot-dog joke ever was an Onion article that claimed to be an L.A. society column by Christopher Walken. In it the writer does nothing but repeat over and over how much he likes hot dogs. By itself, not funny. But because of the mug that runs to the left of the column, the reader hears it in Walken's trademark vocal cadence. Christopher Walken talking about hot dogs is very funny. This sort of mock seriousness is what makes Cilla's cartoons tick. With Hot Dog Holiday, he steps up to take his place beside whoever wrote that Onion piece as one of the brightest stars of a new generation of hot-dog humorists. Bravo.