Trick Chilean and The Golden Age show Adam Rosenblatt to be a promising artist still struggling with the basics. The two comics represent vastly different narrative approaches, indicating that Rosenblatt is still searching for his voice as a storyteller.

"A Jacket for María Teresa," from Trick Chilean #1, is Rosenblatt's adaptation of a story by Chilean writer Mónica Hermosilla titled, "Un abrigo para María Teresa." "Un abrigo" is an account from Hermosilla's time in a Chilean concentration camp. Rosenblatt's version employs a frame in which he listens to Hermosilla read her story at an arts festival at Villa Grimaldi, a former concentration camp now converted into a peace park.

"Jacket" is essentially a flawed story, but Rosenblatt makes several interesting narrative decisions, the most interesting being the use of the frame. The author could have easily done a straight adaptation of Hermosilla's story and treated it as an exercise, but he had greater ambitions. By implementing the frame, Rosenblatt attempts places "Un abrigo" in a different context by adding elements of his own creation to the story. It is a bold and admirable move, but not a successful one.

Hermosilla's story is a straightforward account of human suffering. There is no spin doctoring of the adapted portion. No attempt at prescribing a moral or lesson to them is made. Rosenblatt wants to ensure, however, that the reader reacts to Hermosilla's story in the same way that he did. Therefore he uses the frame as a medium through which his interpretation can be made clear. The problem is that the lack of a simple moral or theme in Hermosilla's story makes Rosenblatt's interpretation appear trite. Rosenblatt closes the frame by describing how later in the evening at the arts festival, an aged Hermosilla stripped down naked and danced in the spray of a garden hose. Rosenblatt struggles to tie this event to the story Hermosilla has just told. He presents Hermosilla's naked frolic as the key that can unlock the hidden meaning behind her story. Rosenblatt writes:

"Then it occured to me that the wild party had everything to do with the way we had spent the morning in Villa Grimaldi. Maybe Mónica was still very young. After all, she had so many youths to live -- her own was done, but there was still María Teresa's and so many others. Suddenly I understood how her skin could look so tired, and yet her youth could march on..."

He then writes, "And that's how Mónica taught me the secret of grieving." "Grieving," is crossed out, with the words, "Eternal life," written next to it. While it may sound poetic and introspective to the author's ear, what exactly this means is anyone's guess. Rosenblatt is unable to clearly express his reaction to Hermosilla and her story, and rather than keep quiet on the subject, chooses to be florid and vague. "Un abrigo" is grounded in real world suffering, the story of a young woman who was tortured and murdered in a concentration camp. Rosenblatt's assertion that Hermosilla dances naked because she is somehow living out the dead woman's youth is grounded in nothing but a desperate search for meaning in an act of playfulness.

Though Rosenblatt's ambitions are intriguing, his reasoning is flawed. He attempts to prescribe meaning to suffering, to, like a Hollywood producer, add a happy ending where there was none before. He would have done better to let Hermosilla's story speak for itself.

While standards of traditional narrative can be used to judge "Jacket," The Golden Age is a wordless, dreamlike comic that spring from an entirely different tradition. Graphically, it is the superior work to "Jacket." While Rosenblatt has enviable drawing skills, his grasp of layout and page structure appears to be no better than rudimentary. "Jacket" suffers from nicely drawn pictures that are spaced too far apart, stacked on top of one another awkwardly and gridded in a way that implies a lack of imagination. Fortunately Rosenblatt's skills in this area can do nothing but improve with time and practice. For the time being, he corrects the situation by simplifying page structure in The Golden Age -- one page, one picture. While there are moments of visual flash in "Jacket," Rosenblatt appears constricted by his pages. The Golden Age provides him the chance to cut loose and draw, and we find that he can do so with panache.

What is missing from The Golden Age is the thing that is key to a comic that exemplifies everything it is trying to be, Jim Woodring's Frank -- recognizable purpose in the actions of the characters. For all its visual dynamism, there is a method to the madness of Frank. There is no such insinuation of purpose in The Golden Age. The events related appear random, the only point to them to allow Rosenblatt to flex some drawing muscles.

Those muscles look to be formidable ones, and while his storytelling lacks polish, his instincts are sound. Rosenblatt is at far too early a stage in his development to judge how much will come of the promise he shows, but he is so raw that his work is bound to improve by some degree. It will be interesting to see how much.

There is nothing wrong with cute. There is nothing wrong with any aesthetic. It is only when a herd of artists adopt an aesthetic and attempt to use it as a substitute for originality of expression that we begin to view it as a tired, rotten fad. The more mediocre works of art that look and feel exactly the same that are produced, the harder it becomes to spot works of true merit. Occasionally, though, art will appear that is so clearly inventive that it sets itself apart from the scores of similar, forgettable works.

Katie and Sean Äarburg know the difference between cute for cute's sake and cute as weapon. In The Adventures of Pipu: Friends Forever they employ hipster motifs such as mod haircuts, low-rent Wal-Mart consumerism and video game violence -- but wrap them in the guise of sugary kitsch. With the skill of a chef or a chemist, the Äarburgs are able to find the perfect balance so that the hipsterism keeps the kitsch from inducing the gag reflex and the kitsch keeps the hipsterism from coming off as oh-so jaded. Lesser artists would not be able to find such a balance. The Äarburgs manage to do so by lashing their motifs to classic story concepts.

It can be argued that there are only two kinds of stories -- The Epic Journey and The Stranger Comes to Town. One need not bother trying to convince the Äarburgs of this. Of the five stories in Friends Forever, each is clearly one or the other. "Pipu's Great Escape" and "Pipu's Halloween Treat" are Stranger stories. In the former Pipu, a chicken that says only, "Peep," is the stranger, intruding on the world of Jacques and Lilly, a young couple from the not-so-mythic city of Oaklandia. In the latter the ghost of Tony Maggot, a beatnik that used to live in Pipu's room, is the Stranger.

The two Stranger strips bookend three stories in which Pipu leaves her home to go on an adventure. "The Little Peach Pipu" and "Pipu's Antarctic Adventure" are both clearly epic. "The Little Peach Pipu" follows the arc of The Wizard of Oz, as Pipu leaves home on a mission, first gaining supplies and guidance from a kind benefactor, then rounding up three fellow travelers on the way to her destination. Once there, instead of outing the Wizard, the heroes fight and destroy a giant robot. In "Pipu's Antarctic Adventure," Pipu travels by rocket ship to a far away land where she learns the secret of, "The dotted line attack," which allows her to expel a destructive force bolt from her open beak. Pipu has traveled east and learned many secret things (technically, she traveled south).

"Pipu's Moustache" is less epic, but still a journey story -- a quest for an item of great significance. In this case the item sought is a moustache. Pipu finds a suitable proxy in a Wal-Mart-style retail store, making it a quest not so grand in scale as "Pipu's Antarctic Adventure," but here the focus is on the item and the power it holds rather than the adventure of the hunt.

By adopting such conservative narrative structures, the Äarburgs afford themselves the freedom to take chances in other areas -- not just with hipster characters or too-cute design, but also with wildly playful dialogue that stays delightfully off-rhythm. The easiest way to tell a good story is to retell one that is proven to work. The Äarburgs may be taking old stories and making them new again, but they do such a fine job of it, one can scarcely tell they were ever old in the first place.

For every comic such as Friends Forever that shoots some much needed juice into a broken down trend, there are two-hundred more that shove it back down with their wholesale lack of originality.

A generous reading of Abandon Ship finds it to be a cautionary tale for the self-absorbed, perpetually unhappy slacker. A more critical reading reveals the same, but the reader recognizes that it has been fifteen years, if not longer, since the mainstream media co-opted the slacker and his story, and squeezed every last drop of relevance from it. So unless Max Clotfelter is trying to get an early jump on the inevitable nineties nostalgia craze, Abandon Ship is all for naught.

It is unfortunate when an artist as technically sound as Clotfelter feels the need to take the road not just more traveled, but the road that has been paved, widened and equipped with a car pool lane. His visual style is not shockingly new, with obvious underground and gross-out gag influences, but he wields it like a tool so familiar that he is able to set it to any number of tasks successfully. Likewise, he demonstrates a penchant for writing believable, entertaining dialogue that moves a story. And while his plot may lack originality, its structure is as faithful to the textbook graph of a story arc as one will find in a minicomic.

What Abandon Ship lacks that Friends Forever has is a freshness of voice. The Äarburgs built their comic out of several different elements, and used a proven structure to hold it together. Clotfelter appears to be drawing inspiration from nothing other than the whining voice of the typical slacker narrative. His voice therefore too closely resembles those of countless artists of limited vision to come before him.

There are no points for getting right the things one is expected to get right. The fact that so many minicomics artists fail the reader on so many levels does not make the book with fewer failures a success. An artist such as Clotfelter is, in fact, more disappointing than his less skilled peers, because while he could turn his hand to more original concepts and possibly create interesting work, he fails to do so. Instead, he raises his glass to a character type that already gets free drinks wherever it goes, and fails to say anything new about it.