If they gave out a best-title award, Michael Aushenker's The Nine Loves of El Gato, Crime Mangler would be as sure a nominee for it as Charles Burns' Black Hole is for best inking. But unlike Black Hole, Nine Loves wouldn't be deserving of any other nominations.

The premise of Nine Loves is self-evident -- nine love stories written by Aushenker, featuring his masked luchador, El Gato, each drawn by a different artist. (Aushenker drew the last story himself.) As should be expected in a book featuring so many artists, the quality of the artwork varies greatly, but the varying degrees of quality do not prove to be as dire a problem as the schizophrenic flavor that never allows the reader to form a sharp mental image of El Gato. Rafael Navarro's highly stylized, cartoonish Gato is a far cry (thankfully) from Amarpal Khanna's attempts at a more realistic Gato. By the fifth story, the reader is still struggling with basic questions -- who is this El Gato, and what does he look like?

The situation is only made worse by the fact that in the best strips, Aushenker's clumsy stories are buoyed by better art than they deserve. Navarro, Lisa Strouss and Ted Seko each turn out wildly different versions of El Gato. Each one is so good that they compel the reader to keep reading in spite of the clumsy writing, the way you keep watching Northfork even though the script is a klunker or keep listening to Beyonce Knowles' "Crazy in Love" even though you know that it's solely responsible for all the evil in the world. But one catchy element does not good art make. The rest of Nine Loves finds Aushenker paired with artists whose talent levels fail to exceed his. When the artwork fails, there is nothing in Aushenker's dialogue or plot to redeem the story.

It is, admittedly, hard to tell if Aushenker writes bad dialogue. All of Gato's lines are spelled out phonetically in an accent that could be generic New Yorker, Bostonian or Chicagoan, but is more likely just generic dumbass ("Dose eyes. Da minute I saw dem, I wuz lost in 'em."). The phonetic spelling is so overpowering that Aushenker could be swiping from David Mamet but one could hardly tell.

But it does not matter that the only picture you have is crap if you don't have a wall to hang it on. Aushenker is a fraud, passing off the same bad story over and over again as several different bad stories. In almost every strip Gato meets a hot dame and beds her, only to have her quickly turn into a bitch, moron or murderer for no apparent reason. Gato then either shows the broad the door or gets it shown to him. Only three strips vary from this formula. Two, "Maria" with Jim Wheelock and "Dionne" with John Barber, are identical: Gato falls in love with a sexy, honest woman, only to lose her to an unforeseen death that is supposed to be tragic. Only "Gayle," with Strouss, has a plot different from any of the others. Different, however, does not mean better, and "Gayle" fails despite its comparative originality and Strouss' charming artwork.

As an architect of fiction, Aushenker is like the builder of prefabricated suburban homes, passing the same structural plan off over and over again, painting the façade a different color each time and calling it new. What's more, his plan is defective. So when the roof caves in, it doesn't just cave in on one house. The roofs cave in on the entire neighborhood.

In the opening to "Satellite Worlds" (a two-part serialized story) the narrator asks, "So what keeps a ramble from becoming a babble? How are words so obscenely one sided?"

The argument could be made that Nate Powell, both the author and the character that provides this bit of narration, explores this question by attempting to push the limits of rambling, one-sided narrative. That argument will not be made here. The opening sequence is the only part of "Satellite Worlds" that addresses issues of communication. It is as if Powell is warning the reader of the tone of things to come rather than raising questions to be considered in the ensuing story.

Instead, the less sympathetic argument will be made that Powell the author creates a preachy, babbling story because, like the character which inspires Powell the narrator to ask those questions, he likes the sound of his own voice.

"Satellite Worlds" masquerades as the story of four intersecting lives -- Powell, two of his girlfriends (nameless) and a boy named Jeremy who grew up in Powell's neighborhood. Early on, there are indications that these characters may turn out to have interesting stories. Jeremy, in particular, is an especially intriguing character, so it only makes sense that the author should all but abandon him in the second act, showing him in only one panel. These characters, each with interesting qualities, are never allowed to develop, suffocated by their creator's mission. Powell is the most unbearable kind of storyteller -- the kind with something to say.

Powell's characters are secondary to his primary concern -- allowing himself the opportunity to offer pseudo-poetic, dime-store philosophy on rites of passage. This appears to be his reasoning for making himself a character and allowing that character to narrate most of the story. When the reader reads, "Sometimes change is so overwhelming, so relentless, that one begins to treasure the provisions of a timely state of inertia -- the lifetime between moments," he or she is not merely reading the thoughts of an immature narrator. These are the thoughts of the author, which can only lead to the conclusion that the author himself is immature.

Part one of "Satellite Worlds" is heavy on the overbearing narration, but the action is clear. Anecdotes are told, but the action is subjugated to the prattling voice of the narrator. Part two shifts gears, presenting new problems that stem from the same conceits. The voice of the narrator is quieted, interjecting only occasionally. The action becomes muddled, however. Relationships begin to blur. An anecdote involving characters previously unseen and not revisited afterward muddies the waters even more. Parties, bus-stop bullying and diner scenes give way to ghosts, imaginary friends and characters that turn into vapor and float away. Powell takes the two-bit poetry out of the mouth of the narrator and reshapes it into (presumably) metaphoric action. Because the action in part one is realistic, one must assume that the fantastic occurrences of part two are fantasies of the characters. These events can't be taken literally, because the story is taking place in a world in which a precedent has already been set that precludes ghosts hovering at the foot of the bed. The story is more than half over when the ghost shows up, and nothing violating the boundaries of staunch realism occurs prior to this.

So what is happening in part two is not really happening, which makes part two a waste of time. The story has been cast aside for flights of fantasy that are no doubt intended to be metaphors, but what good are metaphors on their own? In part two Powell is preaching with eerie pictures and cryptic dialogue, where before he was preaching with wordy narration, but at least something was happening.

Of course, the art is breathtaking, which makes having to point out how bad "Satellite Worlds" is only hurt more. Like the three beautifully drawn, poorly written strips in El Gato, reading Powell's comics is both a pleasurable and a painful experience at. It may or may not be a coincidence that Powell's style bears more than a passing resemblance to cartoonists such as Sam Kieth, Farel Dalrymple and Paul Pope -- cartoonists known more for their brush than their stories. Like those artists, Powell's abilities as a writer may be questionable, but his cartooning is not. He not only creates engaging images, but he sets them up like an old pro, and his work has a more natural visual pacing and flow than most comics you will read this year. To say that Powell can't write says nothing about the kind of visual storyteller he is, and he's a damn good one.

It would be nice to say that eventually Powell's writing will catch up with his drawing skills, but I'm not optimistic. Powell doesn't just draw well; he draws beautifully. When an artist draws as beautifully and writes as poorly as Powell does, one can assume that much time has been spent in practice servicing the former to the detriment of the latter. No doubt, his writing will improve with time, but unless Powell is willing to spend as much time studying fiction as he obviously has spent studying cartooning, his work will never be whole.

Die Sweet features two roommate stories by Cybele Collins. The first, "Die Bitch Die", co-written with Garth Borovicka, is the stronger of the two. The strip tells the story of a minor feud between the residents of two neighboring apartments. It is an anecdotal story, full of the minor amusements that carry good anecdotal stories. It also has what most anecdotal stories lack -- structure.

An existing situation is established -- "My roommate Chris sleeps naked." Conflict is then introduced -- "Three guys live across the hall from us. They have a party almost every Saturday." The parties lead to a series of escalating confrontations between the narrator's household and the party-happy neighbors, with Chris the naked guy as the wild card. Chris' nudity antagonizes the party animals, motivating them to raise the conflict to another level. The inevitable final confrontation occurs, with the narrator's badass posturing undermined by the presence of his naked roommate behind him. The use of implied homosexuality as a punch line may be in questionable taste, but given that the story is basically one of juvenile testosterone wars, the author can squeak by with a basely juvenile joke.

The second story, "Sweet Potatoes," is not quite as sound. The dialogue and narration is entertaining and quirky, but serves no greater purpose. At its best, "Sweet Potatoes" can almost be seen as making fun of itself, with the absurdity cranked up on roommate bickering, Ritalin-induced edginess and mysterious missing items. Ultimately, though, it's too hard to make out what exactly is going on in the story to give it that much credit. As far as I can tell, the story ends with a ghost filling the kitchen with marshmallow fluff, which the two characters must then eat their way out of. It took several reading to come up with this interpretation, as Collins depicts a large portion of this with nearly two pages of pencil smudges and chewing noises. The pencil smudges are, I surmised, supposed to look like marshmallow fluff.

While Collins turns out some interesting, meticulously rendered portraits in these two comics, there is a general tone of sloppiness to Die Sweet. Panel borders fade in and out and many panels are crooked. Some of the best artistic advice one could offer Collins would be to next time ask the night clerk at Kinko's to demonstrate how the machines work. Unless, of course, the author is blending photorealism and primitivism in an attempt to create a brand new -ism, in which case the best advice would be to ask Collins to stop screwing around, already.