Ben Hutchings treats page space as if he pays for it by the inch. Short strips and single-panel gags are packed in four or five to a page, giving the sense that white space is an enemy that must be destroyed at all costs. Multi-page strips ride, like stock cars, dangerously close to each other. If one strip ends a third of the way down a page, the artist fills the remaining two-thirds with the beginning of a new strip. If this work were as uninspired as that of most minicomics funnymen, the complete disregard for the niceties of design could be considered reckless, maybe even lazy. But Hutchings is a talented humorist, one whose work loudly demands its reader's attention. His cram-it-in-there approach to design complements his audacious brand of humor. It seems that Hutchings has all this funny crap in his brain and he has to get as much of it onto the page as fast as he can before it kills him.

Curiously, it seems that Stink's most visually polished strips tend to be the ones where the humor falls a bit flat. A strip from issue six that mocks white-supremacist morons is one of Hutchings' most subtle, and consequently least funny. He tries to let the idiocy of the characters' actions and opinions speak for itself. It works, occasionally, but one would rather see him go for the throat against such a plainly evil target.

The humor here works best when it is at its most absurd: Hutchings' cart-wheeling, axe-wielding, wife-stealing Jesus demands that sinners become Jesus freaks or go straight to Hell. The absurdity of this Jesus targets the absurdity of hard-core conservative Christians. Because Hutchings' aim is so tightly focused, he avoids the common pitfall of essentially pointing a finger at religion and saying, "Look, isn't that stupid?"

Generally, the more absurd Hutchings humor is, the better it is. But that he occasionally tries to branch out into longer, more subtle work shows that he has an eye on artistic growth and is not content to keep drawing the same thing over and over again. That's a good thing.

Sometimes you get the feeling that, if only they could come up with a reasonable excuse, most cartoonists would put pictures of themselves in their minicomics. Tatiana Gill has such an excuse. You see, the photographs in her latest are the same ones she used to piece together the events upon which "Whoa, Mexico," the first of Oasis's two autobiographical stories, is based.

Gill could not remember the story of a vacation with her mother and brother because she was high the whole time. This is problematic, because the story is about how high she got on her vacation. Luckily, she was able to piece together her wacky adventures -- Tatiana buys pills! Tatiana buys pants! -- with the help of her family and the photographs, which are included in the book for no apparent reason other than ego unbound.

The story the author pieces together is not exactly Half Baked: Nothing particularly interesting happens to Gill while she's high, unless dehydration interests you. In almost every panel Gill is taking pills, talking about taking pills or passing out from the pills she took. The rest of the time she is doing some generically stupid thing -- like buying ugly pants or being loud in the swimming pool -- that you've already seen your own friends do when they were high. Why Gill thinks you need her lame story about how fucked up she got in Mexico to add to every other lame story you've heard about dumbass twentysomethings getting fucked up in Mexico is something, hopefully, she will have to explain to her Maker in the afterlife.

The only sensible explanation is that Gill's life is so unnoteworthy that she feels that only through documentation can it be made more exciting. It is also the only way to explain the second strip, which has its own companion photograph -- this one of a teenage, Cure-loving Tatiana and unidentified friend. That story tells, in seven pages, Gill's life story, with special attention given to her musical tastes. Unless she is holding out on some juicy bit of information, seven pages is more than her life story is worth. With the one notable exception -- an incident involving her gun-wielding mother that the author glosses over by giving it less than a full panel's attention -- Gill's life story follows so closely the path of every mediocre, indy-rock-loving, middle-class white girl you've ever met that this piece reads like a treatment for a bad movie about mediocre, indy-rock-loving, middle-class white girls -- probably a movie starring Claire Danes or one of the young ladies from Degrassi: The Next Generation.

That Gill all but ignores what appears to be the only genuinely interesting moment in her life shows she has no business making autobiographical comics. That she includes so many photographs of herself in Oasis gives an indication as to why she makes them -- to her generation of cartoonists, the undocumented life is not worth living.

For years now, there has been much gnashing of teeth over the prevalence of autobiographical comics created by artists who have not done much living. Critical outrage has not slowed the self-love flood: So long as the waters keep rising, critics will continue to seek higher ground.

In the note of introduction included with my review copy of All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, Robert Elrod writes:

"Please think about metaphor when reading my book. Zombies aren't necessarily meant to represent the dead come back to life. I use them to represent the people that wander through life. You get the idea I'm sure."

It would be difficult not to get the idea. The first strip in All Dressed Up features a zombie who puts on a suit, gets on a bus, goes to work and then promptly has his necrotic flesh rot away when he sits down at his computer and puts on his head set. In the end, the zombie's head falls off, the jaw broken open to reveal a watch in his mouth. Point taken.

Since Mr. Elrod asked so nicely, here's what I think about metaphor: it's a crutch to be leaned on by the untalented, the uninspired or those who simply have no idea how to create art. That Elrod's zombies, winged warriors and demons are meant to represent the common man does not mean his strips are anything other than crap. On the contrary, I suspect that Elrod's strips are crap precisely because they are populated by walking metaphors rather than living, breathing characters.

Comparing the denizens of the working world to zombies is an observation worthy of an adolescent. I'm operating under the assumption that this author passed the ninth grade long ago. If Elrod wants to be taken seriously as an artist, the very least he could do is show a little more sophistication than the poetry found in junior-high literary magazines.

These strips fail because Elrod's metaphors make blanket statements about the bleakness of life, but offer no insights. There are no characters to experience this overwhelming pain. There is no action or reaction. There is nothing new. The only thing one can be certain of after reading these strips is that Robert Elrod thinks that life is a boring load of shit.

The only fun thing about reading Retributors is counting the number of bad stereotypes and Marvel swipes. The Spoon is Cyclops. Old Man Whoop Ass is Wolverine. The Gypsy Bitch is a tramped-up Scarlet Witch. There is also a fat Indian (whether he is supposed to be American Indian or Eastern Indian is unclear), a bionic pimp (when will lazy artists stop strip-mining the pimp type?) and a devourer of worlds (Galactus, anyone?). Throw in a government shadow agency and an extraterrestrial conspiracy, set it against a sprawling superhero "universe" and you have the formula for countless marginal superhero comics. Adam Wallenta dusts that formula off once again for Retributors.

At first, this series looks like superhero parody. The group leader uses a spoon as his only weapon. Fat jokes are made at the expense of Max Action. Old Man Whoop Ass is named "Old Man Whoop Ass." Funny or not, one should be able to assume that story elements like these are intended to be humorous.

But Retributors adopts a sober, self-important tone that is ill-fitting. Much is made of commercialization and superheroes "selling out" by merchandizing themselves, but Retributors is full of ads plugging CDs, Web sites, mouse pads, etc. Wallenta's heroes make a big deal out of punishing men such as pimps, johns, drug dealers and porn directors -- men who objectify women -- but Wallenta himself, never misses an opportunity to draw bare-breasted, Barbie doll-shaped women. Even when one woman is in tears, about to be raped, Wallenta lays her out naked and seductive, ridiculously posed on a bed. Not only is Retributors no fun, it is no fun with a heavy dose of hypocrisy.

As for the plot, Wallenta goes through the motions in the first two chapters, never veering far off the course carefully charted for him by generations of Marvel hacks. In the third chapter, things go from mundane to confusing. The conspiracy around which Retributors is centered comes to a head, but it is unclear how the key event -- the death of most of the world's superheroes and destruction of the world-devouring alien -- takes place. A television movie that takes up too much of the third chapter gives one version of events, while surviving heroes and villains later refer vaguely to another version.

More clarity in the final chapter would not have made this comic good, but at least it would have made it a bit less awful than it is. Retributors is representative of everything wrong with superhero comics: It is incestuous, repeating that which has already been done and redone countless times. Reading it, you can almost hear the author trying to pull the wool over his own eyes, struggling in desperation to convince himself that he is not merely recycling the ideas of other, more talented artists.