William, the protagonist of Cole Johnson's "Run Away With Me," is dead. He learns this from a talking rock that is not really a talking rock, but rather a checkered-suit-wearing dandy -- William's spirit guide to the afterlife.

As it turns out, the afterlife is not too exciting. Spirits walk the earth, but they are generally bored. As William's spirit guide tells him, "Surely you didn't think we all walked around moaning, rattling our chains all night, did you? I suppose some of us are into that sort of thing, but it's not everyone's cup of tea."

Without physical needs to fulfill, the dead are left with little besides idle time. William is unable to wrap his brain around this. He regularly ponders the same sort of questions that one would imagine he thought about his before he died, at one point telling the rock, "Life, or life after death I should say, can't be like this."

The banality of life is a common focus for artcomics creators. Few, however, are able to engage the subject with the inventiveness and dry wit of Johnson. At a bar for the dead, William's spirit guide asks him, "Can't you just enjoy being dead?"

William replies, "Well I didn't enjoy being alive, did I?"

The spirit guide, looking frustrated, is unable to answer. He takes a drag off his cigarette, exhales, and then smiles. "Excellent point, Billy," he says.

The exchange crystallizes the author's approach. The afterlife, with its pointless diversions and oppressive loneliness, is not only equally as frustrating as regular life, it is frustrating for the same reasons. Thus the afterlife that the author has conjured becomes a creative substitute for the real world. Like most in "Run," this exchange is executed with great attention given to gesture, facial expression and timing. It is difficult to reproduce the effect that the characters' words have on the reader, because so much of their impact relies on the author's cartooning skills.

Johnson is a quietly expressive cartoonist. His figure drawing owes a debt to Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown and especially to Mike Judge's King of the Hill. Johnson's figures have the same thin-line, stretched look as Judge's, and his characters' faces demonstrate the same reserved expressiveness that makes King's Bobby Hill one of the best characters on television.

Beyond the Judge comparison, the author shows patience in his panel pacing that is common among top-tier cartoonists such as Clowes and Brown. He is not afraid to let words hang in the air, allowing long periods of silence between lines of dialogue. By the same token, he knows when to cut off those pregnant pauses, not allowing his words to hang too long and lose flavor.

While he shares identifiable traits with the likes of Clowes and Judge, Johnson is not yet the sum of his parts. Chapter one of "Run Away With Me" reads like a mellowed version of Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life for the slacker crowd. The principal characters mirror Life's. There is Brooks' perpetually puzzled everyman, Rip Torn's smug guardian angel and even a stand in for Meryl Streep's charming, worldly love interest. But "Run Away With Me" lacks the moments of brilliant absurdity that makes Life or King great. Judge and Brooks establish a base of reserved humor, but their finest moments come in flashes of absurdity that deviate from that base (such as Brooks watching himself as a tribal African running from a lion in a previous life, or Bobby Hill kicking his mother in the crotch).

Johnson has the reserved part down, and now needs to get his hands dirty exploring his own creation. To his credit, most cartoonists would have the opposite problem. They would digress too often into the absurd nooks and crannies of their fantasy world, thereby dulling that world's edge through overindulgence.

It is too early to tell exactly what kind of story "Run Away With Me" is going to be. The inclination is that it is not a pure comedy like Life or King. Based on that assumption, one might say that it is unfair to compare "Run Away With Me" to those works, but the assertion here is not that the artist should try to be as funny as Judge or Brooks, but rather that he should continue to learn from them -- not just artistic style or a story set-up, but from the way in which they manage the longer arcs of their stories, and try to achieve the same ebb and flow in his own work, no matter what the tone.

I don't know if you can be institutionalized for narcolepsy. That's not important. What is important is that I don't think Adam Jakes knows either. That is a problem.

The problem is that Jakes creates comics about people locked away in mental hospitals. Writing about mental patients is something that requires the author to show off a bit. The reader wants to believe that the author has a greater knowledge of the world of the story than he or she does. The author's job is to display such keen knowledge of that world that any of the reader's questions about his command of the subject are dispelled, quickly. The sooner the author establishes the authority of his voice, the easier it is for the reader to engage the story on deeper levels. However, if the reader rejects the story as inaccurate, it becomes impossible to engage. If the author's understanding of his subject is flawed, what value can be found in the story?

The author must be able to convince both the novice and the expert with his details. One or the other will not do. If the author has the facts wrong, but presents them convincingly, one can admire his skill. But it is only a matter of time until someone with greater knowledge of the subject reads the story. If the author fails to convince this person, the work is fraudulent. On the other hand, if the author presents accurate information in a manner in which only the expert would recognize it as accurate, the work is useless. If the reader is not convinced by the details, those details may as well be inaccurate. Whether Jakes' portrayal of daily life in a mental hospital is accurate or not, I do not believe it.

"Tales From the Inside," his serialized story from Whatever follows four patients at November House, an English psychiatric hospital that Tess, the main character, describes at the beginning of the first chapter as, "More or less cool. It's more of a recovery and observational operation than a full blown asylum."

If "full blown asylum" is supposed to mean Arkham or Nurse Ratched's Oregon hospital, then "recovery and observational operation" apparently means glorified hostel. Whatever #4 assembles the four principals for introduction, then promptly sends them off on a hospital-sanctioned, unsupervised outing to a pub in a nearby town.

Why four psychiatric hospital patients -- one of which is institutionalized because he is a danger to those around him, another because he is a danger to himself --- are allowed a free night out drinking is not explained to satisfaction. The reason given is that one of the patients could use a break from her routine. But given that these people are in an institution (at least one of them there by court order), that hints have been dropped indicating that previous such outings have gone badly and that this outing goes predictably awry as well, the reader can only wonder as to what kind of doctor would approve such a trip. The doctor who approves it, Dr. Tamsim, is referred to several times, but the only time she is ever seen by the reader is when she tells the patients they are going on an outing. For people in a mental hospital, these patients don't seem to receive much treatment.

In Whatever #5, the characters spend most of their time lounging around November House. They have even been put in charge of the monumental and seemingly important task of organizing over 100 years of patient's files to be entered into a computer database. This, too, ends in scandal, as one of the patients tries to blow himself up, destroying the room that the files were kept in.

The freedom allowed the patients is not the only suspicious thing about this book. Questionable moments abound. Charlotte, for instance, is a narcoleptic. One would assume that her narcolepsy would have to be extraordinarily bad for her to be committed alongside a violent ex-Marine and a suicidal wannabe cowboy. But when Charlotte passes out at a pub, Tess remarks as to how she's never seen Charlotte "do her thing" before. Perhaps most frustrating is the fact that Tess and her friends are conveniently fucked up. Their violent, suicidal or narcoleptic tendencies rarely rear their ugly heads. When they do, they do so on cue, coming on quickly and then disappearing completely.

The residents of November House interact with each other without even the slightest hint of dysfunction. The worst thing that seems to afflict them is cabin fever. Their favorite pastime appears to be sitting around asking each other if they really are crazy and talking about how bored they are. Though I can't say for sure, I assume that most mental patients have bigger problems than boredom.

Get Carter! bills itself as Kung Fu action-adventure. Less competent genre work could easily be found, but Jerome Hinds makes the same bad creative choices that tend to weigh down these kinds of comics.

Because the author's fantasy world is so complex, the characters that inhabit it spend an enormous amount of time talking to each other about its inner workings, presumably for the reader's benefit. Unfortunately, few things are less interesting than superpowered heroes sitting around explaining the nature of their superpowers.

Because so much time is spent on set up, little time is left for action. The cover villain, The Master of the Flying Guillotine (an "homage" to the 1975 Hong Kong action film that looks more like a blatant rip off than an homage) does not appear until page 20. The ensuing fight ends on page 23, one page before the end of the book.

The art is passable, but could be better had the author not chosen to go with that nausea-inducing computer coloring that plagues so many mainstream comics.

The likelihood of any of these problems fading away is not good. Get Carter! is either a big deal in its land of origin, Singapore, or it's trying to become one. The book contains advertisements for the Get Carter! wireless role-playing game, Pioneer speakers, trading-card games, comics and something called "Mega" that involves free cash giveaways and a guy with a bucket on his head.

Whatever the quality of Get Carter! it appears that there is money involved. That being the case, don't expect it to get any better any time soon.