"Sucks," from Outfitters #6 is what an Archie book would be if Archie and the gang acted like normal, promiscuous, mean-spirited teenagers. Troutman's take on the Archie house style is close enough to the real thing for the reference to work, but is by no means a Sikoryak-esque imitation. Without knowing what Troutman's art normally looks like, I get the feeling that "Sucks" is more a hybrid of the author's style and the Archie style than it is his attempt to create a dirty Dan DeCarlo strip. This is a good thing. A comic strip born only of the desire to see Archie and Veronica fuck would no doubt turn out as soulless as a comic born only of the desire to see Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse fuck, or Sue Storm and Reed Richards.

Such a comic can work only when the artist has motivations other than the simple manipulation of icons. Despite the furor over Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's depiction of the Archie gang in 1961's "Goodman Goes Playboy," seeing Archie run around like a toga-wearing madman is one of the least noteworthy things about that comic. The strip works because of the comedic gems Elder hides in the background. As Milo George points out in the postscript to Elder's interview in TCJ, "It's generally more rewarding to read an Elder-drawn story out of the corner of your eye and focus on the funny and often stunning art." In "Goodman Goes Playboy," the story of Archie the Deviant is a misdirection, part of a magician's or con man's sleight of hand: "Keep your eye on this hand. Meanwhile I'll be over here, stealing your wallet."

Troutman's comic is not as strong as Kurtzman and Elder's. But the fact that Troutman recognizes that parody for parody's sake is not quite enough is encouraging.

"Sucks" tells the story of Ruggo, a jock-ish bully who is more complex than his other jock-ish-bully friends. He hides his intelligence and sensitivity behind an asshole exterior. The reader can imagine him one day outgrowing his identity, one that he appears to hold onto in his teenage years because it keeps him popular and gets him laid.

The object of Ruggo's cruelty is Larry, a dork whose head (in the only deviation from Archie character design) is a replica of Charlie Brown's. Ruggo and his crew have saddled Larry with the nickname "Sucks," perfect in its simplicity and cruelty. Their senior year of high school is consumed by a quest to find new ways to jam the door of Sucks' locker closed. The unrelenting torture of Sucks provides a normalcy to Ruggo's life that he lacks elsewhere. It is a counterbalance to the romantic roller coaster of his relationship with Sharon, a Veronica look-alike.

Troutman's use of the two threads (torturing Sucks vs. Ruggo's love life) makes for a formidable narrative frame. The presence of both is validated at the story's end when Ruggo tells off Sharon at the prom and winds up hooking up with Jessica, a girl outside of Ruggo's social circle who he met because her locker was next to Sucks'. When Ruggo and Jessica walk out of school arm and arm on the last day of class, it implies a graduation of sorts. By dating a girl outside of his normal jock-arm-ornament pool, Ruggo appears to be graduating not only from high school, but his from his high-school persona as well. (That the other girls he had sex with during his senior year look like Betty and Veronica, while Jessica does not look like any particular Archie characters, drives this point home.) His final prank on Sucks seems more like a goodbye kiss than a sign of continued bad behavior.

"Sucks" is not without flaws, though. The character of Sucks does not have any impact on the story outside of being a vehicle of introduction to Jessica and an object of derision. Troutman flirts with the notion that Ruggo's bullying would drive Sucks to drastic action, but never follows through. If Sucks were to act out, it would no doubt have made the story more interesting and the amount of time spent on Sucks more worthwhile.

As a narrative comic, "Sucks" could be tighter. But Troutman's ambitions and his ability to see many of them through make it a worthwhile one.

When two artists publish a comic book together, and then take nearly five years off before their second issue, it is difficult not to draw comparisons. Five years is a long time between artistic efforts in any medium. In comics, it's an eternity.

Lasky and Stump may share the same space in Urban Hipster, but comparing their work to each other's is an endeavor that yields little fruit. Ultimately, it is as inane as a "Who's your favorite Hernandez brother?" debate, with the inevitable, ridiculous, hair-splitting assertions that Jaime is a better artist and Gilbert is a better writer (assertions that demean and dismiss the mesmerizing rhythm's of Jaime's dialogue and Gilbert's mastery of expression and gesture). Saying that one artist is better than another ultimately says nothing about either one's art.

But a fair assessment of Lasky and Stump's growth from UH #1 to #2 reveals a contrast that cannot be avoided. The sharing of space means that both artists' work must be judged simultaneously. The fact that one of them has grown far more in five years' time than the other is not a judgement against Lasky or for Stump. It is simply the truth.

To say that Stump has grown impressively as an artist since Urban Hipster #1 says as much about his work then as it says about his work now. To be blunt, Stump was a pretty bad cartoonist, and has turned into a pretty good, if not great one. Of his four strips in UH #1 (discounting the one-page advertisement for Urban Hipster merchandise and the back-cover collaboration with Lasky), two are border-line unreadable, one has the potential to be charming but ultimately fails and the fourth turns out to be kind of funny.

"Lost in Space" and "December" are both meandering exercises in self-indulgence. The narrators prattle on about whatever crosses their paths, never giving the reader a clear picture of what it would be like to be in these characters' situations. The narrator in "Lost" claims to be obsessed with stars, but her obsession lacks the breadth of knowledge a person usually has about a subject that dominates their life. The train passenger in "December" is an uninteresting, foul-mouthed, pill-popping slacker cliché, who could have been lifted out of any mediocre film, novel, comic or song from the 1990s. He has nothing worthwhile to say about himself or his surroundings.

"August" is another indulgent piece heavy on narrative, but the author does a much better job in this strip in creating a genuine character. Unfortunately, the drawing is some of the author's worst: A profile view of the narrator's father may be the most grotesque single panel Jeff Mason ever published, the head resembling an alien's skull with synthetic skin stretched too-tightly over it.

"Slob" is Stump's only turn at comedy in UH #1, and is by far his strongest effort in that book. The voice of the disingenuous narrator, though at times so loquacious that entire panels must be devoted to text only, provides several genuinely funny "What, me?" moments. The success of this strip is a hint at things to come in UH #2

In the time between UH #1 and UH #2, Stump's drawing style thankfully, and somewhat troublingly, took a dramatic turn. The illustration in UH #1 is, for lack of a better word, ugly: Stump's stiff, feathery figures and disproportioned scenery give the impression that he is trying very hard to cover up a flat inability to draw. The change in art in UH #2 is astonishing: Gone is the obsessive feathering. Objects actually obey the laws of physics, with perspective and proportion greatly improved.

Though his figures are still stiff, Stump has married that stiffness to a minimalist vision and transformed it from a weakness into a strength. The troubling thing is that Stump's art now looks eerily similar to someone else's. When a friend saw my review copy of UH #2, he remarked, "Why did they get John Porcellino to draw the cover?"

The stiffness in Stump's figures set them slightly apart from Porcellino's much looser art, but the similarity is undeniable. One can only hope that Stump will continue to grow and improve, and that readers will be able to look back on this period in his work the way that Barry Windsor-Smith fans look back on his period of Jack Kirby-copying; as an anomalous period in his development.

Despite the visual similarities to Porcellino, Stump's comics are vastly improved from what they were. In "Four Twenty-Five," he finally gets right the theme of obsession that he got so wrong "Lost in Space." The narrator's obsession with an Addams Family pinball game at his local laundromat is explored in a way that not only gives the reader a real understanding of the object of the obsession, but also of how a person could come to a point in his life where it would be possible to become obsessed with something so seemingly ridiculous as a particular pinball game. The moment in which the character finds that the machine (which had been slowly breaking down to the point of being practically unplayable) has been replaced with a new pinball game is handled with true artistic elegance. It is, far and away, the most poignant moment in either of the Urban Hipster books.

"Room for Rent" and "Lucinda" are both one-page vignettes that fall short of the melancholy effect that they strive for, but are still better than similar efforts in UH #1.

The strips that are by far the best are Stump's one-page shorts featuring anthropomorphic cats. "Garfunk" and "Garfunk's Island" are fabulously funny -- the sort of thing you wish you saw more of in the comics section of the newspaper. Thanks to the voice of the title character, the set-up is just as funny as the punch line. The author's three strips featuring a band called The Kittens are a funny mix of music business cliches and cat jokes, with Garfunk stealing the show in the third strip.

The change in David Lasky's art from UH #1 to UH #2 is, unfortunately, almost imperceptible. Lasky is the artist who puts the most urban hipsterism into Urban Hipster. Nearly all of his strips focus on characters from his "Chloe and Natasha" stories. Only the one-pager from UH #1, "So Sick of Everything" -- in which an unnamed character walks down the sidewalk thinking the words "fuck" and "shit" -- does not feature Chloe, Natasha or their friend Maise.

Lasky has done plenty of Chloe and Natasha-free work elsewhere, and there is nothing wrong with his desire to use Urban Hipster as a vehicle to focus on particular characters. The problem is that these characters are so unworthy of the attention. Chloe, Natasha and their friends are dinosaurs from the days when slacker Seattle was the king of cool. One could argue that by their first appearance in 1997, pop culture had already rendered aimless urbanite twenty-somethings working in vintage clothing stores irrelevant. By the time UH #2 came out, there was no argument to be made. The pierced, rock-loving, boot-wearing tattooed slacker long ago rose up from local scenes, was taken in hand by the mass media, and spun into major movies, pre-fab bands and, inevitably, advertisements. Chloe and Natasha are basically the same characters that now sell you soda, cell phones and Volkswagens. To justify their existence in today's culture, it is imperative that the author imbue them with something extraordinary -- something to set them apart from the cliched image that has been co-opted by the media. Unfortunately, Lasky doesn't do so: Chloe and Natasha are jaded and aimless with no story to tell. Yes, jaded, aimless hipsters did at one time exist, and they continue to exist today. But Lasky appears to have no compelling reason to revisit these characters that have been visited, successfully and unsuccessfully, by so many others.

It is evident in UH #1 that Lasky can draw. His photo-realistic drawings of Africa at the beginning of the first Chloe and Natasha story, "Out of Africa," are beautiful. But the cartooning that follows appears somewhat sloppy and rushed. Five years later, it still looks sloppy and rushed, though his shading technique has improved slightly.

In the second panel of "Babette's Feast" from UH #2, a caption appears next to Chloe's head: "It is the summer of 1998." This is the year the first issue of UH was published. The caption reads like a flashing red sign: "Warning -- premature nostalgia ahead." By not branching out into territory beyond the keenly familiar, Lasky has handicapped himself.

But the handicap is not the problem. If the author had managed to tell a good story using characters as problematic as Chloe and Natasha, the achievement would have been all the more impressive. That Lasky falls short only serves to reveal his weaknesses as an artist.

The original Chloe and Natasha stories can be dismissed as the flawed work of an artist early in his development, dealing with material that, at the time, may have been still considered en vogue by some. Five years later, it looks like a trap he is either unwilling or unable to extricate himself from.