In his recent review of Ezra Clayton Daniels' The Changers, Tim O'Neil bemoans how few cartoonists take the serious approach to science fiction that Daniels does: "Most of what passes for sci-fi in comics these days amounts to little more than warmed-over space opera with delusions of grandeur -- Buck Rogers filtered through the ubiquity of Star Wars and Star Trek. It's rare to see a serious attempt at the genre in American comics."

Geoffrey Vasile's "Look to the Stars" from Trackrabbit #1 matches Daniels' excellent Changers in its arts-minded approach, if not in narrative breadth. It is a sci-fi graphic short story as opposed to a sci-fi graphic novel -- the type of story one could see being published as a pulpy pamphlet in some Bizarro world in which EC had continued to publish through the modern era, its house aesthetic shifting with the artform and marketplace over the course of the decades.

Like Changers, "Look to the Stars" has more in common with literary sci-fi than with comics' traditional take on the genre. The uncluttered scenes, precise line and cartoonish figures set it visually apart from other sci-fi comics. Narratively, Vasile goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure that the connection to the genre's literary tradition is made obvious.

After being dumped by his long-term girlfriend, Peter picks up an attractive young woman named Anthea at a bar. What Peter anticipates will be a one-night stand turns into a relationship that he is not ready for. Rather than dump Anthea, Peter decides to build a spaceship to escape Earth in. He uses his collection of sci-fi novels for building material.

The ship is the most deft stroke in "Look to the Stars." What could be a heavy-handed allegory is handled with such a light storytelling touch that the reader gets the point without feeling bombarded by the ship's illogical nature. A healthy dry humor can be found in the narrator's few references to its construction. (The story's best moment: "Although it had withstood years of literary criticism, there was no way my sci-fi collection would survive re-entry.")

As O'Neil points out in his Changers review, "Science fiction is, historically, a thematically repetitive genre, with similar ideas and concepts being reused and reappraised with every subsequent generation." "Look to the Stars" plays with common sci-fi themes -- the situation of the male and female protagonists alone in an alien environment is a familiar one -- but, unlike Changers, fails to do much of anything new with those themes. The ship is an interesting idea, and well-executed, but it lacks the dramatic presence it would need to support the story on its own. It is a supporting detail, not a central concept.

The main problem with "Look to the Stars" is that Vasile's characters don't do any heavy lifting. A great deal of action happens over a short amount of page space. This gives the impression that the story is being summarized by the narrator rather than unfolding in front of the reader. Because the story feels summarized, the events seem like they are being imposed on the characters rather than being driven by them. One crucial incident -- in which Peter loses control of the ship and accidentally strands himself and Anthea in outer space -- is related in a one-sentence narrative caption ("Unfortunately, I lost control of the ship and we broke through the atmosphere."). The reader sees only an external view of the ship. What should be a moment of heightened tension has the drama sucked out of it by the author's desire to move forward with haste.

The most disappointing thing about this is that the author appears to have a pretty good notion of who these characters are -- and who they are seems interesting. Peter looks at first to be an affable nerd, but is revealed to have more than his fair share of destructive alpha-male tendencies. Likewise, when viewed early on through Peter's eyes, Anthea looks like little more than a dim-witted bimbo, but she proves herself to be made of sterner stuff by the story's end. If Vasile had been a little more patient with these characters, and not moved them around so frantically, their charm alone could have bumped this strip up from "promising" to "impressive."

Despite the flaws in "Look to the Stars," Vasile shows enough skill to deserve being called a formidable developing talent. His cartooning is clean, expressive and natural. He has an excellent feel for character, and displays a penchant for making clever but difficult story concepts work. He is clearly someone to keep an eye on.

The pages of Desperate Souls are evenly divided between a graphic novel in progress and a batch of short strips. The graphic novel, Nova Via, is such a mess of amateur mistakes that a lengthy comment on it would be nothing but unnecessarily brutal and disingenuous (like those cruel bastards on the makeover shows who walk into the apartment of the fat single man, express horror when -- surprise! -- he turns out to be a slob, then spend ten minutes ransacking his apartments in search of humiliating examples of his already-obvious slovenly nature).

Sometimes a detailed account of how and why a piece of art fails is worth the effort. This time it's not. Nova Via is an ill-advised venture that became scuttled early in its telling. Andrew Glass should be advised to abandon it. It can not be fixed, and is not worth fixing.

But the best reason for ignoring Nova Via is to focus on the author's other strips, some of which show promise -- particularly "Para Bal," from Desperate Souls #3. In "Para Bal" Glass abandons the realistic human figures -- rendered in a stiff, unnatural style that implies a lack of experience on the artist's part -- found in Nova Via. In their place we find cute, dumpy little cartoon characters (think of a potato with eyes and a mouth on top of a larger potato with arms and legs) drawn in a minimalist style. It is by no means groundbreaking stuff, but there is a natural flow to this style that allows the reader to engage the author's work and consider it for more than its failings. After reading the first three parts of Nova Via, it's like a veil being lifted. What we find under the veil is a cute, capable story. It's not consequential, but it demonstrates a natural feel for storytelling that is absent from the author's attempt at a graphic novel.

John Miers claims that Slab Comix #1 was created "entirely on company time, using those incredibly sophisticated tools, Microsoft Word and Paint."

That latter part is obvious. Slab's pixilated line and employment of cut-and-paste images (every character is the same shape, with hair changed or lipstick added) are, depending on your point of view, either part of its charm or grounds for dismissal. I'll make the case for charming.

A few months ago in this column I presented a case against Johnny Ryan's Shouldn't You Be Working, calling for it to be stricken from the annals of history, never to be gazed on by the eyes of Christian men and so on and so forth. The basis for my argument was that Ryan's collection of office doodles felt like what they were -- random doodles made to pass the time. It is the feeling of randomness that makes Ryan's office sketches feel unimportant and is part of why they fail as a collection. They look tossed off.

Slab works because it gives the reader the opposite impression -- that Miers was driven by an artistic vision and labored in secret under the noses of his corporate overlords to fulfill that vision, consequences be damned. This comic is Miers' snarky, silly "fuck you" to the company that he works for -- and it feels like he put a good deal of effort into it.

If you view Slab as a middle-finger extended toward the drudgery of office life, the use of the low-tech MS Paint can be justified as relevant to the book's social-commentary element. But the art needs no justification. It serves its primary purpose -- to be funny -- beautifully. The repeated use of stock images gives Slab some of the same appeal as the infamous Pokey the Penguin -- but Miers' use of MS Paint is ultimately cleaner and less manic than that of Pokey's anonymous creator. There is a clip-art feel to Slab (many of the pictographs used instead of text in the word balloons may actually be clip art), but the 2-D building facades, appliances and furniture ultimately feel more cute than sterile. Moreover, the cut-and-paste character images mesh with the pictograph word balloons in a way that enhances the humor of the situation. In the absence of words or facial expressions, the clip-art pictographs must be relied on exclusively to convey the situation and the humor within it. The author uses this to his advantage, slowing the reading process down, focusing the reader single-mindedly on the author's strength -- comedic timing.

Based on the hand-drawn cover and some random drawings at the bottom of the endpapers, it looks as if Miers might actually be able to draw with his hands fairly well. For all of Slab's charms, it might be nice to see what its creator is capable if freed from the limitations of a computer program that is to the serious artist what solitaire is to the serious gamer.

Wherever it is that Ryan Woodward is trying to go with The Invincible Ed, it looks like he's in a hurry to get there. In issue #2 Ed wakes up from his first super-powered "battle," meets his alien mentor, calls a girl, dates the girl for at least a few weeks (the courtship is covered in a montage/double-truck splash page), trains with his new mentor long enough to develop a rapport with him (the beginnings of that relationship are skipped over entirely), and gets attacked by a bullying jock.

The problem is not that the pace at which the author is trying to move is an impossible one. The problem is that he lacks the chops. Ed is a weak piece of storytelling from the bottom up. The plot is a thinly veiled mishmash of popular superhero-origin stories -- most notably Spider-Man and Green Lantern. Of course, most superhero comics are thinly veiled knock-offs of other superhero comics, so that problem is not insurmountable. But the author appears to have a poor grasp of the way teenagers talk and what they care about (at one point, a jubilant Ed rides his bicycle home singing, "I'm too sexy for my car...")

However, the greatest problem is the complete lack of depth in these characters. The reader never gets any understanding of who Ed is -- not just what his life is like, but what his personality is like. The same goes for his jock tormentor and girlfriend (whose presence is never justified until her life is predictably put in danger at the end of issue #2 -- to the point that she and Ed never share a full scene prior to the damsel-in-distress cliffhanger). The author assumes that the reader will identify Ed as a hero, nice guy, etc. simply by being told that he is a geek. We never see him doing anything exceptionally geeky, but we know he is one because his friend tells him so right before he gets pounded by the jock-bully -- who we must assume is bad because he is a jock and a bully. What about all the geeks in the world that are actually bad people? The ones that enjoy child pornography and Mein Kampf? What about all the jocks that are decent, kind, intelligent and a little geeky themselves? This sort of character-development shorthand based on geek-good, jock-bad stereotypes is just the sort of thing that one has to expect from the puerile culture of fandom that spawns comics like Ed.

It should be said that there is a level of sophistication to the artwork in Ed, but it's nothing terribly new or exciting. The drawing is derivative of trends in contemporary animation, though I, for one, prefer this approach to the romanticized realism found in most mainstream superhero comics. The worst flaw in the artwork is that it doesn't read well. Woodward spends too much time playing with visual perspective when he should be playing it straight -- the cinematic difference between a hand-held camera and a steady cam.

The impression left by Ed is that Woodward is a fairly accomplished artist who lacks experience creating comics. Some of the problems with his work will no-doubt resolve themselves, given time. Others may be a bit more tricky.