The Best Comics of the Decade #40-21

40. Y: THE LAST MAN
by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia
Guerra, Goran Sudzuka, etc., 2002-2008

Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man is
pulp storytelling at its best. Starting from a winner of a high-concept
premise — a plague wipes out all the males on earth save two, the young
slacker Yorick Brown and his misbehaving pet Capuchin monkey — Vaughan
explores the various repercussions of this apocalyptic scenario in one
exciting, probing story after another. The book wears its politics on
its sleeve, and its commentaries on gender, war, race, religion and
politics are almost always blunt and on-the-nose. But Vaughan gets it
across because he just has such an instinctive feel for genre
storytelling, and for characterization over time. Yorick and the
increasingly large cast of friends and enemies surrounding him are
memorably developed over the series' length. Vaughan's issue-to-issue
plotting is impeccable, and the story moves with the page-turning drive
of the best pulp fiction. It's almost impossible to put down once you
start reading. In this respect, the clean, attractive art of co-creator
Pia Guerra (and a string of mostly strong guest artists and substitutes)
does just what it should, defining the characters with a few bold
strokes and clearly underlining Vaughan's storytelling. There's nothing
showy or innovative about this series, just good classical storytelling
within a light sci-fi framework. Vaughan earns extra points, too, for
his bold final arc, in which he abruptly shifts the series' focus in
surprising ways to deliver a strange, emotionally intense, utterly
unforgettable coda, the kind of ending that hits like a ton of bricks
because no one ever saw it coming and yet, in retrospect, it's an
utterly perfect conclusion.

39. SEXY VOICE AND ROBO
by
Iou Kuroda, 2000-2003

Iou Kuroda is part of that small corner of the
Japanese comics industry that is analogous in some way to the American
independent or art-comics scenes: working outside of mainstream genres,
with a distinctive and decidedly unpolished style, publishing outside of
the biggest venues. Sexy Voice and Robo is a collection of
Kuroda's short stories starring the titular Sexy Voice, a
fourteen-year-old girl who earns her nickname by posing as an older girl
for a phone line where guys call in to talk, non-sexually, with what
they think are attractive young women. Sexy Voice is preparing herself
for a life as a spy, or something equally exciting and glamorous, so
she's training herself to act, to be deceitful, and getting herself
involved in all sorts of shady business. She becomes an errand girl for
an aging mobster, and occasionally ropes in the pathetic toy collector
Robo, one of her regular phone line contacts, to serve as an ineffectual
bodyguard on her more dangerous outings. Kuroda's stories, however, are
less action-packed genre pieces than quiet, reflective examinations of
communication, relationships, memory, the gaps between appearance and
reality, and the unknowability of the inner self. Throughout it all,
Sexy Voice is an endlessly fascinating and charming heroine, overflowing
with wit and vivaciousness, caught at a moment halfway between a
playful kid and the jaded adult she might someday become. Kuroda's thick
linework, so sketchy and so unlike most other manga, is perfectly
suited to these unusual, appealing stories, which mix genre elements
with an observational affinity for the little things that comprise
character.

38. LIKEWISE
by Ariel
Schrag, 2009

For every year of high school, from 9th grade
through 12th grade, Ariel Schrag set herself the task of writing a comic
about her experiences. This four-book journey culminates with Likewise,
the chronicle of Schrag's 12th grade year, a 300+ page opus that
transforms this high-schooler's largely internal dramas into a
stylistically diverse stream-of-consciousness epic. The book ranges far
and wide, continually shifting from the recounting of events and
anecdotes to more conceptual segments where Schrag wrestles with
understanding and defining what it means to be a lesbian, or how to get
over her long-time crush and one-time girlfriend Sally, or why she
documents all this stuff in the first place and what it all means. She
frequently namechecks James Joyce's Ulysses, and adapts his
stream-of-consciousness style to a high school girl's sense of media
overload and diaristic rambling. Schrag's voiceover is a near-constant
presence in caption boxes throughout the book, sometimes representing
the transcriptions of journal entries, sometimes pages of computer
printouts, sometimes tape recordings of conversations and monologues.
Her art style is as diverse as her continually morphing prose, too. Her
sketchy, expressive figures, with their rubbery faces, sometimes
solidify into more densely rendered sequences with delicate shadings, or
into pages where rich blacks dominate the compositions, or others where
the characters and words seem to be disintegrating into childlike
scribbles of great emotional intensity. Throughout it all, Schrag's
self-awareness and self-criticism mediate the excesses of her
autobiographical indulgence, preventing the book from seeming like the
mere teary ramblings of an introspective teenager. By the same token, Likewise
is infused with a real sense of humor and observation that pushes
Schrag out of herself, forcing her to engage with other people, to
include their perspectives in her work to offset her own. It's a dense,
rewarding book that transmutes high school melodrama and theatrics into
something far richer.

37. LOST GIRLS
by
Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie, 2006

This infamous book is Alan Moore's foray into
literary pornography, as he retells the stories of popular fantasy
figures Dorothy, Wendy and Alice as sexual adventures, recounted through
the lens of nostalgia on the eve of World War II. Melinda Gebbie's
sumptuous, quirky artwork lends depth and nuance to Moore's deliberately
purplish prose, while the book's themes are much deeper than one would
expect from Moore's stubborn insistence that he was making straight-up
porn. The book deals with differentiating reality from fantasy, and
encouraging imagination as a creative outlet, an escape and a counter to
the horrors of reality. It is, in fact, a slap in the face to those who
would censor artistic expression. Moore issues challenge after
challenge to the puritanical and perverted minds who insist that to look
at, or draw, a morally objectionable act is the same as actually
engaging in it. It's a beautiful, provocative work.

36. BLACK HOLE
by
Charles Burns, 1993-2004

Charles Burns' long-running series Black Hole
is the peak of the artist's great career in horror comics. Burns has a
knack for locating pathos and unsettling emotions in horror scenarios,
and this story about a sexually transmitted plague among small-town
teenagers is no exception. The series ran throughout much of the 90s,
but since Burns finally published the last few installments and the
collected book after the turn of the millennium, presenting it in its
long-awaited definitive form, it seems appropriate to count it among the
best books of the 2000s. Burns' noirish style is well-suited to this
unsettling story, in which teenage anxiety about sexuality is
externalized in the form of various mutations that turn affected teens
into monstrous creatures, their sexual anguish etched into their bodies
as scales, boils, rashes and new appendages. Few books do a better job
of capturing the fear, and the excitement, of nascent desire and
adolescent longing, as these diseased teens are driven mad by hormones
and embarrassment.

35. ALIAS
by Brian
Michael Bendis & Michael Gaydos, 2001-2005

Before Brian Bendis began turning his attention to
various Marvel superhero titles, with increasingly diminishing returns,
he crafted the masterful series Alias, which existed on the
periphery of the Marvel universe and dealt with superhero storytelling
in an unusual and emotional way. The series centers on Jessica Jones,
who is at least technically a superhero, or was at one time anyway: she
has some minor powers, a bit of super strength, and once dressed up as a
crimefighter. Now, however, she's settled into a more prosaic life as a
private detective, where her powers occasionally come in handy, but
mostly she's just a normal, if tough and isolated, woman. What sets this
book apart — beyond its presence in Marvel's MAX imprint, which allowed
it greater leeway in cursing and sexuality — is its focus on character
development over action. Jessica is a strong, complicated character, and
the throughline of her growth throughout this book is the real focus
rather than the genre plots. Bendis' most brilliant ploy is to use
superhero melodramatics as a way of probing character in unexpected
ways: Jessica's long-ago encounter with the Purple Man becomes a central
device in a surprisingly candid, sophisticated story arc about dealing
with sexual abuse and humiliation, while her romantic relationships with
superheroes Ant Man and Luke Cage are developed far beyond the usual
level of so-called love in superhero comics. The book deals
intelligently with issues of trust, insecurity and painful memories, and
Jessica is surely one of the most memorable and original female
characters in all of superhero comics.

34. PLUTO
by Naoki
Urasawa, 2003-2009

Naoki Urasawa's Pluto is the manga-ka's
response to his biggest influence, Osamu Tezuka, the single artist who
has arguably had the greatest effect on modern Japanese comics. Urasawa
takes as his reference point a popular story from Tezuka's long-running Astro
Boy series, a sci-fi adventure mostly aimed at younger readers and
probably the artist's most famous creation. "The Greatest Robot on
Earth" details Astro Boy's struggle against a mysterious and powerful
robot called Pluto, who's destroying all of the most powerful robots in
the world in a quest to be the best. Urasawa expands upon this story,
using Tezuka's original creation as a framework within which he builds
his own much more complicated world, filling in details and fleshing out
the characters with motivations and histories that were barely even
hinted at in Tezuka's breezy, action-oriented tale. Pluto
shifts the focus onto robot detective Gesicht, who's investigating a
series of murders that may be connected to the systematic destruction of
the world's most powerful robots. Urasawa weaves in references to
contemporary events, including some surprisingly blunt "war on terror"
satire and minimally camouflaged references to Iraq, but his real
innovation here lies in the way he digs beneath the surfaces of these
characters, unearthing emotions and philosophical questions that cut to
the core of what it means to be human, to think and feel and regret and
love and hate. Even more than Urasawa's long-running thriller Monster,
the real thrust of this much more compact series is an interrogation of
the concepts of nature versus nurture, examining the events and
experiences that define a person's personality and moral character.
Urasawa is always interested in evil, which he sets up as a terrifying
absolute only to probe the more subtle gradations between good and evil:
in Urasawa's work, everyone has their reasons for what they do,
everyone has their secret traumas and tormented memories. It's a pulpy
soap opera convention that Urasawa routinely imbues with much greater
depth, lending pathos and philosophical sharpness to his propulsive
storytelling.

33. LOUIS RIEL
by
Chester Brown, 1999-2003

Chester Brown's biography of Canadian dissident
Louis Riel is a strange and inscrutable work, presenting Riel's tragic
story in a simple, direct style, with little trace of commentary, so
that it's difficult to know what to make of this tale: is it a satire, a
tragedy, a black comedy, an exploration of spirituality? Or none of the
above? Is it simply the story of a life, told in such a way that all
the external interpretations, the guesses and conjectures and the weight
of history, simply fade into inconsequentiality in the face of Brown's
blank-eyed, Harold Gray-inspired style? Riel, for Brown, is simply a
man, and when confronted with the unknowability and distance of such an
extraordinary but obscure man, Brown sticks to the facts without
venturing into more ephemeral areas. The result is an attempt at an
"objective" biography that raises many more questions than it even
attempts to answer; Brown tried the same thing with Jesus in his Gospel
interpretations, with even more confusing and provocative results.

32. A DRIFTING LIFE
by
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, 2009

The quiet, introspective manga of Yoshihiro
Tatsumi was introduced to American audiences by Drawn & Quarterly's
series of hardcover tomes collecting some highlights from Tatsumi's
punchy, minimalist short stories. With his simple, direct style and
schlumpy everyman protagonists, Tatsumi depicted urban malaise,
loneliness and sexual perversion with a flat, affectless tone that
contrasted against the sometimes harrowing content of his stories. But
as good as these stories are, his magnum opus is a newly produced,
massive volume that tells the story of his early years as a struggling
manga artist, trying to create a new, more realistic movement within
Japan along with a few likeminded artists. It is a memoir of a largely
unexplored area of Japanese comics, packed with references to artists
and works that are largely unfamiliar in the US. His straightforward
style positions this volume as a historical account, establishing the
context of this time and place both in relation to Japanese history
(World War II, the American occupation, the bombs) and the artist's
personal life. It is, typically, concerned with sexual maturity, and
also with the internal struggles of a man trying to find his own place
in life and art. It is especially enlightening to see Tatsumi himself,
through his thinly veiled autobiographical stand-in, assume the place of
his usual everyman protagonist, confirming the artist's sense of
identification with his troubled, conflicted male antiheroes.

31. MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS
by
Mike Allred, 2007-2009

Mike Allred's periodic returns to his defining
creation are always cause for celebration. Frank Einstein, the
reincarnated hitman known as the Madman of Snap City, had previously
been the star of three different series, but the last one, Madman
Comics, ended in 2000, and Frank's guest spots in Allred's
enjoyably fluffy spinoff The Atomics weren't quite as
satisfying. Madman Atomic Comics reunites Allred with his
signature character, who looks like a superhero but more often acts like
a goofy, lovestruck kid, or maybe a philosopher. Indeed, this fusion of
childlike enthusiasm and philosophical speculation is the core of Madman,
which recycles 60s comics and pop culture tropes without the irony and
deconstruction that so often accompanies modern attempts to reinvigorate
the culture and kitsch of the not-so-distant past. Allred's characters
speak in a hip patois of beatnik lingo, "groovy" 60s hippie-speak and
slangy comic patter. His clean, pop-art drawing style reflects a similar
blend of eras and influences, a blend that at times explodes to the
surface within the pages of this latest series, which perhaps represents
the peak of Allred's Madman saga thus far. The series opens
with Frank in unfamiliar territory, briefly becoming convinced of his
own godlike status before heading off on a twisty odyssey that mostly
involves coming to terms with his own past, identity and existence as a
creative product. In the series' epic third issue, Allred sends Frank
careening through a shifting mental landscape where each individual
panel is drawn in a different style from the history of comics. Thus,
Allred gets to have great fun envisioning Frank (and his robot
doppelganger Astroman) as drawn by a who's who of comics' greatest
stylists: Caniff, Crumb, Herrimann, Schultz, Segar, Gottfredson, King,
Seuss, even encompassing more obscure indie names like Richard Sala and
Chester Brown, alongside various superhero and EC Comics pastiches. It's
a dense, fun issue, propelled as much by the constant stream of
inquisitive, philosophical dialogue (all about the self and the nature
of life) as by the stylistic diversity on display. This is the apex of
Allred's latest take on his creation, perhaps, but it's also indicative
of the strengths of this series as a whole, its careful balance between
dazzling visual ingenuity and the more subtle emotional and intellectual
concerns that occupy the minds of Frank and his creator alike.

30. EPILEPTIC/BABEL
by
David B., 1996-2003/2004-2006

The French cartoonist David B. wrote and
published much of his epochal series Epileptic — an
autobiographical story about his relationship with his increasingly
non-functioning epileptic brother — during the 1990s, but he finished
the work and published it in English for the first time during the
2000s, which in some way qualifies it for this list. It is, in any case,
an immensely satisfying work, because it doesn't make the mistake of so
many autobiographical comics of thinking that a true story is enough.
Instead, David B. takes his youth and his brother's ailment as the raw
material for his wide-ranging attempts to understand the concepts of
sickness, family, history and maturity. With his elegant style,
dominated by striking blacks and contrasts, he invents numerous
metaphors and visualizations for his brother's disease, treating the
fight against the disease as a physical, mortal conflict.

David
B. then continued his work in Babel, a thus-far incomplete
series that elaborates upon the territory of Epileptic by
venturing further into political, historical and philosophical content
in the context of his family and his youth. This series' examination of
genocides and wars brings a global, historically engaged perspective to
the artist's affecting visuals.

29. CHIMERA #1
by
Lorenzo Mattotti, 2006

Italian artist Lorenzo Mattotti has not been a
particularly prolific presence in comics, though his short albums of the
80s — Fires, Murmur, Labyrinthes —
established him as a fine, expressive artist with an intuitive grasp of
color. Chimera is thus a rare pleasure from this elusive
artist. Drawn for Fantagraphics' Ignatz line and intended to be the
first issue of a continuing series — which, true to form, now seems
unlikely to materialize — Mattotti's Chimera is a
semi-abstract, mostly wordless comic in which multiple styles collide
against one another. The book ranges from sketchy, scruffy pen drawings
to thick ink washes to passages of dense, frenzied linework. Mattotti
captures the flow of dreams and nightmares, fluidly transitioning
between layers of reality as his chameleonic style shifts from spacious
compositions dominated by white space to dark passages where you have to
squint into the inky complexity to suss out the nuances at work within
Mattotti's roiling chaos. The book ends with its best sequence, a
panel-by-panel journey into a dark, shady forest that hints at a next
issue that never was. It would've been great if this series had led
somewhere further, but as it is this comic stands alone as a powerful
work in itself.

28. DOGS AND WATER
by
Anders Nilsen, 2004

Dogs and Water is the most complete and
potent statement thus far from promising young cartoonist Anders Nilsen,
who has created a small but intriguing body of work ranging from his
in-progress series Big Questions, to his harrowing attempts to
respond to the death of his fiancée in The End and Don't Go
Where I Can't Follow, to his two books of ultra-minimal sketchbook
exercises, to his various anthology appearances and short-form
experiments. In Dogs and Water, his talent is at its most
concentrated and distilled, creating a simple but enduring work whose
resonances and themes lie just beneath the placid surface. With his
minimal line and judicious use of white space, Nilsen sketches out a
forlorn wasteland where a solitary wanderer drifts along, encountering
various horrors along the way. The book is a parable of wartime
dislocation and dehumanization, a mostly wordless story where
communication is difficult but ultimately offers the only hope of
salvation for these disconnected, isolated people.

27. THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN
by
Frank Miller & Lynn Varley, 2001-2002

Frank Miller's sequel to his widely acclaimed The
Dark Knight Returns is not thought of with much respect or
affection by most comic fans. Fans expecting another DKR, a
second gritty look at a tough, grizzled old Batman coming out of
retirement, instead got a garish, outrageous media/government satire in
which the titular Dark Knight barely even appears for long stretches of
time. The book is as much Miller's snotty perspective on the DC universe
in general as it is a return to his apocalyptic Batman universe, as he
satirizes and pokes at the company's most iconic heroes: Superman,
Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Question, Robin. It's probably the
nastiest and ugliest work to ever come out of the Big Two's superhero
factories, but there's also a kind of gaudy grandeur to Miller's vision,
particularly in the computer colors of his then-partner Lynn Varley.
Her work on Miller's sketchy, minimalist compositions often goes well
beyond mere coloring into actually creating the Vegas-like infotainment
superhighway in which this story is set. It's a messy book, no doubt
about it, inflected with Miller's loony right-wing paranoia and his
naked contempt for the characters he's writing about, but in spite of or
maybe because of these out-there tendencies, this book is never less
than a visceral, entertaining, balls-out read, from its frenzied opening
to its cheekily anti-nostalgic ending.

26. THE SQUIRREL MOTHER
by
Megan Kelso, 2001-2006

Megan Kelso's short stories are quiet and
unassuming things, drawn with a clean, breezy style and unadorned
dialogue. It would be easy to dimiss these fragile, open-ended pieces,
collected in her anthology The Squirrel Mother, as simple and
overly familiar tales of the mundane, except that Kelso's moral probing
and feel for understated emotions goes far beyond the talents of most of
her peers. The deceptively clean style and pastel colors suggest a
light read, but Kelso's work can be devastating in the way she pares
down the excess to get at the essence of a particular moment or
situation, like a mother's struggle with domestic responsibility versus
personal ambition in the title story. In the book's moving and
mysterious final story, another woman, this one a rural pre-teen, plays a
sexual game, her reasons unexplained: because there's nothing better to
do, or she's insecure, or she just finds it fun? These kinds of
decisions and feelings are at the core of Kelso's complex, emotionally
challenging comics.

25. GYO
by Junji Ito,
2001-2002

The work of horror manga-ka Junji Ito is marked by
his strong, unusual imagination, his knack for concocting devilishly
bizarre scenarios and extracting horror from absurdity. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the two-volume Gyo, which starts from a
bizarre premise — decaying fish begin to sprout robotic legs and take to
the land — and just gets weirder and weirder from there. There's an
element of gross-out, top-this grotesquerie to Ito's precisely drawn
images, and he follows each of his nutty ideas through to its
(il)logical conclusion. By the time the book ends, it's gone a long way
from the jaunty disjunction of its sharks-with-legs opening premise, and
the wealth of bizarre, terrifying sequences along the way make this one
of modern horror comics' best works.

24. MULTIFORCE
by Mat
Brinkman, 2000-2005

Mat Brinkman's Multiforce is quite
possibly this elusive artist's defining work, consisting of a series of
newspaper-format strips mostly published in the Paper Rodeo
zine. These large-format single-page pieces are perfectly suited to
Brinkman's feverish, incredibly detailed visions of a strange world
populated by monsters, skeletons, and outlandish creatures of all kinds.
His strips are funny and bizarre, packed with numerous sight gags (a
skeleton head rolling down a complex series of paths, then bursting open
to unleash a rainbow stream) and absurdist comic dialogue. Monsters
sell arms on a street corner and the constant back-and-forth wordplay
and banter make it uncertain if they mean weapons or actual limbs. A
skeleton walks everywhere repeating his name as though he's terrified of
losing his sense of identity, but his constant self-identification
proves to be his fatal undoing. Brinkman's dense pages are filled with
small stories and gags like this. He also works with radical shifts of
scale, as his panels vary from tiny little clusters of miniature figures
to massive landscapes that take up half a page. Multiforce is,
along with Brian Chippendale's Ninja, one of the great
statements to come out of the loose Fort Thunder artist's collective, an
encapsulation of Brinkman's imaginative, fantastical aesthetic in a
handful of large, dense pages.

23.
GOGO MONSTER
by Taiyo Matsumoto, 2000

Taiyo Matsumoto, most famous for his cyberpunky
magnum opus Tekkon Kinkreet, returns again to the subject of
rebellious young boys in GoGo Monster. This book, originally
published as a single volume in Japan in 2000 and only recently making
the transition into English, is mainly focused around an outcast boy
named Yuki, who is in touch with an alternate world of monsters and
powerful godlike beings that only he seems to see. He shuns his peers
and his ordinary world for this fantasy realm, and his gradual shift
towards adulthood, when he begins to lose touch with this alternate
world, is symbolized by the arrival of a new gang of more threatening,
sinister monsters who begin to overwhelm and battle with Yuki's old
friends. Implicit in this story is a clever metaphor for maturing, for
growing up and losing touch with the vivid imagination and playfulness
of childhood, which are replaced with more adult concerns about
mortality and responsibility. Yuki is a boy who's afraid to grow up, and
Matsumoto dramatizes and visualizes his anxiety in terms of an epic war
between invisible monsters who live in water drops and dance to the
sound of the boy's silver harmonica. Yuki is joined in his struggle by
his new friend Makoto, a more grounded boy who is nevertheless drawn to
Yuki's strange immersion in unseen worlds, and by the outcast known only
as IQ, a boy so isolated from the world that he goes everywhere with a
cardboard box covering his head, so that he only looks out at his
surroundings through a small circular eyehole. Matsumoto's affection for
these outcasts and dreamers is strong, and his own eccentric, sketchy
style, so unlike most other manga, is perfectly suited to this kind of
story. His ragged linework and skewed, constantly shifting perspectives
contribute to the book's sense of a slippage between prosaic reality and
some more magical realm whose presence is sensed in subtle ways rather
than seen.

22. HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
by
Warren Craghead III, 2007

Warren Craghead's work is quite distinct from
traditional comics, and this compact book — featuring Craghead's
responses to the poetry of Apollinaire — is the perfect introduction to
his experimental, evocative style. Craghead weaves Apollinaire's words
into assemblages of minimalist drawings, most of which show fragmentary
views of people and objects: an arm, a hat, a ladder, a leg, a face with
no features. These fragments are arranged into complex structures on
pages that use white space in striking ways. Craghead's compositions
force slow, careful reading, following the unconventional flow of the
words around the page, and tracing the ways in which these words — which
are used as graphic elements as much as the drawings themselves —
interact with the images.

21.
OMEGA THE UNKNOWN
by Jonathan Lethem & Farel Dalrymple,
2007

Novelist Jonathan Lethem's "cover version" of a
compromised 1976-77 Steve Gerber/Mary Skrenes/Jim Mooney superhero
series is a brilliant and imaginative take on superheroes made by
someone who clearly loves them and sees the untapped emotional potential
in the genre. Lethem's version of the story starts from the same ground
as Gerber's series; his first issue is virtually a beat-for-beat remake
of the original's first issue, in which a detached, intellectual young
boy gets in a car accident, discovers that his parents were actually
robots, and manifests strange powers after coming into contact with a
blue-clad, silent superhero type, the titular Omega. From there, Lethem
increasing departs from the original story, which was compromised by
Marvel's insistence that Gerber incorporate multiple Marvel Universe
guest stars and tell a more conventional superhero story than he'd been
planning. Lethem, on the other hand, is free to explore his weirdly
unlikable young hero and the resonances of the story's Hell's Kitchen
setting. Lethem's typical concerns — community, race, the power of
fantasy, corporate branding versus individuality — percolate throughout
this story, even as it veers back and forth between a loose
superhero/media satire and a nuanced coming-of-age drama. There's a lot
going on here, and Dalrymple's sketchy, distinctive art, bolstered by
the muted color palette of Paul Hornschemeier, breathes life into this
quirky universe. Hornschemeier himself also draws a superhero origin
story in one issue, but even more notable is the appearance of several
jaw-dropping pages of comics-within-the-comic by the legendary Gary
Panter, whose raw, energetic drawings wind up being the only
self-expression of the otherwise silent alien Omega.