It's mini-comic week! Our BFFs at Isotope Comics just handed out their annual mini-comics award, so this week we're diving into a couple modest-size graphic booklets.

We're suckers for any story about the Monkey King, and we also love the cozy art and fierce personality of Oakland-resident Gene Yang's "American Born Chinese." The six-book series explores Asianness, whatever that is, through tales of modern cultural assimilation, over-the-top stereotyping, and ancient mythology. We couldn't put down Book 3 (fortunately it's a mini-comic, so it didn't eat up a huge chunk of the day), which tells the story of how Lai-Tsao, an unremarkable monk, convinced the trapped Monkey King to join him in his quest. Gene's cute, expressive line-drawings make the story look like it's being told by lively stuffed animals, and his dialogue is Whedonesquely pert: "Why do you come here day after day to feed us and dress our wounds? Are you too stupid to get a real job?" Hee.

The Monkey King's stories (part of the epic Journey to the West) are hundreds of years old, and have been translated and retold by, what, like, billions of authors? Whatever the number, Gene's graphic adaptation surely ranks up there among the most gripping. His art's on display at the Cartoon Art Museum for at least another week -- go go go and look.

After the jump: robots in love, and a scorpion in a cowboy hat.

Our socks were not knocked off by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's The Last Sane Cowboy and Just Another Guy with a Planet for a Head, even though the former was the 2005 winner of Isotope's mini-comic award. But when we handed it to a coworker for his opinion, he loved them. Seriously, he went crazy; doubled-over with laughter at the helpful ghost of Abraham Lincoln, and the giant scorpion in a cowboy hat which, the scorpion explains defensively, was a gift from his mother. And Daniel's website has a really funny joke about Muslims right now. So we decided to like him.

Just Another Guy with a Planet for a Head is about a guy with a ... you get the idea. He just sort of sits there and rants, gently, about his life: what it's like to have a planet for a head, how it feels to look in the mirror and think of all those people living on your head, how he never had anyone to look up to as a kid except for a guy who was a birthmark on the side of a horse. Hm, maybe as comics go, it's just a little self-indulgent. The Last Sane Cowboy held our attention a bit longer -- it's about a girl in some kind of bizarro wild-west, searching for her brother ... a fish. Maybe that's self-indulgent, too, but at least it's got a good beat.

Finally this week, we turn our gaze to A Late Freeze, by Danica Novgorodoff. It's this year's mini-comic award winner, and it's a sweet, dream-like story about a robot who loves a bear and they befriend a frog and then give birth and they get evicted and the robot is captured and their kid meets a horse. Now that we describe it, hey, that's kind of self-indulgent, too! What is it with these mini-comics, anyway?

But A Late Freeze isn't just some navel-gazing art-school experiment. The plot is trippy and unfulfilling, but the real joy comes from its moments, rather than its whole. The robot stands on the bear's shoulders so it can retrieve honey from a beehive; the bear, trapped, has a "dream of grandeur" that involves stomping on a Waffle House; the strange family huddles together at night in a hotel bed. It's compelling, and we don't always know why, but the book is full of images that stayed with us.