They’re superheros, but they never have a chance to do anything super aside from bicker and cuss. This week, Isotope’s turned us on to James Cochalka’s Super F*ckers, a cutely-drawn story about a band of mostly-abusive twentysomethings with vague powers. The group is recruiting new heros, but the day is overshadowed by conflict: a time-bubble containing Vortex's childhood is accidentally punctured by Jack Krak's elbow; a mysterious pink tumor lusts after the blonde chick; blue-hair guy mocks Plant Pal for being a friend to plants; and Wilbur accidentally reveals that he's used his computer-fists to abuse himself.

You can't go two panels without reading a swear, so some folks label this series "mature." But we don't know about that -- aside from bad words, the book's pretty light-spirited and gentle. The powerful jerks get put in their place, the weak and shy come out on top, and even when something awful is happening, the cutesy art and the characters' wide-eyed innocence keep it all in good fun.

It's totally easy to identify with the whole Super F*cker team -- Vortex misses his childhood, Jack Krak likes to be in charge, Orange Lightning likes to have fun, Radical Randy starts trouble. And it's totally easy to get into their adventures -- Vortex needs to save his nostalgic time-bubble, Jack Krak wants to throttle Grotus, Orange Lightning plays video games that make fun of his colleagues, and Radical Randy takes pills that turn him into a drunken slapping beast. Fun fun.

Back in college, we were lucky enough to take a writing class with one of our favorite authors, Steve Almond, and one of the things he brutally drilled into our heads was that a good storyteller has to balance two forces: scene and summary. In a scene, time moves at a normal rate, or maybe even slower, because something interesting is happening; in a summary, time flies by like a montage in an 80s movie where a nerd learns to be cool, because the audience wants to get from one side of the make-over to the other and doesn't really need to linger over the details. Figuring out when to switch from one mode to the other is tough, and requires that authors intimately determine their story's reason for existing. So our guess is that Paul Harmon just didn't give enough thought to why he was writing Mora.

It ought to be an awesome fable; two creepy girls are born at the same moment in a Renaissance-era village surrounded by magic. As the girls grow up, witches conspire with and against each other, and a scary Black Lion ascends to power in the woods by killing everything, including his family. But we're in scene when we should be in summary, and summary when we should be in scene -- two pages devoted to a conversation about soup, while the founding of the girls' friendship gets only a few sentences.

Mora strikes the right balance now and then, such as when the title character spies a mouse that doesn't look right, follows it, and finds that it's not what it seems; a witch's assitant forms a dangerous alliance; and a tense scene involving an attack by the crazy Owlen-Man who demands only "WHY?" is probably the high point of the series. You can usually figure out what a story's about by looking at its best parts, and judging from those moments, Mora is probably about making the right friends while things are calm, so that when you're in trouble you can call on them for help. Or something. We don't know what the book's about, really, and neither, it seems, did its author.

And we won't even go into the terrible punctuation misapplied throughout the dialogue, or the ridiculously self-parodying gothic tone. "Something that wanted to escape was free now, and FULL of PURPOSE ... and so VERY ... VERY ... HUNGRY." Guffaw. It's like something out of The Song of the Sorcelator.

The characters of Everyman, by Steven and Dan Goldman and Joe Bucco, aren't characters as much as cardboard cutouts, propped up so the authors can stand behind them and dictate green-party-style fantasy-enactment. In Volume One (dear God, could there actually be more volumes of this mess?), President Bush's much-mistreated "Affirmitive Action Personal Aide" finds proof that George and Cheney stole the election, and takes the only logical step: he takes the evidence to two activists with a nifty website and a vague agenda. Then they enlist a network of liberal friends to air rogue political advertisements, commandeer the White House, get shot, and win the re-do election that's called due to the revelation of Republicans vote-rigging.

Ho hum. This book's even more smug and self-satisfied than that twerp on the Hello-I'm-A-Mac commercials. It's a left-wing revenge-fantasy come true: it turns out that the 2000 and 2004 elections were wrong, and most Americans really DO hate Bush, and now he's being subjected to the humiliation of losing a REAL election in a landslide.

So it's politics-porn, and just like with sex-porn, the plot's completely weak. The book doesn't exist for complex characters or nuanced action, it exists to tweak the pleasure centers of progressives' animal-brains. The people are two-dimensional -- in fact, we were startled halfway through the book to discover that what we thought was the male lead were, in fact, two different people -- and there can't ever be any suspense, since the rule of the book is that everything will always go the way a progressive activist would want it to. So in the sense that Everyman exists mostly as an onanistic aide, we found it simultaneously more puerile and mature-audiencey than Super F*ckers.