The Girl-Crazy (and Crazy Girl) Adventures of the Superfisters

Jack is shy and artsy, which isn't helping him with his primary goal: attracting chicks. "Jack and Lucky," by bay-area artist Anthony Hon, chronicles the travails of a lonely, horny 20-something. Oh and also, and this is never explained but somehow doesn't seem all that out of the ordinary, he lives with a giant talking 300-pound cat. Like the talking monkey in Rob Osborne's 1000 Steps to World Domination, Lucky seems to channel Jack's inner beast -- in this case, a carefree oaf; while Jack stammers and frets over beautiful women, Lucky gleefully serves up food, booze, and erotica. They're a cute couple.

In issue one of "Jack and Lucky," Jack fails to flirt with an artsy gal at a bookstore (she is later revealed to be involved with an oaf resembing Ron Jeremy); he and his cat temper their loneliness by watching porn together, and finally resolve to take a walk in the park to look for ladies. The plan is brilliant: parks, as it turns out, are populated entirely by tall, skinny white girls who wear the shortest shorts and tightest tops ever devised, and who also apparatly have never heard of braziers. Jack flirts good-naturedly with a lady named Luna, and all goes according to plan until Luna's dog develops an interest in attacking the giant cat. Suddenly, the story turns from a gen-x-ish dialogue piece into an action adventure, with Jack thrown over of a cliff in the scuffle. Suspense!

Words cannot possibly express what a gold mine "Millie the Model" and "Patsy Walker" are. Originally published by Marvel in the mid-sixties, the strips are a camp dream come true. Dreadfully cheap coloring (they make Archie comics look like they belong in a museum), recycled character poses, some of the most hideous outfits we've ever seen ... and oh lord, the dialogue. "How DARE you tell ME how to pose!" "Clicker Holbrook, if you try to KISS me, I'll call for HELP!" "The only way YOU could win a beauty contest is with your FACE tied behind you!" Oh Millie, stop, please, we're in stitches. Seriously.

And we can't stress fully enough how ghastly these women are dressed. All of the wardrobe designs are credited to submissions from readers such as Linda Zacharais of Holland, Ohio; Molly Slocum of Portland, Oregon; Glenda Butcher of Queensland, Australia; Vicky Crab of LeClaire, Iowa; Gay Goodenough of Hingam, Massachusetts; and Melvin Stewart of Rochester, New York. Why do we mention all those names here? Because they are all funny. Very very very funny.

God bless Marvel for reprinting this treasure. The books seem to have been written with the attitude that women are frivolous, posable props who care only about clothing and cattily one-upping each other in front of men. Originally intended to make comics palatable to girls (the very idea), they've now become a sort of Bible for aspiring drag queens.

And speaking of frivolous, let's give a mention to "Agents of Atlas," a sort-of origin story that's set in the old-timey golden-age Marvel Universe, back before the company changed its name from Atlas to Marvel. A team of superpowered heros rescue Eisenhower from a thoroughly enjoyable cabal of Chinese and German villains, then disband, then re-band years later to fight a ... um ... something. It gets a little vague toward the end what their actual goal is.

The flashbacky adventure stuff in the beginning is DY-NO-MITE pulp. Insane villains, ghosts, the all-American Marvel Boy, nonstop action, and ham-and-cheese dialogue like "the Yellow Claw uses super-science, magic, and he's probably still got that crazy Nazi working for him." Va va va voom! But then, it gets all gritty and modern; and it turns into that same old blah-blah-blah that you can read in any Marvel book. Or any DC book, for that matter -- they're so hard to tell apart sometimes. We'd love to keep following along if we get more flashbacks to the good old days, before heros devoted more time to smirking and glowering than to heroics. Issue one ends with a resurrection of sorts, so we're cautiously optimistic that, at the very least, we can look forward to some of that fun old-fashioned tone being applied to modern-day proceedings.