Alexander Hamilton lust and a failed attempt to date Camille Paglia

Ellen Forney's name comes up a lot when young cartoonists talk about the artists they adore -- not bad, considering that "I Love Led Zeppelin: Panty-Dropping Comics" (Fantagraphics) is her first book in seven years, and second ever. (She may have a higher profile soon, since she's currently collaborating on a graphic novel with Sherman Alexie, who also wrote the introduction to "Zeppelin.") The new book compiles a dozen years' worth of her short contributions to various anthologies and newspapers. One section collects her "how-to" series for Seattle's weekly newspaper "The Stranger," in which she draws comics based on experts' advice: Margaret Cho detailing "how to be a fabulous fag hag," a hand surgeon explaining how to sew an amputated finger back on, and so on. Another is called "Collaborations" -- stories various friends, including Dan Savage, have told her about their experiences. (Best title: "The Night Tom Waits Poured Me a Bourbon on the Rocks.")

Forney's line work is so graceful, bold and supple it's hard not to feel like you're ogling it. Only a few stories here are entirely her own, including two marvelous, wordless pieces about bodies in motion -- one about a woman trying to focus her mind on her yoga practice (with limited success), the other a study of a solo trapeze routine -- and a strip about how her failed attempt to collaborate with Camille Paglia turned into a failed attempt to go on a date with her. Paglia should have taken her up on something, anyway: Forney's got a rare talent for refining other people's understanding of their own experiences into comics, boiling them down to their clearest, most telling verbal and visual details. Her work is bristling with badass attitude, but every page she draws reveals her compassionate interest in other people's minds.

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The cult following of Bryan Lee O'Malley's awesomely hilarious "Scott Pilgrim" books has been snowballing over the last few months -- this blogger recently noted that "if I try to write more than two sentences about ["Scott Pilgrim"], my hands reflexively make the metal sign, and I lose the ability to type." Scott is a 20-something dude in a kind of awful band called Sex Bob-Omb; his new love interest Ramona Flowers has informed him that he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends before he can date her. In the new, third volume, "Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness" (Oni Press) -- and no, the Smashing Pumpkins references don't stop there -- his opponent is the self-righteous Todd Ingram, currently dating a rock star named Envy Adams who once broke Scott's heart. Their battles involve kung fu, bass solos, and the psychic powers Todd has because he's a vegan. ("You know how you only use ten percent of your brain? Well, it's because the other 90 percent is filled up with curds and whey!")

All of this is, of course, an elaborate metaphor for the much more banal issue of dealing with a new partner's romantic history, and it's basically a soap opera with a huge cast. But instead of emo-kid navel-gazing, O'Malley throws in video game- and role playing-inspired fight scenes, delirious rock 'n' roll spectacle, and screwball dialogue. O'Malley's picked up a lot of storytelling cues from Japanese comics, and he uses them better than any other North American cartoonist -- hyperkinetic drawings with lots of zoom lines, "superdeformed" characters, even tiny explanatory captions. (One character mentions that she's spent the night at home, "scrapbooking." Caption with an arrow pointing to that word: "CRY FOR HELP.") And even though the climax of "Infinite Sadness" is, as Scott himself admits, a "last-minute, poorly-set-up deus ex machina," it's way too funny to complain about.

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