The quiet man of Irish comix, Phil Barrett is perhaps one of the country’s most consistent creators, releasing at least one book a year and managing a regularly-updated blog. This, the 11th issue of his anthology title Matter is an enjoyable hodge podge of styles from the slice-of-life dramas of Mike Leigh to the mythic devilment of Flann O’Brien, all rendered in a six-panel structure that undersells Barrett’s knack for tackling big issues in small spaces.

Of the eight stories in this edition Barret manages manages to find tragedy in the comic and the comic in the tragic, only once lurching into full-blown melodrama. The opening piece, Smashment, is a fable about the fine balance between empowerment and loneliness when a young man famous for his superhuman strength finds himself an outcast when he takes a shine to a local lass. From there we get a whistlestop tour through cross cultural misunderstandings, psychic powers and what to do if you mistake a leprechaun for a…never mind.

The most intriguing of the stories, Ash Wednesday is a deceptively complex morality tale involving a burglar and a priest that hints at far darker undercurrents than a simple tale of material larceny. That Barrett can manage to balance text and subtext in only 12 panels is achievement enough to warrant each story get a second, or even a third, once-over to make sure nothing else has been missed.

Barrett has been known to experiment with levels of detail in his artwork in previous Matter collection but here he opts to keep it simple and let the stories take centre stage. This writer’s new personal favourite? The single image on the back cover of a woman all dressed up and going nowhere outside a wig shop. What comes across as filler on a first pass yields hidden depths through incidental details like the downturn of the lips, the anxious posture of a girl feeling the cold. In this sense it is classic Barrett: modest, unassuming and utterly compelling.

b/w, 16 pages, A5, W/A Philip Barrett www.blackshapes.com

If there is one tragic convention of the typical urban drama it is that of interlocking characters unaware of their proximity and the impact they have on each other’s lives. Magnolia, Short Cuts, Crash, all epic stories that sprawl from a point of contact. Niklas Asker’s Second Thoughts is almost one of those stories, that fact that it shies away from the obvious at the most delicate of moments elevates it above melodrama with just enough frustration and ennui to ring true.

Set in London, the story follows two characters, each struggling with their own sense of identity. Jessica, a determined, self-absorbed writer, is determined to get her novel finished, even if it means destroying her relationship. Meanwhile photographer John is suffering from a serious case of city sickness, made more acute by the absence of his impossibly gifted and beautiful girlfriend. By chance they share a moment in Stansted Airport going in opposite directions: he’s leaving London for New York for love; she’s waiting on ‘a friend’ coming in the opposite direction for the same reason. As it turns out they share more than frustration and both return home empty-handed and alone.

Confronted with the inevitability of a life of claustrophobia in London do Jessica and John, never to meet again, stick with their respective lives of quiet desperation or twist and move on to somewhere (anywhere) better. As fate would have it the decisions they make occur in much closer proximity than they know.

Asker’s story is deliberately paced, the organisation of panels on each page lending an almost procudeural rhytmn to the early exchanges between characters. The use of a double page spread with mirrored layouts for Jessica and John’s meeting, establishing both as pivotal characters without implying the dominance of either in the overall narrative is a particularly striking example. Later, repeating panels are employed to illustrate the characters’ shifting power relations (to explain any further is to head into spoiler territory) demonstrating Asker’s feel for the emotional without overplaying his hand.

London itself is depicted as a city reproduced not much by the artist as interpreted in the minds of his characters. Barring some establishing shots or the city at night, the Capital is more talked about than given enough page space to become imposing or inspiring. As for the characters themselves, Asker’s crisp designs are simple and clean enough to create enough empathy for the reader to appreciate, if not quite fall in love with.

Hardly the most sympathetic of protagonists, Jessica and John are deeply unhappy by their repsective situations and act as such. John is a shoegazer who can’t believe his luck when he gets a shot at the kind of beauty he has only viewed from behind his lens but feels emasculated by his inability to break out of his comfort zone. In contrast Jessica sees her other half as a convenient crutch, her work making her physically and emotionally unavailable. Neither would be much fun at parties.

Asker’s conclusion is a mixed bag that culminates in a beautiful full page splash that, while visually and emotionally perfect, creates just enough doubt to question the relatively clean ending. Still, Second Thoughts is a graceful study of love in a time of uncertainty, when economic lines are being redrawn and everything is coming under question. You can’t not read this in one sitting.

€tbc; b/w, 80 pages, US, W/A Niklas Asker, Top Shelf Comics www.topshelfcomix.com

So this is exactly a story about what then? Don’t be fooled, there is more to Tom Humberstone’s tale of slacker love that meets the eye, the problem is untangling its core message to make sense of everthing that has gone before it. Confused? Don’t be.

On the surface, How To Date A Girl… is a classically structured boy-meets-girl fauxmance. The first meeting of our protagonists Tom and Kate starts as a boozy night down the local before ending in a tube station with a cough, an awkward kiss and the promise of more to come. Before you start to settle in for a cosy night with cocoa and a happy ending be warned, this is an autobiographical work. These things rarely end in a neat little package.

Broken down in to three acts, Humberstone’s story is constructed around dialogues between friends as he counsel from his friends on how to win Kate over. From page one it’s plain that this is a comic for readers, where the words seem to leap off the page to the extent that you can hear the clink of pint glasses and buzz of crowd scenes as a small cast of well-wishers impart their, at best vaguely useful, advice. The downside to this approach is that some of the pages come off as overloaded, with the characters almost tearing speach bubbles apart to try and make eye contact with each other. Humberstone overcomes this largely by avoiding rigid panel structure for a more montage-driven approach that lets the conversation flow across the page. It’s a refreshing way to deal with scenes that so easily could have descended into uniform panels of talking heads against a neutral background.

Aside from his page construction, Humberstone’s crosshatched artwork is as imperfect as his characters: awkward, expressive and full of gentle humour. Using a scratchy, sketchbook immediacy for the majority of the book, it’s a shame that he abandons this for a more slick presentation in the final act.

Humberstone’s honest style stretches far beyond the style of his pen and ink work as well, and here begins the tough work of how to accurately assess this book. Dogged by self-doubt, the Tom we are presented with is a slacker-by-numbers and knows it. To liven up procedings we are given the Harvey Pekar treatment of occasional asides to the reader, something Humberstone himself is called out on by Kate at the first opportunity. If anything, Tom draws such attention to all of his failings (and his attempts to cover them up) that he takes ownership of them, injecting an almost Woody Allen vibe ­ the namechecking of Manhattan at the end a deliberate poke in that direction.

Having got this far, where How To Date A Girl…  ultimately falls down is in its denouement. Essentially we have 50 pages of banter with nothing to show for it at the end. Had Tom been struggling with writers block at the start, come out of a damaging relationship or toyed with leaving town then the reader could appreciate the necessity of telling the story, of marking an important point in his life at which things made a turn for the better or worse. In the absence of any wider context (and we are assured he has gone on to a more loved-up and fruitful existence) we have a story of romantic missteps with no real point beyond a nod to the redemptive power of art.

Playwright Neil Simon knew to bend the truth Biloxi Blues for the sake of a good story, but in flagging the bits he made up at the end he got away with constructing the ending he wanted rather than the one life gave him. How To Date A Girl… is real, charming and messy, but it just lacks a killer punchline. Sometimes there is a thing as too much honesty.

£tbc; b/w, 54 pages, A4. W/A Tom Humberstone www.ventedspleen.com