Rasl

It's drunk lightning. No, more of an Escherian stair step. Whatever you decide to call it, expect to spend a fair amount of the time you're reading Jeff Smith's RASL obsessing over the antihero's nose. Smith's dark tale of a dimension-jumping scientist, whose name is pronounced "razzle," is relayed in a jaggy style that couldn't be more different from that of the artist's Pogo-esque epic Bone. And smack in the middle of almost every panel, like a squiggle of punctuation for this comic's many idiosyncrasies, is RASL's strange schnoz.

RASL's whole face is actually kind of a car crash, especially since he makes a habit of jumping between dimensions of space and time in a homemade suit, leaving him banged-up and oozing. But despite such physical drawbacks and an attitude that makes the average noir protagonist seem like a sweetheart, the self-named RASL - once a physicist named Robert, now an art thief - swashbuckles through dimensions imperceptible to regular folks. When he's not stealing Picassos, he battles baddies and beds babes as only a scientist can. In fact, the whole story not-so-subtly touts the hidden glamour of the sciences. Smith even ties his lead character's fate to that of the once-overlooked master of electricity, Nicola Tesla.