New Portland-based comics publisher Sparkplug has produced some exciting work in its short existence, but the most fully formed and hypnotic of all of them is Danny Dutch, a collection of web comics by David King. Each page is made up of four equally sized panels (like a classic Peanuts strip) and each panel has characters with tiny bodies and large heads walking around and talking, but King doesn't use the format for the forced mirth of a newspaper comic. Instead, he employs the four-panel grid as a sort of poetic form, and our expectation of a punch line is in itself the joke.

"This label mars my magazine!" Danny Dutch exclaims in one panel, holding up a magazine with a subscription label on it. His friend responds in the remaining three panels: "Those labels are all I need/To remember my home./They are more important than anything." The stilted dialogue (and the way that Dutch and his friends all smoke pipes and dress in suits and ties) resembles the weird, old-timey feel of most comic strips. King shares Charles Schulz's inward gaze, but he toys with emotions even more complex than Charlie Brown's melancholia: Longing and loneliness (and a vagina joke or two) are evoked as strongly as most comic strips cling to banal catch phrases. Danny Dutch accomplishes the impossible in this way. It takes the comic strip, a form that's been normalized and commodified to the brink of extinction, and finds a whole new rich vein of complexity to explore.