A few weeks ago, I did a funnybook roundup in my books section, and I didn't have space to review all the comics I'd read recently. Here are three such books.

08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail (by Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman) is a recounting of the arduous, endless election that we just lived through for the last two years of our lives. I love politics and I love comics, but this damned book doesn't make any sense: It's not willing to go in-depth enough to explain the events of the election, which means it's a memory book for people who somehow need the assistance of a book in order to remember the events of last year. You couldn't actually teach someone the events of the 2008 election by handing them this book; they'd have no idea, for instance, what the story of Ashley Todd, the woman who carved the backwards "B" into her own face, meant for the campaign. There's a brief allusion to her: "A reported political attack by a black man caused a brief sensation. Followed by disgust over the sick hoax." But there's no context beyond those two sentences. Which is a shame, because the graphic design-y layout is perfect for conveying information. I wish that Crowley and Goldman would go back and create a book four times the size of this one, describing the entire race in detail. I'd be in politics-nerd heaven.

I love Harvey Pekar, but his new historical collection The Beats: A Graphic History is a complete let-down. Tiny little biographies outlining the lives of each of the Beats are bone-dry and profoundly uninteresting, and there's very little actual writing by the Beats on display in the book. Without their work for the reader's reference, the story of the Beats is just a loose-knit assemblage of friends who travel around, get into trouble, and take drugs. It's incredibly dull stuff, and it's not even academic enough to be insightful. Instead, it's just letdown after letdown. Some of the artwork is interesting in an early Dan Clowes kind of way, but besides that, this is a huge disappointment for fans of Pekar, the Beats, or biographical comics.

And lastly, Yoshihiro Tatsumi's mammoth autobiography A Drifting Life was one of the comics I was most looking forward to this year. His creepy short stories, published by Drawn & Quarterly under the titles The Push Man & Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo, are perhaps the closest thing to a comic book by Haruki Murakami that I've ever seen, due in part to their weird, alien detachment and bizarre situations. There is, quite simply, no American comics analog for him.

But this book is so fucking boring I can't even believe it. Tatsumi describes his early life: He started drawing comics. Then he got hired by a bunch of different companies. He'd promise short stories to each of the companies. Then other companies would want to hire him for more money. And then he'd have too much work to do! And so he'd do the work and it would be tough. And he lived with a bunch of other artists. Sometimes, their personalities clashed! But they worked it out. Maybe if I was a student of manga, A Drifting Life would be interesting. But his honesty in portraying how boring and petty the life of a professional writer really is—arguing over page rates, waiting for late checks, and so on—isn't the kind of thing that makes for a compelling 850-page autobiography.

I believe that comics can be used to talk about real-life situations and life stories in exciting new ways that we are barely beginning to discover. It's unfortunate that these three books don't do anything to confirm my suspicions.