Abby Denson has written her fair share of comics starring female characters, including the Powerpuff Girls, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats.

But it was her work with boys that earned her acclaim from a group of women.

Denson is the writer and artist of Tough Love: High School Confidential, a manga-inspired love story starring two boys. It started out as a serial in XY, a magazine for gay teens, but was published as a graphic novel in 2006.

The following year, Denson received the Lulu of the Year award from the Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit that promotes female readership and participation in comics.

"I was always into reading comics," Denson, 32, said in a phone interview from her home in New York City. "Luckily, my family was super-supportive of me doing it."

There's a genre of Japanese comics, or manga, about romantic relationships between boys. Denson, whose father and uncle are gay, was inspired by the genre, known as shonen-ai.

"I wanted to do a romance comic, but those can get so predictable," she said. "I thought, 'Oh, this is like a new twist that is interesting.' "

While shonen-ai stories are primarily aimed at girls, Denson said Tough Love has been well received by gay readers.

"I got a couple of suicide notes, too," she said, "and I followed up with them really quickly, of course, and put them in touch with a suicide hotline."

Tough Love is about two suburban boys, and Denson said she had such teens in mind when she included contact information for a suicide hotline in the back of the book.

"It's a lot harder to be a gay teen in a small town," Denson said. "It can be really lonely. So we wanted to reach out to them."

Reach out to Dan at dkoller@ quickdfw.com. Especially if you're that cartoonist he met in front of Hector Cantu's table at Wizard World. Dan stupidly deleted your e-mail before he could respond to it.

Whenever I go to a comic book convention around here, I see Cat Staggs . And whenever I see Staggs, she's sketching.

So I asked her at last weekend's Dallas Comic Con why she's always got her nose to the grindstone.

"As I sit here right now, I have 700 drawings to do between now and April," she said. "I am going to be pretty exhausted by the time April comes around."

Staggs, a resident of San Antonio, draws "sketch cards," original pieces of art that are randomly inserted into packs of trading cards. If you open up a pack of Heroes or Lord of the Rings (right) cards and find one of her pieces, it's not a reproduction. It's one of the actual sketches she's made a living off of the last four years.

"It's very time-consuming, and it's not the greatest pay in the world," Staggs said. "Most of the ones I work on, I work on because I love the property so much. Who doesn't want to work on Indiana Jones or Star Wars?"

Comic book publishers in need of cover artists would be wise to check out her portfolios, at AirBrushCat.com or ComicArtFans.com. Staggs hopes to breakiinto the business.

"It's the one place where artists are treated like rock stars," she said. Dan Koller

Harley Quinn: Preludes and Knock-Knock Jokes: This collection of stories about the Joker's girlfriend features gorgeous art from Terry and Rachel Dodson. (DC, $24.99)

Hulk: The End: Speaking of good-looking art, Dale Keown and George Perez illustrate these stories about the final days of the Hulk. (Marvel, $19.99)

New Exiles #1: The team of mutants who travel between alternate universes gets a fresh start courtesy of writer Chris Claremont, the father of the X-Men. (Marvel, $2.99)