"Oh Cornelius, you're so continental! I refer not to this continent, of course, but instead Europe!" These words from the Breakfast Ape, the voice of avant-garde cartoons from Charlottesville, Virginia visual artist Ramsey Arnaoot, may not have been exactly what Stephen Spender had in mind when he outlined these points half a century ago in "The Modern as Vision of the Whole." Yet Spender appreciated as much as anyone that modernism is never what you expect it to be. The cartoons, including the epic narrative of the Breakfast Ape Ring Cycle, are archived online at http://www.angelfire.com/wy/ape/. Those who think that comics are instant gratification from wage-slave draughtsmen should try a close reading of the Breakfast Ape. Only to the intrepid student does Arnaoot's art reveal its secrets.

This makes the Ape very different from his compeers. Every three cells of "Apartment 3-G" are freighted with the same daily mix of melodrama and titillation. Each installment of "Garfield" is another capsule of one cat's static, corpulent smugness and amused hauteur. Ordinary comics suggest a larger whole: the Cliff's Notes to a totality of romantic experience intimated by each day's "Apartment," the winks at human foibles and the exigencies of pet ownership in "Garfield," or the cheat sheets of the old Illustrated Classics, which rehashed the great books for less enthusiastic students through action scenes and brightly drawn pictures. The Breakfast Ape, on the other hand, inhabits a world too bizarre for a larger understanding. There is no narrative consistency; one strip deals with an everyday vignette of undergraduate boozing ("Hoo is Breakfast Ape?"), while the next contends with literally cosmic forces ("A Universe of Pain") concluding in a frenzied recitation, in German, from Rilke's Duino Elegies. A daily three cell cartoon ration is supposed to be self-contained and complete; the Breakfast Ape concedes only vaulting points, sometimes obscure, for further thought. The readers must pursue it from there.

"I should have known that ambiguously phrased birthday wish would backfire," observes the Breakfast Ape on learning of his grandmother's death. This stoic reaction is one trope in Arnaoot's ongoing series exploring the uncertainty and treacherous fluidity of language. Similarly, the Ape plays with connotation, making clear that Cornelius Continental was from the European, rather than the American, continent. When last we spoke, Ramsey proposed a coffee table lexicon of improper usages, the Contradictionary. He made bold announcements for new Latinisms in English, like "nequessence," meaning the non-essential, to be employed to the mystification of others and the indulgence of the self at cocktail parties. He planned to market a pocket colander, which you could take to restaurants and strain your food with.

Each of these ideas straddles farce and profundity. Arnaoot makes them hilarious; taken dead seriously and in French Marxist theoretical jargon Ü but I repeat myself Ü this is the selfsame punning on which Jacques Derrida makes a living and marshals hordes of English grad student followers. Alternating between mad laughter and comics-as-homework, the Breakfast Ape inverts the classical comic strip; rather than amusing its reader, it is already amused with an uncomprehending audience. Yet alongside that smirk is a cocker spaniel eagerness for understanding; Arnaoot obfuscates and is proud of it, but begs his readers to tease out the subtexts of the inner Ape. The Breakfast Ape is never what Flann O'Brien called "an insoluble pancake." And even when inscrutable, Arnaoot's mind is brutally consistent. Consider this conversation of his. "What," asked a student of Arnaoot's, "would happen if you put salt in your eye?" "It would sting. A lot." "What," the student pressed, "about pepper?" "Even worse!" came the reply. "What about cheese?" said the student. "It would be," enunciated the master, "delicious."

Ms. Linnea Wexler, Mr. Arnaoot's sometime collaborator, has been described to me by turns as a 'sculptor of Norse gods' and as a 'sculpted Norse goddess.' In either case, she calls to mind some remarks of Sir Kenneth Clark on sculpture. "Art is justified, as man is justified, by the faculty of forming ideas," he lectured; "and the nude makes its first appearance in art theory at the very moment when painters begin to claim that their art is an intellectual, not a mechanical, activity." Likewise, Arnaoot claims cartoons for the domain of art and ideas with the austere geometry of the Breakfast Ape. Denuded of shading, color, and fancy shapes, only resolute philosophy remains. Clark again: "[The artists of the Renaissance] abandoned, of course, the Platonic fancy that Godlike man must conform to a mathematically perfect figure Ü the circle and the square." Not so our Breakfast Ape; he seeks a Godlike voice of formal inflexibility. Language, the Breakfast Ape knows, controls our lives.