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The sole consistent design element is Goldman’s hair, a bun-shaped mass of pointillist speckles. Faces and bodies are uniformly bulbous and wobbly. Her images, executed in feathery line work with ink wash, drape all over one another. That’s somehow fitting, and so is Rudahl’s madly anarchic, hyperdramatic visual approach. (Caption: “By the end of July, the budget and tax-cut portions of Reaganomics had become law, setting the stage for the Reagan administration’s ‘new beginning.’” Image: a beaming sun with a big, sarcastic smiley face on it, rising over the Capitol building.) Virtually all the dialogue in “Ronald Reagan” is drawn from the public record, and Helfer crams in a remarkable amount of information, but it’s the images that pass judgment. Buccellato and Staton’s caricatures often resemble a rushed version of Mort Drucker’s movie parodies from MAD magazine if Helfer’s words skewer Reagan at every opportunity, they don’t overtly burlesque him the way the pictures do.

That sort of visual ricocheting among multiple varieties of exaggeration and abstraction, combined with the time leaps required to squeeze Reagan’s career into 100 pages of comics, makes for disjointed storytelling, and there’s scarcely a panel here that leads directly to the next. On a single page, we see a smiling Reagan hobnobbing with three other Screen Actors Guild board members while Jane Wyman checks her watch then Reagan and Wyman sweating, smiling and pushing away enormous tough guys with shirts labeled “Union” then a quizzical Reagan (with a question mark over his head) watching a man with a fez and a hammer-and-sickle jacket whispering in someone’s ear and finally the editorial-cartoon shorthand of an eagle and a bear standing on a broken swastika and scowling at each other. After an opening montage of notable moments from Reagan’s public life, which might as well have been sketched from publicity photos, “Ronald Reagan” becomes a catalog of the sorts of visual rhetoric cartoonists can pull off: nearly every panel incorporates some kind of broad caricature or symbolic distortion, usually at Reagan’s expense.

Most of the book’s spin, though, is actually in its artwork, by Steve Buccellato and Joe Staton.

If you were to read only Andrew Helfer’s text for RONALD REAGAN: A Graphic Biography (Hill & Wang, $16.95), for instance, it would seem to be a straightforward chronological trot through Reagan’s life story, with particular attention paid to the showmanship of his public persona and his weakness for self-serving fabrications. Cartooning is always subjective, so when you look at political comics, it’s useful to think about where their arguments can lie - not just in their words but in the implications of their visual style.