I've had an unnerving experience.

Through friends, I was invited to profile a group of young people who are starting a comic-book company here in the city. I don't often do good-news stories, but I was in the mood for something light, considering what's going on in the city lately. You know the story: Young people making their dreams real. This generation's Superman by this generation's Siegel and Schuster (who were teens when they invented the Man of Steel, don'tcha know). You've read it before.

When I started interviewing their editor, their writers and artists...I found something else.

I guess I'll just give it straight.

No Limits Comics, operating out of a pair of apartments in the Apollyon district, has announced its first three titles: The Vengeance, about a driven, mentally-unstable superhero group; Arachnihilium, about a human-appearing alien whose stomach opens into a maw and a number of leathery spider legs to engulf, mostly, evildoers; and Sorrow, about a woman who births super-powered children who do her bidding for a day, then die.

"We wanted to do comics more connected to real life, if not in detail, in emotion," says editor Alia Ghanem, a twentysomething goth festooned with leather accoutrements and multiple piercings. She and her boyfriend, writer Bruno Schulz, started the company.

She continues, "The Vengeance is about what super-powers would really do to somebody, which is bring out their worst, id-like selfishness and cruelty. Real people steal, beat people, and rape when they can get away with it. So our heroes do, too."

We're supposed to sympathize with these heroes?

"You're supposed to be amused," she says. "I used to be disgusted by life, but now I'm amused." She smiles with her black lips.

Schulz is a small young man with haunted eyes. I ask about his approach. "I basically describe the blackness all around us. There's poetry in it, like beetles in a rotted log. Arachnihilium is a wandering, random force who erases people, like a father."

Like a what?

"My father killed my mother, then himself, after trying to shoot my sister and me. He didn't get us. We were too small, and crawled under a broken fence he couldn't fit through. Sometimes I dream I'm hung up on that chain-link fence, as I was, briefly, and he's coming for me."

At this I notice Bruno's nervous tic. He looks over his shoulder about once a minute.

I also notice something else. Alia has scars, over a dozen, on her wrists and arms. She's a cutter, it looks like. I ask her about it.

"That's a woman's life. That's what Sorrow is about...pain, disappointment, regret. Sorrow has her children when she needs them - and it's as painful as real birth, each time - knowing they'll age and die by the end of the twenty-four hours. So she doesn't attach. She couldn't bear it."

I ask if this relates to personal experience.

Alia reflects for a while. "Of all the mysteries of this world the one that's most baffling is why a woman would bring a new life to it, to all this suffering. Better to be in black nothingness for eternity, without this vivid episode of horror punctuating it. Life, I mean."

The artists of No Limit Comics are similarly full of sunshine. Halest Tranfo, who draws The Vengeance and Sorrow, has a muscular style reminiscent of "Jim Lee and John Watkiss and Jerry Ordway, the three Jays," whom he says are his artistic Trinity. He hides the letter "J" in his work, on walls, in clouds, in cracks on the street. He says he feels their power helping him when he does. He also says that the ghost of the famously troubled cartoonist Wallace Wood jars his table, and sometimes his elbow, while he is inking. "Woody likes to see me screw up. Sometimes he visits in dreams and tells me to go out the way he did."

Wood, his eyesight, liver and fine muscle control shot from years of alcoholism, facing a life of dialysis and decline, took his own life with a firearm.

Jade Seven, as she calls herself, illustrates Arachnihilium. Her work is detailed and sensitive, otherworldly, which is how she seems in person, too.

She has a lifelong fear of spiders, she said, which are "the embodiment of depression". "If you're ever depressed, or near a depressed person, look around. There will be a spider somewhere in the shadows. As if they feed on it."

So why does she draw a book about a human-eating spider-alien?

"I master it this way. I control the page. Usually."

This small crew of cockeyed optimists has produced six issues of each of these books already, in advance of publication. This impressed me; it's one thing to announce big plans, and another to do the hard advance work to make it happen on schedule. It's the difference between passion and discipline.

"That's Alia. She doesn't let us get lost in our private Hells. She demands we produce, and can make you feel very, very small when you blow a deadline or turn in pages that are just adequate," says Jade Seven.

"She has the personality of a dominatrix," Halest Tranfo declares.

Alia Gahnem smiles at this. "Go back to your drawing, Halest," she jokes, and everybody laughs.

Times change. The can-do heroics of early comics, the suburban horrors of the Fifties, the neurosis of the Sixties (I'll spare you the rest)…every decade has its popular culture reflecting its time. These walking wounded have their own type of fantasy, black on black, pain upon sorrow, creating a visual poetry for other sad souls.

"My dad left a note," Bruno Schulz says. "He wrote that none of this was real, the world is a lie built on deeper lies. He couldn't stand that, and he couldn't stand leaving us, either, which is why he tried to take us out with him. I dedicate my work to his memory."

The comics will be available next month.