The idea for Empty Love Stories is pretty smart: There are endless possibilities for darkly humorous stories of depressing relationships, doomed obsessions, hollow sexual attachments masquerading as real love, and so on. And author Steve Darnall has managed to get some good artists, notably Mike Allred and Rob Walton, to illustrate his comics for him. But the actual storytelling falls somewhat short of its promise. Despite the infinite variety of pain, betrayal and indifference to be found in real life, Darnall often falls back on pop-culture easy-laugh sources like trailer trash, the walking dead, and evil alien invaders. Besides being just plain unimaginative, these easy ways out undermine the cynicism of the premise, turning Empty Love Stories into just another collection of bad jokes. And worse than that, the deluded, misled, obsessed and abused parties in Empty Love are always the women. That makes the whole project a whole lot less funny.