W4M - Thomas at Pano’s - I was in with a friend of mine and you and I kept making eye contact. He and I were sitting in the corner by the bathroom on the first floor around 11pm on Friday night. I was the girl in the purple shirt. You’ve been my server before but I’ve never had the nerve to say anything to you…

This is an actual missed connection from Buffalo’s Craiglist and is just a sample of the many postings that express desperation to reconnect—we’ve all had this experience. You see someone you’re totally attracted to, and there’s a gut feeling that you should do something, but you just don’t. You think about it for maybe a few days after, and in the case of some of the posts, even decades later. These are the experiences that fill I Saw You…: Comics Inspired by Real-Life Missed Connections, a compilation edited by Julia Wertz of web comic, The Fart Party.

The compilation features the cream of the crop of the mini and alt-comics scene, most notably Jeffrey Brown (Clumsy, Funny Misshapen Body), Liz Prince (Will You Still Love Me If I Wet the Bed?), and Laura Park (Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream). It also features some lesser-known artists who are equally as fantastic, such as Kazimir Strzepek and Jason Frees, whose comics were particularly heartbreaking and just downright weird in the midst of a compilation that mostly pokes fun at the missed connections posters.

So if the talent is as stacked as much as it is, the book should be pretty amazing, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. While it features a promising theme and some of the best D.I.Y. comic artists around, it doesn’t quite live up to the premise. Even though the entire book is separated into six distinct parts (such as “Coffee Shop Crushes,” which features missed connections from, well, you guessed it), it lacks cohesiveness from comic to comic. There seemed to be a lack of direction in editing it, possibly due to loose parameters for what they were looking for; some comics were adapted from real missed connections, others seemed to be made up, and a few I could barely recognize as even adhering to the theme.

That’s not to say the compilation doesn’t have its highlights. The comics that engage more with their subject matter come off really strong, specifically Corinne Mucha’s “I Just Had to Tell You: A Heartfelt Story from a 29-Year-Old Male,” which follows a guy into a bank where he proceeds to look down the teller’s blouse, and Daniel Barlow and Megan Baehr’s heartbreaking interpretation of an old, washed-out musician’s longing for Brenda, a bartender from his glory days.

Unfortunately none of these comics are so good that the book is necessarily worth its sticker price. Those who are diehard fans of any of the anthology’s artists might be interested, and this seems like a good place to start for those unfamiliar with the mini-comics scene, but for anyone who falls in between, your $12.95 might be better spent on actual mini-comics from the artists themselves.