Where are all the good science fiction comics?

On the surface that question may appear rather academic.  Anyone who's ever read a comic can, with little effort, rattle off a list of the genre tropes they've run across in comic books: aliens, ray guns, time travel, genetic manipulation, cosmic disasters, and extradimensional gods.  Hell, any four or five of those things appear in every issue of Avengers, JLA, X-Men, or The Authority.  In fact, most independent publishers would tell you that comics are being choked to death by science fiction -- they would argue that we need more mystery, historical, crime, humor, or autobiographical books.  Anything but science fiction.

They couldn't be more wrong.  In point of fact, there is exactly one mainstream comic book out there that deals with SF themes (the most excellent Transmetropolitan), and only a handful in past years (American Flagg! comes to mind, as do Watchmen and Green Lantern: Mosaic -- but two of those are out of print, and for all intents and purposes impossible to find).  I think the mistake people are making is the classic one of confusing the props and toys of SF with the real thing.  That's why most comic sci-fi tends to take the form of superhero books with a few props switched backstage: instead of mutants running around shooting beams out of their eyes, you have cyborgs running around with beams shooting out of their fingertips.  Or whatever.  The details don't matter when the effect is so depressingly similar.

I hate to be the one to have to point this out, but science fiction isn't about cyborgs, lasers, or spaceships -- it's about a certain way of looking at and dealing with the world around us.  It's about politics -- the way we choose to live together and why.  It's about pitting reason and skepticism against superstition and unfounded belief.  It's about humans working together to unlock the most profound mysteries both of the cosmos and of the mind and heart.  And finally, to state it baldly, it's about science.  That last is where a lot of well-meaning comic writers fall on their faces; even Peter David, whose intelligence I respect greatly, once wrote that "the Babylon 5 station gets its gravity the same way the Earth does: through rotation."  Uggghhh.

It is the firm conviction of myself and my collaborator that the only sure-fire way to revivify the slumping comics industry is to increase the diversity and variety of the material available.  A good SF comic could form a bridge between comic books and the hundreds of thousands of SF readers out there who heretofore have seen comics as, at best, juvenalia.  And I don't think the benefits would only extend to comics; an innovative enough approach to the comics might make a few science fiction writers think in ways they hadn't before -- the ability that forms the bedrock foundation of the genre.  All it would take to do this is a lot of research and a truckload of chutzpah.

So the question becomes: who, if anyone, is going to risk this new approach?