The world long ago devolved into a cartoon; fiction and literature have struggled to catch up. Long before Art Spiegelman’s Maus legitimized the graphic novel or Michael Chabon immortalized comics creators with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Jay Cantor set the standard with Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels, an inspired riff on the archetypal George Herriman comic strip. It’s taken him 15 years to follow up; unfortunately, Great Neck expands on the least satisfying of Kat’s "panels" — the last, in which the characters become all too human. The disappointing result is a messy palimpsest 703 pages long.

In Krazy Kat, the 1945 Los Alamos A-bomb test triggers the title feline’s metamorphosis from an Edenic two-dimensional innocent into a self-obsessed neurotic mortal. Much the same happens in Great Neck, though perhaps in reverse, as the historical nightmare of the Holocaust transforms neurotics into comic-book characters. It’s the ’50s, and in a classroom in the tony title Long Island town, a bunch of schoolkids are getting a lesson in genocide from Mr. Hartman, a survivor of the camps. Before this, Great Neck had been for them a Jewish paradise, "the Promised Land." Now there was no escaping the knowledge that the world held death and evil, especially for Jews.

The revelation hits Billy Green the hardest. Already sickly, undersized, and such a chronic weeper that his ears are always infected, he sinks into a masochistic funk from which he emerges only after he discovers his talent for creating comic strips. Thus is born the comic character "Billy Bad Ears, . . . ‘The Super Hero Who Draws Himself.’ "

Fortunately for his readers, Billy’s solipsism includes the chaos of the time and the misadventures of his Great Neck friends. Like Frank Jaffe, a local golden boy who bolts from his black-history classes at Columbia to join civil-rights activists in Mississippi in 1964. He ends up martyred à la civil-rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney, his death, in Cantor’s roman-à-clef version, providing the impetus for passage of the Civil Rights Bill.

But Frank’s death has other consequences. His sister Laura receives letters apparently sent by Frank describing his post-mortem agonies. She summons her friends — including Billy, Frank’s girlfriend and future terrorist Beth, sexually confused æsthete and future avant-garde artist manqué Jeffrey, and clean-cut hunk and future crusading lawyer Jesse — and they form a cabal vowing to perform deeds that, through a Gnostic logic, will "raise the divine sparks" and lay to rest Frank’s long-suffering soul.

That resolve turns into a mini alternative history of America from the ’60s to the ’80s, each character touching on movements ranging from the Weather Underground to Saturday Night Live, with emphasis on Beth’s misguided connection with the SDS. It also spawns Billy’s comic version of the same, in which he transforms his friends into superheroes with names like Ninja B., SheWolf, and the Sophist. An improvement over Billy Bad Ears, perhaps, but this Marxist fusion of X-Men and Doonesbury by way of R. Crumb doesn’t seem likely to inspire a cult of costume-wearing followers, as Cantor would have us believe, let alone influence the course of history.

Nonetheless, it provides a break from the ongoing soap opera of the Great Neck kids, who fumble through a kaleidoscope of loves, losses, triumphs, treacheries, disillusionments, diseases and many, many tears (Billy is one thing, but did people in the ’60s and ’70s really weep that much?). True-life icons like Andy Warhol, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King pop up, as well as stand-ins for — I’m guessing — Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and John Belushi. And of course, representations of such militants as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Black Panthers, here coming off as self-righteous, fatuous, and unsympathetic.

No doubt that’s unintentional. Part of the problem is the book’s structure. His premise is ingenious and his scope epic, but Cantor diffuses momentum and interest by being all over the place. Great Neck lacks the tight focus of a scene, or "panel," as in the best parts of Krazy Kat; instead, its promiscuous point of view and pinball chronology leak from the frame and spread into an amorphous pudding of interior monologues, flashbacks, and flash-forwards.

Some of these points of view deserve better, such as that of Mr. Hartman, the memory-anguished schoolteacher whose struggle to express the terrible truth of his experience leads him to become a poet. Or that of Beth’s father, Leo, another Holocaust survivor, whose despair and guilt lead him to practice psychoanalysis. Both walk through the cartoon universe of Great Neck’s America with the knowledge that "such a thing — the black bottle filled with death — is possible." The trick for Cantor is getting us to believe that life in Great Neck is possible too.

Jay Cantor reads on Tuesday, January 21, at 6 p.m. at the Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue in Harvard Square. Call (617) 661-1515.