Comicpress theme question.

1. Your search box does have the stylesheet applied to it; you just don’t have a style that actually applies to it in the CSS. The identifier of that box is “s” so I’d look in your CSS for anything that applies to #s and make sure it’s got the right font and such.

2. That’s a very weird way of doing a form reset/clear, because it reloads the page, which makes no sense. I’d edit the code and change it from this:
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td colspan="2"><small>Search:</small></td></tr>
<tr><td><form method="get" id="searchform" action="/narchives.php">
<input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" size="47" />
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
</form></td><td><form method="get" id="searchformclear" action="/narchives.php">
<input type="hidden" value="" />
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmitclear" value=" Clear" /></form></td></tr></table>

To this:
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td colspan="2"><small>Search:</small></td></tr>
<tr><td><form method="get" id="searchform" action="/narchives.php">
<input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" size="47" />
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
<input type="reset" id="searchsubmitclear" value=" Clear" /></form></td></tr></table>
That would make your buttons line up and also the clear button from reloading the archives page pointlessly.

3. The excessive whitespace is because of all those BR’s. Look at this:
...Weapons getting lost.</a><br />
<h3><strong><br/><br/>October 2006</strong></h3>...
That’s three line breaks inbetween the end of one line and the beginning of the next section. Modify the code to remove those two line breaks at the beginning of each section. It’s already in an H3, you don’t need to explicitly break it.

That code is most likely part of some sort of loop in the archives.php page.