Garrison, Chris – Jakey the Jerk #1

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Jakey the Jerk #1

I do so love comics that mess with my expectations. As you can probably guess from that title, the lead character is a bit of an asshole, and the first few strips set up a funny (if repetitive) formula. Jakey tries to ask out a bank worker, hits on a lady at a traffic light and gets annoyed when his conversation with a lady in a bar is interrupted. It might have gotten old over the course of a whole comic, but they had me chuckling. The next strip was split in two, with Jakey in one half and the other half featuring an owl who hears from the woman he’s with those words that every “nice guy” hears at some point in their lives. Next up is a slightly longer strip with an argument about whether or not a certain celebrity is dead (with a nice punch line), but then the comic completely changes speeds. The rest of it is taken up with a long story about Jakey being basically hired on as a bodyguard for a woman that he didn’t know was famous. She’s a hippie chick, he’s a gym rat, they don’t seem to have much of anything in common, but Chris takes on a long hike with the two of them and we get to see a gradual warming by the both of them. I wasn’t expecting to see much in the way of genuine emotion here, so kudos to him for successfully straddling that line while also keeping it funny. There’s also potential for the story to keep going, but either way I’m curious to see more of this world. Chris is on a website with a bunch of other artists, so I’m thinking that might be my afternoon right there if they’re all as good as this one. Check it out, get some laughs, enjoy a small goat creature butting some people into oblivion. $3