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Jason Part 3

I’ve never figured out if it’s a better idea to put my major criticism at the start of a review (implying that my overall opinion of a book is negative for readers with short attention spans) or at the end (where said people with short attention spans never see it). Instead of deciding, I’ll keep up with my current policy of changing it up every time, pleasing no one. This book has way too many spelling errors. Yes, for many people that’s a minor thing, and if you’re one of those people, feel free to skip ahead a few sentences, because I loved this comic other than those errors. But for a book like this, that was funded through Kickstarter, to have so many spelling errors just baffles me. Sometimes it’s things like the wrong usage for “their,” which is annoying but understandable. But putting “hapry” instead of “happy” implies a complete lack of any sort of proofreading, and I don’t get that mindset. Grumpy rant over, so how about that story? If you haven’t read any of these Jason comics from Bonesteel before, they’re the product of a delightfully demented mind. Jason from the “Friday the 13th” movies is real, and lives in the same section of town as Freddy, Pinhead, and Michael Myers from the “Halloween” movies, among many other guests. Honestly, half the fun is figuring out which horror movie bad guy that is in the background who goes unnamed; I must say that I do alarmingly well in this regard. Anyway, this comic covers Tuesday through Saturday in the life of Jason, starting off with his taking questions at a horror convention that really helps us get into his mindset (for example, he has a “spidey sense” that lets him know if anybody anywhere near him is having sex). From there we see Jason working out at the gym (including what he listens to while he works out, which you’d never guess), having a chat with Satan, answering his fan mail, going on a spending spree at a hardware store, chatting with his roommates and taking his dog for a walk. It’s hilarious, especially if you’ve seen the movies involving these characters, but I think it would even hold up if you only had a slight idea of who these “people” were. Oh, and I’m offering a free service where I read pages from comics creators before they publish them and tell them which spelling errors to fix. Any takers?

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Jason Part 2

Hey, I did some good in this world! Well, that’s assuming a lot, but I complained plenty about the spelling in the first part of this “Jason” story, and it was all almost completely fixed in this one. Coincidence? Yeah, probably, but I’ll still take it. I mentioned in that first review that I didn’t have a single problem with the story, and that remains the case here. If you missed it, this is the story of Jason from the Friday the 13th movies, going about his days as an employee of a group that lets these killers have casual conversations with each other and provides them with state-of-the-art weaponry. This time around we get to see Jason trying to learn the basics of how to care for his new dog, trying to figure out why he wants to be a mentor to a kid (an actual mentor, but to somebody who will have full knowledge of what Jason does), the guy from the “Scream” movies talking shit to Freddy Krueger and challenging him to a kill-off, and a product demonstration of the various killing tools that Jason has available to him. It’s still chock full of funny bits, and once again you can just barely know about these characters and still get a lot out of it. Granted, it helps if you have some familiarity with them, but it’s still a thoroughly engaging story either way. And isn’t that always a sign that the creator has done their job? Yes! That’s the answer I was going for.

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Jason

Just a general service announcement for everybody out there who spends countless hours planning, drawing and distributing comics: for the love of all that is holy, use a spell checker. Or a dictionary, or that friend of yours who placed 11th in their high school spelling bee. I’ll never understand why so many people are so willing to spend so much time on art and so little time on figuring out if you’ve got “actually” spelled correctly. Also it always sucks for me to open up with a rant when I actually (see what I did there?) enjoyed the comic quite a bit. This is a week in the life of Jason, that dude from the Friday the 13th movies, and I initially thought that Bonesteel was going in the same direction as John Brodowski’s Curio Cabinet (no I’m not going to explain the reference; the collected edition of that book is available and you should all have read it by now anyway). That turned out not to be the case, as Bonesteel’s take on the character was of a guy who punches in to work each day, selects the weapon he’d like to use and goes about his way. I was hoping to get some sort of explanation of Jason’s uncanny ability to sense when teenagers were having sex, but maybe he’ll get into that in later issues. Anyway, we get to see Jason in some downtime at the office, playing a game of cards with other horror movie icons (and I will now and forever object to that guy from Scream being included in this group), discussing ways to liven up their boring routine, and eventually getting a pet (sort of). Bonesteel doesn’t mess with hands, feet or faces, which gives everything a vaguely dreamlike quality, but the dialogue is funny and that’s all that matters in this kind of story. It’s worth checking out and I’m curious to see if he keeps it up, and if he does keep it up if he can manage to keep if from getting repetitive in a hurry. He’s off to a good start, once he finds somebody to check over his spelling…