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Collins, Jed – Champ 2010
Champ 2010
It’s about damned time that somebody broke out of the daily diary strip formula. Jed starts off with the usual four panel strip, two panels above and two below, putting one out daily even when he doesn’t have a thing to say. Eventually he starts throwing in sketchbook pages when he’s too busy for a strip, then he moves to three panels, one on top of the other, and finally just whatever format he needs to tell the story he wants to tell from that day. In a genre that’s become tired as hell it was a nice change of pace. This also means that there are more than a few gaps, so any weirdos who demand 365 strips out of a year’s worth of a daily strip are going to be disappointed. As for the rest of us, enjoy the variety! As it says on the cover, this tells the story of Jed’s year without booze, and he regularly professes annoyance at that fact. It was kind of for health reasons but more than anything he seemed to want the challenge of a daily diary strip to fill the hole left by the lack of drinking. I did a review for the first month of this book, so I won’t mention that stuff (the short version is that I liked it), but the subjects of other strips include being miserable at a few different jobs for different reasons, liking the ladies from afar and then from closer up, trying to make time for his comics while still earning a living, wondering if those weird dimples on his thumb nail are cancer, resisting the urge to punch hipsters, and various shenanigans with his friend Chris Monday (whose books will be reviewed here one of these days too). Then things pick up a bit towards the middle of the book when Jed gets a serious girlfriend. That’s also about the time that he started getting complaints about a dip in quality in his work, to which I say: eh, maybe a bit. Misery is almost always a more interesting topic to read about than happiness, so there’s that, but fuck it, the guy was happy! Relationships being what they are, he might very well end up being miserable again some day, which will make his regular readers what, happy? That makes them assholes! I’m veering off track here, but I chatted with Chris and Jed at the hotel bar during the “open draw” thing for SPACE this year, and they both seem like nice enough guys, and as human beings I’d rather they were happy than not. And it’s not like his strips sucked after his relationship started, it’s just that he talked about more things in a relationship frame of mind, which can also seem like a personal attack to some self-centered single people. This is solid pile of strips and, like I said, he plays around with the format a bit, which is always nice to see. Check it out, why don’t you? $9
Collins, Jed – Uh, Love Story
Uh, Love Story
What a… charming story? I’m not entirely sure how to respond to this one. It’s the story of a man who is in love with a retarded girl. Yes, there are more politically correct ways to put that, and if this comic had the slightest interest in such things I’d reflect them here. Things begin with our “hero” chatting with this retarded woman at her bedroom window. She seems to only be able to respond with images inside word balloons,such as a cat, teddy bear, a monster truck, kermit the frog and a turtle. No, these images did not seem to correspond in any way to what was happening around her. Her father sees this man talking to her at her bedroom window and throws him off the property. The sister of the retarded girl sees the guy laying in the gutter and lets him know about a dance her sister will be attending later that night, but there’s a catch: it’s a special dance only for retarded people. Our “hero” decides that he can pretend with the best of them and gets into the dance, at which point the two of them (and the girl does seem to like the guy) happily get together. The only problem is that the father sees this guy at the dance and things get a little hairy, but why spoil that heartwarming ending? I varied between being mildly creeped out and somehow touched by this odd love story, and am still not sure exactly where I landed. I did like the vast dark spaces in the comic, between being beaten unconscious and his very brief struggle with his conscience. On a technical level I thought it was fantastic. On another level there’s a point where things quickly go from laughing with something to laughing at it, and that line veers all over the place in this issue. Still, if you don’t mind the occasional uncomfortable laugh, or if maybe you didn’t spend your formative years working at a home for special needs adults and might be a little overly sensitive because of that fact, this is worth a look. No price, but with that color cover and all I’d say $3.
Collins, Jed – Champ 2010 #1
Champ 2010 #1
I have a pretty basic rule of thumb to tell how a good a journal comic was after reading it: how difficult is it to pick a sample image? If there’s only one or two funny strips, then it’s an easy call and probably not that great of a journal comic. If there’s a dozen or more I could have happily thrown onto the page, then that journal comic was pretty damned good. This one falls in the “pretty damned good” category. Also, does it make me a bad person if I saw Jed’s cover warning that he’s not drinking this year and immediately thought that the comic would be duller because of it? Yes, it probably does. It doesn’t get off to the best of starts either, as Jed notes at the top of his first strip that he redrew it the next day. I didn’t think that was allowed in journal comics, but he immediately makes up for it by describing in his next strip that he redrew it because he wasn’t sure how to depict his moustache. Looking at my book of rules for journal comics, I see that “moustache confusion” is an acceptable reason to redraw a strip, so I stand corrected. As for the specifics, strips in here deal with his new sobriety, trying to find a job (and coming up with some pretty crappy jobs), trying to sell his truck for a pittance due to an immediate need for cash, a crazy owl, a bird-shit water enema, a golden flavor nugget, stupid football rules, (surface) grave digging, e-mailing a woman who he forgot about from back in his drunken days, making copies, looking Asian, getting free books, and rediscovering an old van. There are a few of the “oh crap, I need to get a strip done today” strips, but Jed mostly manages to make them funny. The only aesthetic problem I have with the series is Jed’s occasional use of black text over a dark gray background, but that’s the sort of thing that is probably more the fault of the copier than him. Which kinda does make it his fault then, as he’s the one making copies, unless it’s just a profoundly crappy copy machine. I just glanced over at his website to try and find a price for this thing (and to make sure he was keeping his journal up, which seems to be the case), and he has the first volume for sale for “any amount you’d like”. That’s profoundly generous, and if you’d like my at least slightly informed opinion, here’s how much I think you should give the man when you buy this comic: $4. Nice cover, nice packaging, a fair amount of content, to me that equals exactly $4. Or, if you’re rich, you could make his day and give him $100. Your call…
