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Craig, Joel – Welcome to Nursing HELLo
Just for the record (assuming that anybody is taking a record of this, which is a bold assumption), that title went from being something that might be a typo to a pretty smart summation of Joel’s efforts to quit cursing so much at work. I always assumed that nurses were required to curse at work to help deal with the shit that they had to put up with, often literally, but apparently such words can still offend people who see horrific injuries all day. Anyway, this is another one of those cases where the story was fascinating and his struggle to maintain a connection to his artistic side while being consumed with work hit pretty damned close to home, but technical issues kept dragging me out of the narrative. Partially this is because I’m a firm believer in always getting the basics right in comics, as I’d much rather focus purely on the narrative, but, as always, this might bother me a lot more than other people who don’t read hundreds of comics a year. So, bad news first: some of the individual pages were lighter than others (making a few things tough to read). That’s probably a printing problem and not on Joel. But the word balloons were most likely his fault, and if you’re spilling out of those (or, worse, having the word balloons burst through the walls of the panel for no reason), then it tells me that you were making things up on the fly. Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but it is the sort of thing that should be corrected for the collected edition. There were also some misspellings that could have been fixed with an editor or a proofreader; not lots of them but enough to get my snooty attention. If this was a terrible comic, these little flaws could have dragged me right out of things, and it would have prompted a thoroughly nasty review. But I really enjoyed the story! It’s all about Joel deciding that he wants to be a nurse after studying the program for his husband, how much he learned in two years of nursing school (which he says should be a book all by itself, and I agree), his interactions with his co-workers and patients, and the basic overview of what happens in his life over those four years. He was aware enough to include definitions for all of the medical terms that he used, but it may have helped to repeat them a few times just to hammer them home. Oh, and he had Madonna to turn to as an imaginary friend a few times, and those conversations never failed to put a smile on my face. I brought up the flaws I saw with this mostly because I think he has all kinds of potential in comics and I’d love to see more of this story, which is mostly his life. But if I have one core message from this website (which I certainly do not), it’s to get the basics right. It makes everything else a lot easier. Even with those little problems this is still a thoroughly entertaining book, and you should still give it a shot. $15.99
