Hilarious Consequences

Providing a soundtrack with a comic is a nice enough idea, but it can be a plus or minus. The protagonist of this collection is in a band, and at one point he reassures himself, “Yours is just as good as anything Bloc Party do,” (not my idea of high praise or ambition) which I guess explains why the CD is all indie, but it’s varied enough that we clearly aren’t meant to take it as representing the character’s music – one band is the author’s, Wet Paint, and another is a solo track by someone out of Bloc Party. Anyway, I don’t like indie, indeed I dislike nearly all of it – some of this is better than other parts, but it doesn’t help my reading enjoyment at all. Your mileage may vary – I’ve certainly heard and indeed reviewed far worse indie (see here for instance).

So let’s leave that aside and talk about the actual comic. It’s crude fanzine art, very basic drawing, virtually no technique at all. It’s clear enough (apart from a few times the inking ends up suggesting something incomprehensible), but not much use on expression or body language, and it took me a while to grasp that one figure was the same character as in several previous strips. I guess it’s closest to a less able Jeffrey Brown, as someone says to the protagonist on the last page.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. It’s miserabilist, all about a failed musician moaning about life and struggling for enough cash to get by amongst various, possibly psychosomatic, ailments, with occasional unappealing touches of self-pity. The writing has little more technical skill than the art, sometimes losing the pacing badly on longer sequences. However, what there is is a wry sense of humour that really appealed to me – on the single-pagers I often found myself smiling at the last panel, frequently a kind of downbeat punchline. I wanted to quote some, but few are real gags, and only work in their context, which probably suggests the art and timing is contributing more than I claim in the previous paragraph here.

If you can find it in a shop, skim a bit, look at a couple of the one-pagers (there are titles at the start of every strip, so they are easy to find), see if they make you smile as they did for me.