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So! The other half of the reason why I was excited this week - besides All-Star Superman coming out - was that my copy of Jeremy: The Complete Strip Collection showed up in my mailbox, FINALLY. Jeremy is a comic strip originally available on the web, written and drawn by Calamity Jon Morris, about a nine-year-old boy made out of assembled bits of criminal corpses and reanimated. He rampages when he gets angry - but much more adorably than I'm afraid the Hulk has ever managed - and his chief nemeses are (A) roaring crowds of villagers with pitchforks, and (B) this little girl named Sara who wants to be a mad scientist and wants to take him apart when she isn't otherwise bugging the crap out of him.
I've been a webgeek fan of Calamity Jon's for a while now, following his sketchblog, including his recent spat of Batman mini-webcomics, and I was quite happy to see that the collection was being put out by this Lulu.com site. Jeremy in particular is so lovely and goofy and batshit crazy with wild flights of fancy and a frantic pace. Morris's art is extremely kinetic, loose and dynamic to fit the lunatic bent of the characters.
Has anyone else read Jeremy, or is anyone interested? Part of the fun of the collection was watching the evolution of the strip, as Morris started to experiment more with panel layout and story structure - one-offs to longer stories to poignant meditations (& then back to one-offs!), fat-chunky panels to tall, stark ones. One strip has Jeremy shouting "SHAZAM!" and trying to turn into Captain Marvel, while later on you can see Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as reenacted by nine-year-olds. There are, of course, some sketchy moments - the early-strip jitters, the occasional story that seems to grapple with having no plot - but the energy of the strips and rogue's gallery of characters more than make up for it. |
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