Zack! Empire – Jerkface Comics #1

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Jerkface Comics #1

That does  it. Center for Cartoon Studies, I beseech you: if you don’t already offer a course on basic spelling and grammar, please start one up. Pretty please? At the very least make sure that it isn’t lost on your students that their comics can be the most visually pleasing things in the world, but if there’s a spelling or grammatical error on every page then it’s not going to make a bit of difference. Of course, I have no idea if Zack ever attended that school, so it’s probably a moot point, but holy Christ am I sick of reading comics by people who have no idea when to use “your” or “you’re” and seem to get tripped up on every word longer than six or seven letters. I am aware of the fact that this is my own personal crusade, so I’ll stop talking about it already. What about the comic itself? Well, I think Zack is a fairly young guy, so there’s all kinds of potential here. And he seems be be keeping a steady schedule of releasing comics, which is always a promising sign. The main problem is that there are three big stories in here and two of them are about how he usually can’t be bothered to make comics, which isn’t a great sign for his second book. The introduction page (where Jerkface battles with the words in the panels when they get a little too mean) was hilarious, and I also enjoyed the second big story about Jerkface and a friend dealing with an asshole. And it’s not like the stories about his lack of motivation were worthless, as that’s a pretty common staple of the auto-bio genre. The first one dealt with the problem in more general terms (he keeps getting distracted by thoughts of various lady parts), while the second story on this topic dealt with his inability to stick to a to-do list. There were funny bits in both stories, but a limit of one per comic might be a good idea in the future. And some of that dialogue was awkward as hell (saying it out loud and hearing how it sounds can help). Still, a fair amount of funny bits, and the back cover showing the things that weren’t in this issue was also nicely done. A mixed bag, in other words, but promising. Provided that you’re not as stuck on the spelling errors as me, that is, but that kind of thing should improve over time. Right? $3