Book-A-Day 2010 # 208 (8/30) -- Desperate Times by Chris Eliopoulos

A comic strip is a surprisingly complicated thing, with a dozen or so elements that all have to work correctly (figure drawing, background drawing, dialogue writing, plot writing, cast balance and size, timing within a strip, timing between strips, and so on -- not to mention humor) for the final product to click. And that can be clearest with a strip that works very well on most of those measures, which throws into relief the things that could be improved.

Chris Eliopoulos's first strip in a daily strip-comics format was Desperate Times -- about a wanna-be freelance artist named Marty (presumably his viewpoint or self-insert character), his best friend Toad, and -- well, let me just quote the back cover, which helps illuminate my point: "one drunken sloth, a guy living his life in a theme park costume, the sister of one slacker and the wife of his that always has her ventriloquist dummy on her hand". (Desperate Times appears to be either over or on indefinite hold, but Eliopoulos is currently running a daily webcomics strip, Misery Loves Sherman, that shows that he learned a lot from Desperate Times.)

This collection of Desperate Times strips was published in late 2009, but the strips are clearly from some time earlier, and also may have been done over the period of several years. (The book has about sixty pages of comics; the first section is laid out as half-page comics telling a single long story, and the rest are strip comics, with a humorous continuity.) Eliopoulos's drawing is excellent -- there's a clear Bill Watterson influence, especially in the black areas on his figures -- and his dialogue and situations are strong as well. But the strip lurches from one plotline to another with little overall continuity -- Marty gets married, suddenly, between strips, shortcircuiting what could have been a great sequence, and then it takes another couple of pages before Eliopoulos reveals who he's gotten married to -- and the focus wavers from Marty to Toad, with the minor characters dropping in and out in a way that feels random.

Desperate Times is funny, and it's a strip about twentysomething slackers, which is uncommon enough to be notable and exciting. And I suspect that the rough patches would have smoothed out if Eliopoulos had been able to devote more time to the strip, and run it as a real daily (instead of as a backup in the Savage Dragon comic, and then in occasional issues of its own comic book). As it is, it's an interesting piece of work that doesn't quite gel, and seems to have ended prematurely -- but this is still a collection of funny comics about quirky characters, somewhat more adult than anything you'd find in your local newspaper.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index