Webcomic Review
Jazz and Jess
"Drawings Of One Syllable"

So there's cartoons and zombies and chavs and an evil twin and Jess is really cute and Jazz works at a place that is secretly creating the zombies and...

Wait, I have to stop or I'll have told the entire story in a single punctuationless outburst. (which would be kinda cool, actually...)

The thing is, you almost can tell the story in a single rant. There are lots of little details but they don't matter. Hell, lots of the big details don't matter either. If this were a novel, it would be terrible- but it's not a novel, not anything like one, and what it is is rather special.

It's one of the cartooniest cartoons ever to have cartooned, that's what it is.

Really. The art is striking, stylized, extraordinarily simple yet so carefully worked out to express everything it needs to express. You don't typically gesture with your nose so the characters don't have noses, but their eyes have a huge range of expressions just from manipulating the stylized eyeshapes. Actually it's not the biggest range of expressions one could have, but they're all such strong cartoony expressions and read really well. Likewise with mouths- and you really get body language, hand gestures etc.

And what sort of things are they expressing?

Gee, well- Jazz is working training zombies and he's smitten with this one little girl zombie for saying "Gghahggarrrrgllliiiieee" in a rather special way- to him it sounded like 'Daddy!' or possibly 'Kitty' so he's asking his boss, his evil twin, if he can keep her as some sort of pet, dress the bits that aren't falling off in a bunny suit, that sort of thing. Evil Jazz isn't having any of it, and refuses.

What can you even say about such a comic? Other than "erm... sandwich... ketchup.. messy... er, kittens... gravel..." in the manner of Jazz caught with blood all over him?

That's the thing. There is no bigger, grander plot, just as there are no noses on human or zombie characters. It's just the cascade of impressions, and a perfect harmony between the simple, quirky art and the simple, quirky writing. Simple doesn't mean unsophisticated, but it certainly means uncomplicated- and in every sense, Jazz and Jess stays outrageously simple. I've rarely seen any comic, certainly not a story comic, so totally accessible and easy to get into. One glance and you 'get' the art and whatever acting performance the art is meant to convey, a few strips and you 'get' the story such as it is, and are prepared for whatever the strip throws at you in terms of plot twists.

Except it's hard to call them 'plot twists' when everything is so simple- there's just the setting, and we keep learning a bit more about it. What I'm reminded of is greeting cards. It's like the comic is the longform adventures of the new superstars of the edgy postmodern greeting card world. The comic just feels like a massive success at something- and to me it feels like these are two-panel gag modern greeting cards, the high-priced branded ones where you're like "I wonder who came up with these cards about chavs and zombies. What's a 'chav'?"

Sometimes the comic starts to dig into heavier, deeper, more significant layers of plot, but then it promptly implodes, turning the seriousness into a gag, throwing a pop culture reference or breaking the fourth wall in an indirect way- clever, absurdist, but always refusing to allow things to mean TOO much.

There's a concept Scott McCloud talks about called 'iconic'. He sees it as a combination of not having a lot of detail, but also not being too abstract. That's not the best definition- it seems unduly negative. With Jazz and Jess, we have an example for a better definition: "iconic is representing something specific, very very very simply and directly."

This is why the comic is so successful as a cartoon. On every conceivable level, it's representing incredibly specific, well defined things with extraordinary simplicity. The characters have a very simple art style, but they're not two-dimensional, they're vividly three-dimensional just by all the lines going exactly right and a little simple shading. Everybody is always, always so very on-model you could practically identify character by jaw-line alone- when that is literally just a line. Eyes express a reaction or a moment of acting when they are two joined bubbles with dots in them.

It's similar to the situation you face if you were trying to do something like forge an XKCD comic... XKCD is not simply any stick figure comic. It's a very specific variant of stick figure comic, with specific articulation and gesture from the figures, specific 'head shapes', line weights and textures... so by the same token, it looks on the surface like you could draw Jazz and Jess characters and fill them with solid colors and have it ring true, but almost nobody could pull it off convincingly.

The same is true for the writing- even the writing is iconic. You'll have concepts like "Evil Jazz is nasty to his woman" or "zombies attack the police" and they'll be executed in the simplest, most direct way possible, without a false note. It seems simple but it isn't as simple as it looks.

It's even true for backgrounds. The backgrounds don't hold up the 3-D quality of the characters- they're more flat and stylized, with no real relation to perspective rendering. Lines go in funny directions, things like a skyline might be rendered literally like a flat cardboard cutout of a skyline- but everything's reduced to its most primitive form and then rendered sharply and cleanly. I'm looking at a drawing of a watercooler, which happens to have a fish floating in it looking bemused. The watercooler doesn't line up with any lines in the room and its lines don't line up with itself (as far as strict perspective goes) but the shapes and colors are pure watercooler- it's boiled down to a water tank (with a perfect little goldfish floating in it, making perfect little bubbles) and the gray base with an indentation where you put your cup, and a spigot. No handle, no actuating lever or button- but without the indentation, the base is a gray box, and without the little dot for a spigot, the indentation could be anything. Put it all together, complete with the black line that doesn't totally go around the top of the tank part, and you have yourself an iconic watercooler, fish joke included.

What do you get when you read a comic that is so utterly iconic in every respect?

Mostly, immediacy. There isn't as much to say about it because it's so simple, but by design it grabs you immediately. You don't have to go study the archives to understand what's happening. You get the jokes immediately, you get the action sequences, quips and remarks- it's super easy to jump into.

Whether you'll stick around depends on other things. If your iconic comic periodically hints at more subtleties, and they're consistent hints, that is more of a hook to keep people returning. If the hints are always in random directions, not so much. Jazz and Jess isn't always that consistent- characters change around and want different things- one girl desires Jazz, has and then conquers Evil Jazz, and then passes up proper Jazz and feels it is 'closure'. It's a resolution of an underlying plot point, but if that plot point was allowed to stay instead of being resolved it would be a kind of traction. The less resolved the conflicts of the characters are, and the more specific they are, the more traction there is to return and see how they're doing.

That balances with the need to have the conflicts be simple, iconic, so when you return you immediately understand what's happening.

I'm very sure that I'll understand any new Jazz and Jess immediately- less sure that the archives will be important and tell me about current story developments. Some basic points, like squid, will stay relevant. It seems like other things, even interpersonal dynamics among the characters, could change around a lot with nobody batting an eye.

That's not a big criticism- more of an observation. If these characters were more consistent people there'd be more to grab onto. As long as they're pretty changeable, the comic is just very easy to jump into- which is still very important, especially for new readers.

All that's left is the update schedule, which is on the rare side. It seems like it's worth the wait. This is one of those comics that sticks in your mind, but it's also a bit like Chinese food in that it's filling and then you're already hungry for more. I've never read through 86 comics so quickly and easily, and would cheerfully read right through it again.

Or I could wait for an update. Hmmm ;)