kingandy | Everything Jake (Reply)

Everything Jake is a webcomic I read for a while, but gave up on because it was too schizophrenic; the author said he had a Five Year Plan or whatever (this being four years ago), but it kept flip-flopping between "Oh, we're just an ordinary college comic" and "WITH SUPER POWERS" and "The super powers were just a dream" and "OH NO THEY WEREN'T". I'm sort of interested in a story about a bunch of college kids with a secret government-sponsored Special Powers Training module (which is absolutely secret, but they still get course credits for), but he kept coming up with reasons not to use the powers or just plain ignoring them. Random (vaguely cool) paranormal beings would appear, deliver some MASSIVE SECRET about Jake Bruno's life, then wipe his memory. The story would then wallow in meaningless dull college life and/or relationship stuff (Sub-soap-opera. Not even a punchline in sight) until the next time the author decided he felt like drawing super-powers. The story didn't know what it wanted to be. Then you had pages of prose or - worse - script-style dialogue, and eventually I gave up on it. The art was only ever mediocre, really, and the prose pages in particular read like bad fanfiction.

Why do I bring this up, you ask? Well, I went back to flip through it this evening and not much has changed - except he's gone back to do a pre-2000 prelude tale, being back in High School and thus long before Jake discovered his powers. It's boring and slow-moving. However, I really felt I had to bring this page to everyone's attention. Because I really, really love it. The following page is pretty cool too, purely for the panel about Grant Morrison. Of course it all turns out to be a dream, but it was nice while it lasted.