By Steve Lafler (Top Shelf Productions)
ISBN: 1-891830-13-9
This is an anthropomorphic allegory using cartoon insects as variously and vaguely disguised icons from the world of popular jazz music.
Jimmy Watts is just your average Catholic kid: horny, self-absorbed, rebellious, and plagued by unnecessary and largely unearned guilt. Then his folks get him a saxophone and his life takes a whole new turn, even to the point of having music-induced semi-mystical visions. He has a destiny now. He’s going to be a Musician.
Winning a scholarship to the City Music College, he meets young pianist Slim Watkins and they discover shared tastes for fine, loose women, getting out of their heads and Jazz. Their rise in the boozy, druggy, sleazy world of popular music reflects their slow, seemingly inevitable, descent into drug addiction, which in turn mirrors their meteoric success with their band ‘Bughouse’.
This tale draws heavily on the history and legends of America’s almost-mythic Jazz Age; it also tellingly comments on the deadly pressures of creativity, the dumb things talented people do to cope with it, and ultimately, how some survive and others simply don’t.
Steve Lafler has crafted a deceptively compelling little gem whose strength lies in fresh, earnest characterisation laid over an archetypical plot. Originally a five-issue mini-series from Cat-Head Comics (1995-96), the series has been collected twice but with substantial revisions both times.
The 1996 edition reprints issues 1-4 with supplemental pages and a 20-page prequel, whilst the 2000 edition reviewed here expands that to 192 pages with substantially more new material. In either case though, the spiritually downbeat issue #5, which dealt with the aftermath of the drug-related death of a major character and how his surviving friends cope, is omitted and replaced with a different ending. Perhaps one day we’ll see a definitive edition of this wonderful modern fable.
© 2000 Steve Lafler.