Ollswang and The Jam

Thursday, 6 February 1997

With the comics industry imploding, this is not the best of times to be a comics fan. This may be more true for me than for most; I'm especially fond of obscure comics by quirky, independent creators, the exact sort of thing that exists most precariously in today's market.

One difficulty in reading such comics is that many of them are published on irregular schedules. (The Catch-22 of the indie comics biz: If they were published more regularly, they'd sell better. If they sold better, they could be published more regularly.) Some comics go months or years between issues, so it's hard to tell when there's a new issue coming.

One such comics is The Jam. I first saw this comic over a decade ago, when it was a backup feature in a Canadian superhero title whose name escapes me. It was written and drawn by Bernie Mirault, whose rendering skills were shaky and whose inking hand was heavy (he's improved tremendously over the years), but whose grasp of layout was original and inventive, and whose writing was simple, direct, and charming.

The Jam tells the story of Gordon Kirby as "The Jammer," a young man of good spirit, who fights crime in a modified sweatsuit he bought at Sears. His adventures have involved frightening muggers, fighting a bizarre religious cult, talking a neighbor out of committing murder, playing mindgames with an unscrupulous psychiatrist, arguing with a nasty bank teller, and being targeted for special misery by the Devil himself. Due partly to the comic's irregulr schedule, partly to its passing among several publishers before arriving at Caliber Comics, and partly to the fact that my comics collection is highly disorganized, I'm not even sure that I have every issue. I do have every issue that I've seen, and even accidentally bought one twice.

I suspect that Mirault has been losing interest in his character -- the last two issues, written by Jeff Lang, have dealt with a character of Lang's creation, called "the Kinetic." This would explain why the latest issue (#13) bore a message from Mirault, saying that this would be "the last issue of The Jam for awhile," and that he's "of a mind to create a new book." I'll certainly buy it when it comes. I've enjoyed everything of Mirault's that I've seen (including his issues of Grendel), but I'll miss The Jam.

The most recent issue of the Comics Journal (#192) bears an obituary for Paul Ollswang. The obit confirmed that I have all of Ollswang's work that was published as distinct comics -- two issues of Dreams of a Dog and one of Memories of Doofer -- and gave me some shorter works, published in anthologies, to search for. It's Doofer that I had been most hoping to see more of. This was an odd, endearing, and very funny tour of a small town in the far future, sometime after much of humanity had been driven insane by an advertising jingle. Doofer was home to such sites as the Cove of the Clam Bar and the famous Statue of Limitations.

Much like Mirault, Ollswang didn't render in the style popular among most comics fans, but his sense of design and layout was brilliant, and he created comics that put humor and charm ahead of violence and melodrama.