woodenrocketpress

review: FREELANCE BLUES Issues 1 & 2

FREELANCE BLUES

by Ian Daffern and Mike Leone. Art by Vicki Tierney
Issue 0 – 8pg; Issue 1 – 26pg; Issue 2 – 26pg
Available at freelanceblues.com

Let’s talk about work ethics and how to tell a good workplace story. I personally have suffered from unwanted responsibility being lobbed at my sorry head at every crappy job I’ve ever had, and it’s been difficult at times, but everything I’ve taken on I’ve done so voluntarily. My life has a pretty straight narrative focus in this area: work bad. Dave want freedom. Repeat.

So I’ve always identified readily with bad day at work stories and damn-the-man narratives like Office Space or Will Ferguson’s Happiness. But here’s the problem, too many of these narratives creates a whitewashing effect and every story, from Clerks to American Beauty gets lost quickly in a very bland, broad statement: work bad. Rather have freedom. Repeat. Ian Daffern and Mike Leone’s Freelance Blues had better work pretty hard to keep itself from drowning in this overdone genre, right? Well it does.

Freelance Blues is a serial comic about Lance Bunkman, a man who, outside of any apparent logic, always ends up working for bosses who are not just evil (everybody’s boss is evil), but B-Movie mad scientist evil. He hops from job to job always needing to thwart some monster here, or escape with his life there, and admits that with a complete lack of marketable skills, defeating this ever-present evil is “all he’s good at.” Already on paper this exceeds all expectations as a pigeon-holed “damn-the-man” narrative. At the very least, its got monsters.

But the shining light to the story is not the monsters… its Lance. Bunkman (who, fittingly, is born on Labor Day) works any number of these jobs to support his twin sisters through high school, has fought for custody of them after the death of their parents, and teamed with his healthy curiosity and sharp, calculated dialogue, Daffern and Leone have carved a character right out of the likeability handbook, and it completely works in their favour.

Without an immediate connection to Lance, some of the smaller faults of the series may pull at you. The big ideas of these two masterminds are often at the mercy of brevity, and a lot needs to be established in the first book, in very few pages. So a healthy blob of exposition froths out of a few small word bubbles and, at times, I want to just let Vicki Tierney’s punchy and fun art style do all the talking. As such, Issue 1 feels a bit rushed, and I was left wanting more explanation, and more time taken with a very specific and delicate premise. I especially felt a little cheated out of first “climactic” boss fights that were all-too short.

But even though I want to see more soaring monster battles, its never far from mind that the nature of Lance’s crappy job is to battle monsters, and excluding them in large number or great description is actually a bright and funny choice. And where Issue 1 might leave me feeling rushed out the door, Issue 2 has the pacing and plot that I henceforth expect from this series. Lance’s personality flies off the page and the monster battle is funny, and sharp. Then, at the back of the book, I read that Issue 2 was the first issue written by Daffern and Leone and infer that the Issue 1 had to be written around it. What I hope this means is that all future issues will go bounding down the well-paced, well-thought out path befitting this really original idea.

Where Freelance Blues wins is not in its depiction of a hate-my-job story. Where it wins is also not in its revisionist take on the genre where some lofty critic might quip “It’s great, because its not about the monsters, its just about this guy who has a crappy job.” What’s great about Freelance Blues is that it is about the monsters, it is about a crappy job, just as much as it is about a guy trying to put his sisters through school. It’s about one well-thought-out guy and his well-constructed surroundings. Spoilers at the back of the book repeatedly allude to Lance’s strange destiny to always work for these occult department heads, and the series drapes itself in a tone that is as much fantasy as it is slice-of-life. Freelance Blues doesn’t succeed by reinventing the genre, but rather carving out its own specific niche.

I met Ian Daffern and Mike Leone at a Small Press Book Fair, pressed back to back down an isle of wordsmith-hucksters all trying to share their wares. We got to talking about the future of the medium and when I asked Ian if they had a facebook, or a twitter, or anything to raise awareness, he offered the very simple comment (paraphrased here): “You know, we don’t really have time for it. You can either do that, or work on new stories, and its hard to do both. Working on this is the most important thing right now.” They continue to release new issues and do something fun, and interesting, that comes from a long decade of planning and dreaming. Talk about work ethics.