The Pogostick

    (Fantagraphics)
™ and © Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Small-press fans might already be familiar with the individual works of Columbia and Persoff, but their joint effort yields a comic book nothing like their previous stories. Columbia’s character, Audrey Grinfield, is an unhappy, disgruntled worker at a design company, where he’s barely the tiniest cog in the giant corporate wheel.

Grinfield has a naive, insane, and downright comic detachment from reality, like a dark version of Mike Judge’s Milton. Grinfield somehow manages to trudge through the real world while living in his own; his world is one in which he believes that all food in the company refrigerator is placed there for his consumption and that the names attached to each container are vain attempts to achieve grateful recognition. After embarrassing himself at work one day, he commits himself to a mental institution, solely to avoid having to face his coworkers again. The irony is he has no idea that he might actually be insane.

Laughs are largely generated by shame and pity, like those Chris Ware elicits in his Jimmy Corrigan stories. Persoff’s art looks like a pseudo-Picasso cut-and-paste style collage, with a kind of two-dimensional quality that’s oddly fitting to Grinfield’s flat and featureless personality, and in spots it’s a bit too reminiscent of Ware’s draftsman-like precision.

But this is a different and promising take on the life of a disgruntled office worker, and future issues can’t come soon enough.

— Jim Johnson / Comics Buyer‘s Guide’s Reading Room
Jump to issue:
  NotesWriterArtist
#1

February, 2003
Cover Price: $4.95
2 copies available from $124.99 		Al ColumbiaEthan Persoff
#2

December, 2003
Cover Price: $4.95
3 copies available from $5.00 		Al ColumbiaEthan Persoff