by Shaenon K. Garrity
If The Stiff doesn’t get much attention in the webcomics community,
maybe it’s because no one knows quite what to make of it. When the
series debuted in 2003 as one of the launch titles on Girlamatic.com,
creator Jason Thompson described it to Comic Book Resources as “a
manga-influenced romantic comedy (in the style of Maison Ikkoku, Video
Girl Ai, Futaba-kun Change or Love Hina)... It's also a horrendous,
gruesome horror story.”
A year later and over 150 pages in, The Stiff
continues to display a glaring lack of manga influence, romantic
comedy, or gruesome horror. The comic is also frequently billed as a “zombie romance,” despite an evident dearth of zombies. Just to
confuse the issue further, Thompson has concocted an obviously
fictional backstory for his opus, claiming that it’s an obscure
Japanese manga based on an even more obscure ancient Tibetan sutra.
And the whole thing looks even less explicable as part of the
Girlamatic lineup, slotted between upbeat comics about little kids,
cute bunnies, teenage girls, and female space bums, not to mention
genuine manga-style romantic comedies. Then again, something about The
Stiff feels right for Girlamatic. Baring its grim rictus on the front
page at least twice a week, sometimes more, it cleanses the palate like
the sting of wasabi in a mouthful of sweet sushi.
If The Stiff isn’t any of the many things it claims to be, what is it?
Tricky question. On the surface, it’s an achingly well-observed
piece
of fiction about uptight teenager Alistair Toth and his friends, all of
whom exist on the ragged fringes of high-school society: they’re the
goths, the gamers, the kids on the school newspaper and the yearbook
committee. Alistair is a bundle of bizarre quirks and neuroses:
obsessed with horror and gore, deeply uncomfortable about sex, he
claims to be “asexual” and is disgusted by what he perceives as the
sexism, immorality, and uncontrolled depravity of his male peers.
Control is important to Alistair. But his iron grip on himself loosens
when he develops his first crush, on a transfer student named Alice,
and begins lying, sneaking, and bending rules to get close to her.
These and other misadventures are viewed through the eyes of Alistair
and his friends Dan, a socially awkward would-be goth, and Jamie, a
shy, thoughtful girl studded with piercings, both of whom are in the
throes of their own painful romantic and sexual awakenings.
In its broad outline, this sounds plausibly like a romantic comedy.
In execution, it’s not. Thompson has a remarkable memory for
adolescence; his characters don’t sound like an adult’s version of
teenagers, but like bright, articulate people limited only by a lack of
mature experience. In a recent sequence, the school newspaper staff,
left unsupervised for a period, engages in inquisitive
pseudo-sophisticated talk about sex, then plays goofy pranks,
overturning desks and climbing out of windows. This behavior,
self-consciously adult one minute and giddily childish the next, rings
perfectly true. As Thompson’s art has developed, he’s learned to
capture the characters’ body language: Dan dangling from a chain-link
fence like an ornery schoolkid, Alistair hopping down a sidewalk,
bursting with pent-up teenage energy. The comic follows them through
their daily routines, listens in on their conversations, and reveals
nothing that could overtly be called horrific.
And yet something is off, somehow. Maybe it’s those unsettling
closeups of grotesque organic details: the inside of a mouth, a
half-eaten cafeteria lunch, the remains of a dissected frog in a
biology-lab sink. Maybe it’s the eyes: Thompson draws strange eyes at
the best of times, but his decision to give the adult characters and
animals blank, pupilless eyes is downright disturbing. There’s
definitely something peculiar about dream-girl Alice, who, as Jamie
learns, is hiding a puzzling secret. And Alistair has been slightly
askew ever since he hypnotized himself and made a solemn vow to do what
many a yearbook inscription advises: never change...
If The Stiff is a horror comic, it’s horror in the Lovecraftian sense,
the sense of a subtle wrongness creeping in at the edges of an
ostensibly normal world. Thompson certainly knows this brand of
horror. Before The Stiff, he was best known as a creator among H.P.
Lovecraft fans, many of whom admired his five-issue comics adaptation
of the Lovecraft novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Thompson
also self-published the one-shot Hyperborea, based on the work of
horror/fantasy writer Clark Ashton Smith.
After Dream-Quest, Thompson’s comics work dwindled as he focused on
his day job: editor for manga publisher Viz LLC. The year before The
Stiff launched on Girlamatic, Thompson was appointed editor-in-chief of
Viz’s new manga magazine, Shonen Jump. As Shonen Jump quickly rose to
its intended position as Viz’s flagship publication and the top-selling
manga magazine in America, Thompson found himself increasingly torn
between his burgeoning manga career and his creative work. Late in
2003, he stepped down as editor of Shonen Jump, massively scaled back
his workload, and took a part-time editorial position at Viz. As of
this writing, he spends half of each week editing such Viz titles as
Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragonball Z, and Bastard!, and the other half drawing The
Stiff.
I know this because I also work at Viz, and Jason Thompson is a friend
of mine. Watching The Stiff develop, and watching Jason develop as a
cartoonist along with it, has been a continuing inspiration. Over the
course of The Stiff, Thompson’s art, always obsessively detailed, has
grown cleaner and more graceful; he’s learning the value of strong,
simple lines and blocks of shadow. He now draws beautiful backgrounds
(something too many cartoonists never bother to learn) and
nicely-articulated figures, and is learning the vital craft of facial
expressions. His lettering has improved by leaps and bounds. And his
ear for dialogue is remarkable. Consider a typical exchange between
Dan and Alistair, watching videos late at night:
“Let me see what else I’ve got. You sure you don’t want ice cream?”
“Sorry, I don’t eat artificially flavored ice cream. Who wants that
stuff going into their body? Gross!”
“’Godzilla,’ ‘Gamera’... Hey, do you like Japanese girls?”
“That question’s sexist! ...I like Jewish girls better.”
The conversation feels natural and unscripted, yet at the same time it
conveys a weight of information about the characters: Dan’s
overeagerness to please and guileless sexual curiosity, Alistair’s
uptight self-righteousness and disgust toward anything involving sex or
the body. At the center of this throwaway exchange are buried the core
themes of The Stiff: fantasy horror versus real horror, airy ideals
versus the sloppy demands of the flesh. And it’s funny, too. This is
an amazing amount of work to accomplish in four breezy lines. This is
load-bearing dialogue.
My opinion, of course, may be colored by my friendship with the
creator. In my defense, I can say only this: before The Stiff, I could
not have imagined that Jason Thompson was capable of work on this
level. The Stiff is still rough around the edges: the careful,
detailed art could use a little more polish, especially in the faces,
and the relatively crude early installments, still finding their tone,
pale beside the much more accomplished and lively pages serialized now.
But it remains a remarkable and ambitious work.
Thompson plans for
The Stiff to run for some twenty chapters; he’s currently working on
Chapter Four. When and if The Stiff is completed, it will be massive,
surely one of the longest graphic novels online. Will we know what to
make of it by then? I hope so.
