Jeff the Land Shark #1 // Review
It’s a sunny day. Jeff is hanging out in a park on Bleecker Street. It’s a nice, little space right across from 177A. Of course...that means that it’s right across the street from Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. No one in their right mind would want to go in there when the doctor wasn’t in...but Jeff happens to be an adorable, little land shark created by an organism designed only for killing. So what’s the worst that could happen? The cute, little land shark finds out in Jeff the Land Shark #1. Writer Kelly Thompson continues a fun, little relationship with Jeff in an issue drawn to page and panel by Tokitokoro.
There’s lots of potential danger for Jeff to have to deal with. It doesn’t help that he’s being followed around (and taunted) by a pair of talking snakes named Anton and Aleister. Naturally, he’s going to be distracted. Naturally he’s going to run into a particularly awful magical artifact. And so it’s only a matter of time before he loses his shadow. Now he’s got to chase after it and find some way to defeat it. Given Jeff’s luck, it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to run into some form of help somewhere along the line.
Jeff works really well in little comical micro-narratives. Here Thompson is giving the little shark plenty of room for his own feature-length story and it’s working-out pretty well. The issue is that there really isn’t a whole lot going on beyond the surface of the story, so the narrative leans-in really, really heavily on the art to find its appeal. This isn’t bad in and of itself, but it IS difficult for any narrative to focus itself so squarely on a nonverbal title character. So it’s goin to be weird, but the first issue is fun.
Tokitokoro finds the cute in Jeff from a variety of different angles. As always, the little shark finds himself in over his head in dealing with something that’s considerably bigger than he is. In the past, Guruhiru has a much more dynamic approach to Jeff in the infinity comic book online, bt Tokitokoro does a good job of taking a slightly different tack with everyone’s favorite little Marvel mascot. The energy and momentum of the story maintain from beginning to end and there are some fairly dazzling effects hittin the page tthoughout the issue.
There’s no question that there’s room for Jeff on a whole bunch of different platforms in a whole bunch of different formats. The more traditional superhero adventure approach might not fit the little land shark quite so perfectly in the very first issue of the new series, but Thompson has a solidly interesting story to tell and she’s got tremendously fun storytelling skills. It’s just going to take a little while for Jeff to find his feet in the rhythm of a more traditional sort of contemporary comic book narrative format. It’s only a matter of time.
