30 days of comics I love #27: He has slept the whole night through.

The Pogostick #1 

by Al Columbia and Ethan Persoff 

There were only two issues of this before it was abandoned by its creators, so it's a really a fragment of a comic, but I always find something slightly appealing about the unrealized possibility of comics that flame out so fast.

Al Columbia, of course, has some experience with grand stories being cut short, after his involvement with the Big Numbers saga, but artist Ethan Persoff has only done a tiny handful of printed comics as far as I can see, with most of his work in the 21 years since this was published by Fantagraphics going out online.

But while though there were only two issues of this particular title, they can still be enjoyed in their own merits. This is partly because Persoff's clipart style is easy to read, with plenty of slightly unusual art choices giving it an unreality. 

And it's also because it's another comic about an absolute weirdo trying and failing to get by in modern society. You don't need a thick, hefty collected edition to get this across, not when you can do it with two tiny issues.

It's also has a wicked sense of humour, the reason Audrey has been moved to the night shift is cruel and blatant, but Audrey's blissful unawareness of having his penis showing is deathly funny, and the way he misinterprets the way things work with the communal office refrigerator is also some black shit, man.

And it also comes with an existentially troubling undercurrent of awkwardness, with his poor co-workers blankly reacting to Audrey's issues, as inhuman as anything else in a modern office environment. A good, sharp shock in the finest alt-comic tradition of the times, even down to its truncated life.