Review - Jessica Farm by Josh Simmons
April 25th, 2008 John Posted in Comic Books, Reviews |
In Josh Simmons’ “Jessica Farm” a girl named Jessica Farm who lives on a farm wanders around a house filled with surreal creatures and psychological fury in an attempt to escape the wrath of her father on Christmas morning.
That’s a gross simplification of the story, which piles on the weird for weird’s sake incidents — a talking monkey figurine, a troll-like closet guardian, a tiny jazz band, and others — and mixes things up with a kind of juvenile sexuality, which includes an extended shower scene and a weird creature who sticks his testicles in people’s food to spice it up.
Unfortunately, these bits of surrealism don’t add up to much and part of the reason is the format. It’s Simmons’ plan to create a page a month of the story and then release a book each time he reaches 96 pages. This means that this current book was created from 2000 through 2007 and that the next book will not see the light of day until 2016?
The first problem there is that you’d think that seven years and 96 pages would be enough to give the reader something, anything, that resemble a plot or a progression — unfortunately, the book just seems like a series of weird events strung together. In that way, it’s all set-up, but with so little established that there’s no sense that the reader should expect anything further than what’s gone on before. In other words, there’s nothing resembling a story that grabs you and Simmons’ storytelling skills as demonstrated here aren’t so dynamic or depthful that you’ll forgive the lack of story just to see the mind at work.
The other problem is that it’s an awful large leap of faith to believe that most books would keep people hanging for eight years to read what happens next — it’s a gargantuan one when the story being stretched out is one that nothing really seems to happen of any logical consequence.
I appreciate what Simmons is attempting to do here, but in meeting the challenge, I don’t think the work rises above what it needs to be. Of course, further volumes on through the last in 2050 might indeed change my attitude about the whole venture and I could be taught a very valuable lesson about judging a story midstream. I just wish I felt Simmons had any more of an idea of where he is going than I do — taking seven years to essentially whistle dixie for 96 pages doesn’t give me hope. And I’m not so sure I’m going to be interested in enough in 2016 to try and change my mind.
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