Jessica Farm: Volume One

The comic book field can be known for a lot of things, but longevity can be overlooked by some. Recently, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley set a high mark collaborating on 110 issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, surpassing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s 102 issue run on Fantastic Four. Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier did 120 issues on Groo the Wanderer for Marvel Comics' Epic imprint of creator-owned comics. On the independent comics side, Dave Sim wrote and drew Cerebus for 300 issues over the course of three decades.

Josh Simmons has a similar goal. He plans to work on Jessica Farm until he has a 600-page story, at the rate of one page per month. The first volume (Fantagraphics, $14.95) covers January 2000 through December 2007, with future editions to be put out every eight years until the conclusion in 2050.

So far, one word can describe the first steps of Simmons’ saga: odd. It’s an interesting sort of odd, even if there doesn’t seem to be a solid understand on what is real in this particular universe. At first glance, Jessica seems to merely be a woman-child with an imagination in overdrive, perhaps brought out by an abusive father. She knows all sorts of characters: a talking monkey on her nightstand, a miniature band that plays in her soapdish, a gladiator/warrior-type whom Jessica has been very intimate with . . . and those are merely the tip of the iceberg. But when Jessica gets attacked by a particularly nasty creature, her grandparents send her off on a quest, indicating that this might not all be in her head, up to and including “Gramps” and the lucky chicken bone wedged in his beard.

Given that Simmons works one page per month, the art is pretty good. Jessica herself can be seen as a wide-eyed ingenue and a sexual being within pages of each other. Simmons also plays to his strengths by placing scenes in near-darkness, something he worked to near-perfection in his first full-length graphic novel, House. The bizarre characters vary in their odd forms, up to and including Jessica’s companion in the last part of the volume, who spices up her soup in a way that some people wouldn’t approve of. Needless to say, the overall tone of the art gives credence to the “Alice In Wonderland on crystal meth” blurb in the promotional text.

In the end – or should that be the beginning? – Jessica Farm is a good start to what may be a great story. Whether the second volume will be worth the wait when it’s published in 2016 remains to be seen.

-Jason Borelli