“A telephone survey says that 51 percent of college students drink until they pass out at least once a month. The other 49 percent didn’t answer the phone.” - Craig Kilborn

Rating:

This week’s review is ‘Dead Days’ by John Rios. It’s about two college roommates. They do the sorts of things you’d expect from typical middle-class north american twenty-somethings. They eat junk food, they play video games, they drink beer, they avoid work, they try and date women, often unsuccessfully.

This comic has been online since 2004 according to the archive. According the the FAQ, Rios started drawing Dead Days for the college paper when he was in college in 2001. He has since graduated (class of ‘04) but keeps doing the comic for his loyal community of readers because he loves cartooning. That’s an impressive achievement. It’s also a very looong archive. I didn’t manage to get through the whole thing, but I swooped down and sampled from various periods in the strip’s history.

It reads very much like a print comic strip. I can see this in a college paper, and it would be head-and-shoulders above the majority of comics in that market. The art is very professional. The character designs are solid. All-in-all, a very well-done little strip. There’s one big problem for me. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even break a smile. I read a lot of these, just to make sure I wasn’t reading a dry period or something. But, no. It was exactly as funny as Garfield. I like the drawings, but the fact that it’s black and white doesn’t help matters. Again, if you consider this to be a printed strip, then the B&W makes sense. But even Garfield did colour strips in the Sunday edition.

I’m glad that the comic has a loyal following, and I’m sure it would do well in any college paper. It’s all about the context, I think. If I was sitting at a bus stop, and I was looking for something to read, I might snicker at one of these strips. But sitting at my computer, where I have access to such a wide variety of comics, all competing for my eyeballs, Dead Days doesn’t hold its own. I’m not a big follower of gag strips anyways, even when they do make me laugh. Sinfest, Unstoppable, XKCD, and Perry Bible Fellowship come to mind as examples of strips I check in on every now and then.

I would have found this hilarious when I was younger. Jim Davis does very well with Garfield. I bought up all the Garfield collections when I was in Jr. High School. I read them until they were dog-eared. I memorized all the jokes, and told them to my friends. The subject matter of Dead Days is a bit more ‘mature’ what with the sexual and alcohol references, but the gags are about the same.

‘Dead Days’
by John Rios
reviewed by Crackwalker
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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