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Fleep: 06/28/18

Fleep

Fleep by Jason Shiga is a webcomic that had a brief print run. That's long over but the web comic is still up for anyone interested. Like all of his comics, it stars Jimmy in another impossible adventure.

In this story Jimmy wakes up inside a telephone booth in an otherwise completely dark space. The only things available to him are the phone book (in a language he doesn't understand) and a Russian to that language dictionary. At least with the Russian he recognizes it, even if he's not fluent.

In these forty-four pages, Jimmy has to figure out where he is, who he is, what happened, and how to escape. After reading Demon, I found this locked room adventure almost laughably plausible.

Reading through the comic, though, I was struck with the notion that maybe all these Jimmys are on the same timeline. In Fleep we don't see anyone but Jimmy, so how the rest of the world is populated is undefined. That got me to thinking. What if Empire State, the rather mundane almost love story is the start of Jimmy's adventures. Then he's driven by grief and later morbid curiosity and revenge in Demon to completely remake the world in his (and Sweatpea's) image. The world completely populated with now mortal clones of them would be in a bit of a fix. So what if the mad scientist in Meanwhile was trying to undo the mess that original Jimmy made? Fleep, meanwhile, could be a side story happening before the time travel choose your own adventure or concurrently with it.

Regardless, I like Shiga's stuff. It's always a little messed up and it certainly messes with your head as you read it. But in a good way.

Four stars

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