It’s a new dawn for Marvel Comics, as print readers were able to get their hands on the first hard copies of this week It’s Jeff! one of the breakthrough successes of Marvel’s infinite scroll comics, available exclusively through the Marvel Unlimited subscription service.
If you didn’t to have a Marvel Unlimited subscription and you wanted to get a bunch of Jeff, you were out of luck until this week, when the first print issue featuring Jeff’s adventures hit comic stores.
Who is Jeff? Kelley Thompson introduced him in the pages of West Coast Avengers, where he charmed the audience as Gwenpool’s pet. When that series ended, she brought him to deadpool, where he once again enchanted the audience. And finally, last fall, Thompson teamed up with the artists known as Gurihiru for It’s Jeffa series of silent comedy shorts featuring Jeff doing cute things in the Marvel Comics setting.
So, of course, this baby land shark has an origin story. Don’t look a cool shark in the continuity mouth: he’s cute, he’s a shark, he’s got legs, he’s got low-stakes adventures, and everyone loves him. It’s not complicated. It’s Jeff.
What else is happening in the pages of our favorite comics? We’ll tell you. Welcome to Monday Funnies, Polygon’s weekly list of the books our comics editor liked last week. It’s part society pages about superhero lives, part reading advice, part “check out this cool art.” There may be some spoilers. There may not be enough context. But there will be great comics. (And if you missed the latest edition, read this.)
Image: Kelly Thompson, Gurihiru/Marvel Comics
It’s Jeff! stories are simple: Jeff gets into some antics and finds a fun way out of it. There is no particular theme: one day he is sledding with superheroes, the next day he is seemingly charming tourists visiting the tulip fields of the Netherlands. Writer Thompson keeps the Sunday Funnies stories simple, while Gurihiru delivers their ever-charming art. Again, it’s simple, but there’s just no downside.
Image: Tini Howard, Sweeney Boo/DC Comics
Solidarity with these assassins! Stand up for your rights! UNITE THE GOONS OF THE WORLD.
Image: Leah Williams, Marguerite Sauvage/DC Comics
Action comics is both DC’s main plot Superman book these days And an anthology series, with multiple backups following the main story. One of these backups, writer Leah Williams and artist Marguerite Sauvage’s “Head Like a Hole,” is so mesmerizing I wish it was its own mini or continuous. The creators wrestle with the dragon to figure out how to fit Power Girl – with her eternally rocky place in DC continuity – into the new status quo of the Superfamily.
The concept: Because of reasonsPower Girl has developed some quirky new psychic powers, and combined with the psychological expertise and psynic powers of the Teen Titans’ Omen, they team up for a psychotherapy practice where, as Omen guides patients through talk therapy, Power Girl sends astral projections into their heads to beat mental manifestations of their trauma, insecurities and fears, allowing them to beat and identify what they might not otherwise be able to recognize.
It’s a twist a very common trope in modern Serious Superhero Stories – a character who attends talk therapy – but with a creative visual/action element and a narrow character focus that keeps it from being taken over by weirdness. Sauvage’s trippy mental landscapes feel boundless and floaty, which helps to understand that these are all metaphors.
Hey, DC, give these characters their own book!