Bouncing In Many DIrections: The Bounce #1 Review

When left to his own devices on creator-owned material, writer Joe Casey produces comics that are, in the language of critics, some pretty fucked-up shit.

Be it Automatic Kafka or Butcher Baker: The Righteous Maker,  Casey seems to like to traffic in higher-concept superhero stories, loaded with sex, drugs, psychedelia and other stuff that you won’t normally find in a standard superhero story. Like robots with existential malaise using drugs to find meaning in an empty life. Or a dude in a truck killing all comers and fucking anything that walks, moves or crawls. And no matter what, at some point you will find yourself reading and muttering, “Just what in the hell is goning on here?”

Welcome to The Bounce. A comic story that, in 20 short story pages, features not only superhero action, but copious drug use, cop murder, interdimensional travel, and government funded quasi-religious partical experimentation to fracture the nature of reality.

So as is often true to form on a Casey book, I really have no fucking idea what is going on. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t enough good stuff here to stop me from wanting to find out.

Meet Jasper Jenkins: a raving pothead (we know this, as the very first panel of the book is a splash of him ripping off a bong so big it has its own area code. Which is “oh-oh-oh,” if you get my drift), who, as you can probably tell by his alliterative name, spends some of his time as The Bounce: a superhero whose secret power is… well, bouncing. Justin sees a news report that the Chief of Police has been taken hostage, so Justin puts down his bong and goes into action against supervillain The Crunch, utterly failing to save the Chief but learning that there are possibly many people with new powers running around the city. Meanwhile, we meet an Assistant DA who is committed to stopping the masks so long as the activity doesn’t get in the way of his Vicodin habit, and a spy running a military and quasi-religious effort to pierce the “veil of reality” using something that looks a lot like the Stargate from, well, Stargate. Cut back to Justin, who is attempting to score some kind of new drug in a bar, only to find that it’s not the kind that you get in a baggie, and winding up someplace strange where someone appears to be waiting for him…

Follow that? Yeah, me neither, not so much. There’s a lot going on in this issue, almost all of it setup for whatever Casey has in mind for the greater goals of the story, but that means there’s a lot here that we don’t get a ton of clarification on. For example, we know Justin likes weed, and we know that he has superpowers and uses them apparently as a hero (if not a very good one – again, he doesn’t stop the Chief from getting killed), but that’s about all we really know. Similarly, we get the implication that the emergence of powers is a new thing in this world, which is potentially an interesting long terms story, but that’s all we get here.

All in all, we get the glimpses of no less than five different stories here, any of which could be a pretty cool comic book in and of itself – what’s it like, being a broken-down DA in a world of superpowers run amok? Can you tell me about this drug that sends people to other dimensions? Why is this unrepentent stoner acting like a superhero anyway? Hell, in the handful of times I’ve smoked pot, my idea of an adventure was figuring out what to eat, because eveyone I know who smokes brings Doritos, and I hate Doritos. Either that, or they want to go to Taco Bell, and their damn tacos? Fucking Doritos. But that’s not the point.

The point is: there are a bunch of potentially good stories going on in The Bounce #1, but none of them are fleshed out enough to to be a real grabber… but they’re all interesting enough to see how any of them individually play out. So while we have a whole bunch of only vaguely connected elevator pitch stories going on here, there’s enough interesting concepts to bring readers into future issues… but there sure as hell isn’t a complete story, or even character arc, to make this individual issue feel like you’re getting the full bang for your comic dollar. There are a lot of seeds of good stories, but this issue doesn’t tell really any of them yet.

David Messina’s art is really pretty interesting. There are times where he goes kinda simply and cartoony, like toward the end when Bounce finds himself in a very strange place. And yet during the bulk of the story, his work is fine-lined, detailed and realistic, with painted-looking colors that give things an extra feeling of depth. And yet during the superhero battle, Messing goes full-90s style, with big muscles, textured, raised masks, and even Doomsday-style bone ridges for The Crunch. Hell, even The Bounce has a pose where he’s going full Spider-Man via Todd McFarlane. The differences in visuals drive home that we’re really looking at a bunch of different stories here, and works damn well for a story going in as many directions as this one is.

So ultimately, how well you respond to The Bounce #1 will depend on what you want from your superhero comics. If it’s a bunch of action, well, this issue has one small-scale scene of tights-n’-fights, but that’s about it. If it’s heroes and villains with clear motivations, well, we have a hero, but we don’t know what motivates him beyond words like “Kush” and “Resin”. But if you’re looking for Big Idea comics that will pay off eventually for an investment of time today, this comics looks – looks, since there’s just the germs of four or five ideas here, with no idea when or how they’re gonna pay off – like a book you’ll go for.