Laptop Guy- Tapping into the vein of cultural alienation and thwarted ambition first opened by Generation 'Spaced''

Get Laptop Guy here:
http://blackheartedpress.com/titles-2/

Interview with Laptop Guy artist Sha Nazir:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv6G9Du78DM



It was during my three-day half marathon sojourn in Edinburgh Scotland last year that I discovered the utterly wacky, yet painfully realistic comic book called ‘Laptop Guy.’ I found the book in an atmospheric, wonderfully creepy and heroically hanging on in the face of corporate hegemony comic book shop called ‘Deadhead comics.’

Laptop Guy was a comic book that looked a bit sad, a bit lonely, and a bit ordinary next to all of the steroid enhanced superhero nonsense books that looked imperiously down upon it from their lofty positions on the adjourning shelves.

But there’s a truth in sadness, and the book radiated a rare beam of truth amongst the army recruitment pamphlets and Marxist social justice warrior nonsense coming from the corporate powerhouses that dominate the comic book industry. It called to me, and somehow, I knew it would be good before I had even read it.

When I did actually read the book I laughed my ass off, then read it again trying to figure out what was so good about it, why it managed to do something that other comic books just weren’t doing for me. It’s a question that I put to the back of my mind for a while, but now after reading issues two and three of the series, I think that I’ve managed to nail down just why it works, and why it’s such an absolutely (rare) fantastic comic book.

Firstly, it’s about a guy who seems real. It’s about a guy we can relate to because we all know him. Actually rather than knowing him, we might actually BE HIM. This guy (Sha) is working a crappy McJob, despite being smart and wanting to find something in life that’s actually worth doing rather than acting like a cog in a corporate machine. His completely ridiculous, self-deluded life-plan is to write and draw a comic book that everybody will love, and by doing so he will escape from the crappy life and even crappier job that is slowly draining the life force from his very soul.

That’s where ‘Laptop Guy’ comes into it. Laptop Guy is the creative lifeline that Sha hopes will help him to escape from his McJob forever. However, this character is so ridiculous, so ludicrous, so doomed to fail that poor old Sha seems to have no hope, no chance or escaping the greasy embrace of his McJob whatsoever.

So, will this wacky creation known as 'Laptop Guy' help Sha escape his life of drudgery, or will the failure of his creative masterpiece spiral him into mental illness and life-long depression? Throw-in the planning of his best friends upcoming stag-do and a seriously weird co-worker and you have yourself a comic-book that avoids the cloaks, loads on the funny, and actually has something to say about life in the UK today.

How can you not identify with this guy? This guy is everybody I went to university with. He’s the generation that is overqualified and underemployed. A generation that was lied to, ate up the lie like a hungry, yet overly obedient doggy, and then found out that the food was crappy and is now giving them the s***s. That’s my generation, the duped generation, and I’m finally seeing it in a comic book.

The character of Sha is of course a comedic representation of real life tragedy. He’s not supposed to be a flesh and blood character that will leave you wailing in despair. He’s a character designed to make you laugh, and what makes him really work is the artwork by artist Sha Nazir.

Nazir draws him as a nervous, deluded, unhappy, incompetent twit but there’s a huge likeability factor about the way he is drawn, and despite all of his his flaws he’s a deeply sympathetic character. Yes, he’s fictional, but the character traits and flaws resonate deeply. He’s a comedy character, but there’s something very real about him as well. I see him in my generation, and yes, I see him in myself.

Laptop Guy reminds me very much of that old television show with Simon Pegg, the show where he plays a dorky wannabe living in a flat and dreaming about making it big in the world of geeks and comic books. Spaced, that was the name of it. A show that sparkled with creative energy and a feeling that it was tapping into something new, tapping into something that was being ignored by the cultural texts of it’s time.

Spaced was a show that concluded it’s run in 2001. That’s a long, long fourteen years ago now, so don’t you think it’s about time that the vein was tapped into again? I do, and that’s what Laptop Guy is doing, tapping into the vein of bubbling, lost generation creativity that is being squandered in McJobs and rejection letter after rejection letter before unexpected pregnancies and middle-life compromise combines to crush the creativity all-together.

Laptop Guy is, at its very core, a very funny comic book. It makes me laugh, makes me feel good and makes me feel that there is at least somebody out there (in Scotland) who gets it, and has the ability to transfer that ‘it’ into an entertaining contemporary comic book. Could writer Jack Lothian and artist Sha Nazir be the new Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson of our post Snowden times? That’s quite a question to ask, but going on what I am reading here in LapTop Guy the comparison isn’t quite as out there as you might think.

The vein opened by Pegg, Stevenson and co in the late 1990’s is still good, and when I read Laptop Guy in 2015 I get the sense that something big could be starting to take off here. The smart comedy vein of geek culture alienation and thwarted ambition has plenty of mileage left in it yet, and if you want to see it being tapped into again, then Laptop Guy is a comic book that will be right up your geeky, lonely, run-down comic book store alley.