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.

My Scottish Stash (Of Independent comics)

If you read my previous post you’ll be aware that I recently took a bit of a break from my usual routine and ran a half marathon in Edinburgh Scotland. Whilst in that rainy, tourist packed city I managed to find a hidden away comic book shop-
http://www.yelp.co.uk/biz/deadhead-comics-edinburgh
I took a lucky dip and selected five locally produced comic books. Here’s what I picked up, a quick description of the book and whether or not I thought it was any good, or not.

Title: The Steamin’ Headmaster
Publisher: UK Comics Creative Limited
Website: http://www.comicsy.co.uk/rapidcomics/store/products/the-steamin-head-master/

A book about a drunk Glaswegian headmaster who gets kicked out of his house by his rightfully angry wife and ends up living a drunken bachelors life, of sorts, at the school. Whilst messing around in various parts of the school in his underpants and swinging a bottle of booze around his head he comes across his equally strange science teacher buddy and together they hatch a plan to do some crazy sci-fi experiment involving a disgraced former colleague and a millipede. The book doesn’t quite work, perhaps unsure as to whether or not it’s a comedy, horror or serious look at the moral implications of genetic manipulation between man and animal. The first half is fun, but the conclusion is a bit of a let-down, packing too much into a short number of pages and ending with a silly panel of a giant millipede that left me feeling a bit confused. My lasting impression of the book is of a good idea that got a bit lost in translation. It started off fun, got a bit weird and ended up a bit of a mess. Rating 5/10

Title: Saltire
Publisher: Diamondsteel Comics Ltd
Website: http://www.diamondsteelcomics.com/

I was looking forward to this one, having heard about it on various comic book websites. However, after reading the book I was a bit disappointed with it. The story follows Roman era Scots battling the invading Roman legions, and there’s not much to it at all. Saltire is a superhero/God and he helps the locals fight against the Romans, and that’s about it really. I found it to be a bit childish, shallow and not very rewarding. The art was not bad, but there was a tone of seriousness to it that was a bit po-faced and severely lacking in fun. That’s okay sometimes, but there wasn’t enough meat in the story to justify the serious tone, and by the end of it all I was getting a bit bored with the silly, largely undeveloped characters. I was a bit upset by this book. I thought it would be great, but it wasn’t even good. Rating: 5/10

Title: Maximum Alan
Publisher: Black Hearted Press
Website: http://blackheartedpress.tictail.com/product/maximum-alan-1

This one looked like a lot of fun. The front cover is designed to look like a Watchmen comic, and it appears to be offering a cutting piss take of all things Alan Moore related. What I actually got was an amateurishly drawn joke stretched way to thin, loads of inside jokes about comics that even I didn’t understand and a silly plot that got a bit tiresome half way through the book. This book was certainly bizarre (as is claimed by David Lloyd on the front cover) but it wasn’t that funny, and not half as good as I wanted it to be. Rating: 4/10

Title: The Freedom Collective
Publisher: Rough Cut Comics
Website: http://www.roughcut-comics.com/pages/frames.htmlhttp://www.roughcut-comics.com/pages/frames.html

This one is a lot of fun, taking the piss out all of those old American comics of the 1960’s anti communist era that portrayed everything Soviet as bad, and everything American as good. The book comes from a Kremlin perspective, so everything communist is good, and everything capitalist is bad. It’s a good idea, and there’s a lot of mileage to be had from reversing western propaganda and showing how it might work if the other side uses the same, simplistic and deceitful tactics to deceive their own populace. The book plays it for laughs and there are underlying assumptions to be wary of, but there are moments when it gets it right, in particular the panels that show a large mountain of money flowing underneath the White House, and the portrayal of the US president as a Mafia boss, which is closer to the truth than a lot of people would like to admit, even to themselves.  Reading this book makes me long for a modern equivalent that tackles contemporary US propaganda, perhaps looking at what is happening in the Ukraine right now where the US has sponsored a coup to overthrow a democratically elected government, and how the US corporate media is misleading the American public about what has happened, what is happening, and who is responsible. Where’s that book? We certainly need it right now in this era of corporate mainstream media deceit and connivance with the rich and powerful.  This book however is all about the comic code era propaganda in American comics, not what’s happening in 2014. It’s a lot of fun, drawn very well and I’d fully recommend it to anybody reading this review. Rating: 8/10

Title: Laptop Guy
Publisher: Black Hearted Press
Website: http://blackheartedpress.com/comics/laptop-guy/

This book is undoubtedly my favourite of the five books I picked up during my time in Edinburgh. The plot follows an eternally optimistic, yet obviously doomed, comic book writer as he takes time off from his McJob to come up with the big idea that is going to make him the next big thing in the world of comics. Things are looking pretty bleak (Sherlock Bones anyone?) but then a work colleague horribly mutilates himself as a result of his own doomed attempts at artistic creativity, and the amazing Laptop Guy is born. This book is absolutely hilarious. It’s the kind of book that leaves you properly laughing out loud, as opposed to typing LOL at your own half asset attempts at humour on facebook. The art, in particular the facials of the hapless comic book creator himself, is perfect and furthers a sense of the ridiculous that makes this book an absolute riot. Check out that cover. Check out that stupidly optimistic face, surrounded by his ridiculous creation. This book is awesome. It’s probably the funniest comic book I’ve read in a long, long time and it was well worth going all the way to Scotland and running a half marathon (in the rain) to get my hands on it.  Check out the website, and get a copy for yourself. You won’t regret it. Rating 10/10