4 out of 5

‘Fleep’ is probably the most concise way to figure out if you’ll like Jason Shiga’s works or not.  His simplistic art style has remained more or less the same, and the story has his doses of math and dark humor and slightly confusing plot points that are common across most of his stuff.

Anyway, here’s my recent awesome summary I blurbed out to the comic shop dude recently when he asked me if I was reading anything good – I’m currently reading Shiga’s Demon, which is awesome, but I started by asking if he was familiar with Jason, then mentioned Fleep and the following: It’s a math comic.  A man wakes up in a phone booth and uses math to figure out how he got there and where he is.

ENTHRALLED?

Yes, as I was saying this, I was well-aware I was leaving out some key plot points that might make this a bit more sensible:

“A man wakes up in a phone booth the outside of which is encased by concrete and he has no clear memory of how he got there and where he is.  The phone book is in a language he doesn’t recognize and the operator similarly seems to speak gibberish.  He uses math to figure out how he got there and where he is.”

It’s a bit better.  I was expecting the placating “…sounds interesting” response I got, either way.  But I’ll stand by the latter summary.  Shiga’s plotting style for Fleep is inevitably a bit forced, because he’s creating a locked room mystery with a few fantastic details, such as the gibberish language.  There’s also the staccato presentation, owing to this originally appearing as a newspaper strip (so some plot elements are repeated, while some A to B to C connections seem to be skipped entirely to keep puzzle > solution progress on pace).  And across most of Jason’s writing I’ll generally find a few panels where I can’t quite figure out what he’s talking about – or rather, I assume it’s about one thing but it’s actually about another.  I sense this is due to a lack of an editor (the idea is clear to Jason but not an outsider), but maybe he actually uses an editor and I’m just an idiot.

End result, though, is that I’ve reread Fleep countless times, along with all of Shiga’s stuff, and continue to have fun.  I love when a creator and their style of art and writing is so well intertwined that I truly can’t imagine it as working in any other way, and such is the case with Jason’s stuff – both the more mathy stuff like this and the more plotty stuff like Empire State.  What’s doubly fun is how Jason never rubs his puzzle solving in our face: he gives us enough context to maybe look up some equations or concepts if we want to get an idea of whether or not what he’s doing is possible (which he’s always convinced me it is), but it’s not so exhaustively applied that it bogs down the reading in any way.  You can zoom past it and just swallow it as MacGyver logic if that’s easier.  Just make sure you attribute credit to me when you explain Fleep to your friends using my initial summary.