4 out of 5

You’re having a great day!  …Until your stomach takes revenge and waylays you upon the toilet, pooping out the grossest noises and sounds and reality reminding you of it’s wicked sense of humor.  This godawful relatable experience – captured concisely and perfectly in ‘New Life’ in Ted May’s Men’s Feelings #1 – is a pretty good encapsulation of what May taps into in these two issues, mini (5″ x 7″-ish) comics produced between other projects – at least as noted in book one – and collected, working together thematically pretty darn well.  May has a comfortable narrative style that nips at slice-of-life indie stuff but veers just far enough into weird to make it exponentially more inventive and rewarding.  The strips in Men’s Feelings, in particular, display an appreciated ‘get-in get-out’ sensibility, taking his snapshot scenes just up to their punchline and then moving on.  Strung together as a series of vignettes, May’s clean linework creating an incredible range of characters in each 30+ page book, it creates a nice series of beats, effective and humorous because of that aforementioned relatability, even when it’s expressed in a suddenly surreal fashion, like a skipped stone causing a speedboat to explode.

Book one has a stated theme of ‘tears and toilets’ – which is funny in itself; book two, though mining the same feelings (manly feelings) of loserdom that might cause us to cry on a toilet, feels a bit less connected, some of the strips reading more like straight gags.  It’s the one I read first, and what got me interested in reading more of May, but reading the books back to back the difference is apparent.  (To be fair, these were collected two years apart, and ‘collected’ connotes what it does: these might have been doodles done without the intention of putting them together.)

Indie comics produced a pretty wide range of creators wanting to give us their own humble takes on what life is like.  To me, this often amounts to indulgent reads that add poetry and meaning and tragedy in where there really isn’t any.  Men’s Feelings reinstates the randomness, and irony, of existence, creator Ted May’s brain limber enough to swing into weirder territory when it best serves his ideas.