1 out of 5

God dammit, Gerard.  I would brush “Trouble” off as just early work of young kids, but Jones stood by this stuff and recommended it during his DC heydays, so I was totes looking forward to getting my hands on it.  I have discovered that I like Gerard’s humorous, offbeat writing more than his straight dramatic or action stuff, so it seemed that a creator-owned humor series that lampooned the hero-genre would be a good place to find some yuks while Jones lets loose with his half-stupid, half-random, half-genius (half-too-many-halves) jokes.

But god damn, “The Trouble With Girls” starts with a great send-up in its first panel, then seems to somehow miss its own joke for seven long, boring, unfunny issues.  I kept thinking – okay, Jones and Jacobs have gotten the basic gags out of their system, now it’s going to settle into something much more subversive… but… no.  I guess I didn’t realize how many basic gags there are.

Here’s the pitch: Lester Girls is every suave action hero rolled into one.  He can’t take a step down the street without running into some terrorist group or another, firing missiles at him, sending assassins, and his house and cars and guard dogs are frequently blown up or killed in the name of the good fight.  When he turns on the lights, there’s always a supermodel in a slinky outfit, just raring to do kinky things.  The Trouble is… Lester just wants the usual life.  Kids, a Chevy, a frumpy wife, a crappy job.  He’d give anything for normality.  Our opening panel finds him on the “edge of his seat” (the toilet) reading Steinbeck… before getting attacked by one of this aforementioned groups.  The idea is no. doubt. RIFE with potential.  And yet… it’s as though Jones and Jacobs had too many other jokes in mind – some on topic, some not – to actually mine that potential.  Now don’t get me wrong, I used the word “lampoon” up there and, yeah, these chaps were National Lampoon writers, and this was an early effort, so I was expecting a fair share of sloppiness and meandering, but they can’t even settle on a personality for Girls, and they overplay the hero card into a complete “everything works out always” super-lucky card, which sort of takes out the parody of it and makes Lester into a superhuman Mr. Magoo or something – if his car blows up, a bus pulls up that happens to be going where he’s going; he goes on a picnic lunch and when the lunch is ruined, there happens to be a gourmet meal that becomes available for his consumption… I get the vibe they were trying to achieve, but while things start as a bit more “adult” version of The Tick, they just never develop the gag beyond what I’ve just explained, so you’ve read one panel, you’ve read ’em all.

Further ruining the focus is the sidestory of “Apache Dick,” which is a loose shtick involving a clan of men named something-something Dick (Eskimo Dick, Hawaiian Dick, etc.) who are all cultural stereotypes (sort of) and who also fit the action-hero-everything-is-perfect mold.  Various Dicks (womp) are mentioned, but half of our story focuses on Apache, as he makes his way to Girls from around the globe for some reason or another.  Now if “Trouble” purports to be about Girls – his name being in the title and all – why include this other character with essentially the same lifestyle?  You could say it’s for a comedic foil, to juxtapose someone who likes the life with someone who doesn’t, but Girls revels in his skills at the same time that he says he wants a normal life, and this isn’t done smoothly enough to make me feel like it was purposeful.  Even when the writing duo falls on the great idea of having Girls pursue a regular joe job, the storyline is dismissed after one or two panels, perhaps because they wanted to put in another dumb gag about something “crazy” turning into something fortunate for Lester.

I’m very forgiving of books if they can at least entertain.  I won’t even go into the art by Tim Hamilton here, because I understand it was probably a first or early effort, and there’s a lot of mayhem to predict, so we can forgive his proportions and angles being questionable fairly often – he gets a look for Girls down and commits most of the action understandably enough.  So that’s not the one star.  I don’t even think I had my hopes too high – Gerard hasn’t really done something perfect to my eyes, it’s always a little off, a little sloppy.  But to take such a great pitch and not even make me smile – no fucking lie – is a crime.  I bought this in a trade.  Had I been buying the single issues at the time, I wonder if I would’ve been wowed by the purposeful stereotyping and sex references… but I don’t think so, since there was already plenty of stuff in the underground doing it with much more forceful gusto.  Jones was born in ’57, Jacobs in ’55, making them both well beyond college by the time Girls was published.  And yet the book reads like college kids who think they’re making their big masterpiece when it really needs an outside eye to step in and ask what the point is.  It can’t even get points for being energetic because it never ramps up beyond its one main gag.

Whatever.  Some historian can explain to me the importance of this… I still seek to flesh out my collection of Jones stuff, because his brain seems to be a good one, but I guess I have to hope whatever else I read isn’t as dissatisfying as ‘Girls,’ a series he’s evidently proud of.  (Sorry for this being Gerard focused, it was why I looked it up in the first place.)