Press Start and Fight
By JP Coovert
One Percent Press

This year, JP Coovert is going to marry his sweetheart Jacie who is patiently waiting for him in the Midwest while he finishes up his Graduate Degree at the Center for Cartooning Studies.

Oh, but first he has to find her.

After the couple talks about their future responsibilities in Press Start, JP gets sucked into a video game and Jacie is nowhere to be found.

JP has to collect all the slimes, defeat seven perilous challengers and kill his dark alter-ego before he can get Jacie back. In other words, he’s got a lot of fears to face and just a bit of growing up to do before this story comes to a close.

Press Start is the kind of comic you need to spend some time with. It’s personal, it’s fantasy and it’s JP at the top of his game, so to speak. The bookmaking is beautiful and so is the artwork. The two-color screen printed cover looks just right for the story. Inside the cover, printed on its opposite side, JP has drawn a pattern of little sad pictures of himself doing the things he loves, but obviously missing his lady all the while.

The art inside is black and white, no gray tones, and very reminiscent of JP’s notable comic series Simple Routines. In fact, all the real life scenes are set up in the same Simple Routines four-panel-per-page and straight line format. When the fantasy section overtakes the story and JP is sucked into video game mode, he begins to use brush stroked lines and areas of black. The movement of the characters radiates off the page and it feels like, finally, JP is able to have the freedom and conviction to draw a story that is both meaningful and fun. For a guy who has written almost strictly autobio up to this point, it looks and feels like a sigh of relief not to have the complications of reality barking at him to get things right.

And Fight, Press Start’s companion comic, is just a drawn-out fight between JP and his dark alter-ego, and it’s awesome for several reasons. One of my favorite Coovertisms is that he so frequently draws in perfect grids and straight panels, but in and Fight, the panels break away at key points and respond to the fight so that everything feels super action-packed.

I can’t believe this package is only selling for $5. It’s available online from One Percent Press and was first printed in October 2007.

-Sarah Morean