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Jetcat Clubhouse
by Jay Stephens
(Oni P, $10.95, paperback, 104 pages, April 2003; ISBN: 1929998309.)
Since the early 1990s, Jay Stephens, a Canadian cartoonist  based
in Guelph, Ontario, has been producing comics imbued with a twisted
yet childlike imagination. His newest release, Jetcat Clubhouse,
continues the adventures of the characters from his 1999 collection
The Land of Nod Rockabye Book. These comics lovingly pastiche
the effervescent absurdity of Saturday morning television cartoons.
Melanie is an elementary schoolgirl who leads a double life as the
superhero Jetcat. Her friends include Tutenstein, an inept boy mummy
who is much too nice to follow through on his dreams of world domination,
Oddette, the richest little girl in the world and a junk-rock star to
boot, and Ploppy, an incontinent space monkey. Jetcat's arch-enemy is
the monstrous evil scientist Bela Kiss.
On one level, Jetcat Clubhouse works as straightforward children's
adventure, drawn in a style that evokes the economic versatility of
Charles Schulz, the colourful exuberance of Hanna-Barbera cartoons,
and the silliness of Harvey Comics like Richie Rich. In those
very influences, which hark back to the 1960s, lies a nostalgic hook
for adult readers. It's a wry nostalgia, though, with generous sprinklings
of postmodern irony.
In Jetcat Clubhouse, Stephens pokes fun of all the ridiculous
clichés of classic Saturday morning children's programming while
simultaneously indulging gleefully in those very conventions. He earnestly
shows how much pleasure lurks within his source material. And that's
how Stephens pulls off his delicate balancing act: despite all his sardonic
jabs, he never makes fun of the reader, for Stephens, too, loves the
material that he satirizes.
Jetcat Clubhouse is fully enjoyable either as zany kid superhero
fun or as ironic postmodern pop-culture artefact.
Originally published in The Montreal Gazette,
Saturday, 30 November 2002.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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