I suspect there are few people out there who’ve not worked retail at some point of their lives. And let’s face it; retail jobs are wretched, soul-stealing jobs designed to crush the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of our youth. So I suppose it’s inevitable that slice-of-life webcomics focusing on retail work (or more specifically, the young men and women who are bored to tears in those jobs) would arise from them. While Between Failures may not precisely show the realities of the retail trade, it does capture the spirit of it (much like the movie “Clerks,” which BF pays homage to in some ways) through a mixture of dark humor, cynicism, and the occasional bit of drama.

Since any webcomic that focused on the mundanity of retail work would quickly put its readers to sleep and possibly result in multiple recursions of post traumatic stress syndrome and a wave of store shootings from former employees driven insane from suppressed memories of the utter tedium of retail work, BT instead focuses on the employees who work for a barely-solvent chain store, and their interactions with one another. It is this banter between employees and the shifting relations between them that drives much of BF and makes it so enjoyable to read.

As BF is a slice-of-life comic, it has more of an ensemble cast rather than focusing on any one character as its protagonist. Thomas, the floor manager and chief snarky bastard of the comic, comes across at times as a primary protagonist, but he willingly passes the baton off to his coworkers, and each member of the cast has had his or her moment to shine in the spotlight. Most of them have done so quite well (though it helps that most of the cast are quite likable and distinctive) when the comic focuses on them; there is a bit of chemistry between the characters, and this helps drive the comic as a whole.

One interesting aspect of the comic lies with its initial use of black and white art, and its shift to color. I don’t know if the cartoonist had this in mind when he first started the comic, but J.T.’s shift of the art from black and white to color was quite artistically done and works both metaphorically and as a storytelling device. I won’t spoil it for you, but the moment color comes into the comic is a climactic moment for the comic as a whole; later updates have included black and white for flashback scenes, and I can easily see black and white crop back into the story for dramatic purposes.

Another thing you’ll soon realize is that much of the cast seems addicted to movie quotes. This is somewhat understandable, as one of the characters is a huge movie fan who loves it when her coworkers try to stump her with movie quotes (and she’s never been stumped once, so far). I know that I have a tendency to start using movie quotes myself when I’ve been exposed to them, so I suspect the cat’s tendency to overuse movie quotes could just be cultural contamination from their coworker. Fortunately, the abundance of quotes is more amusing than annoying.

On the whole, Between Failures is a humorous (if at times darkly cynical) comic. That’s not to say there are not dramatic aspects to the existential storyline; just as “drama” tends to creep into any retail setting, so too does it rear its head in BF. Fortunately, J.T. has managed to blend the two so that even during the more dramatic moments of the story, touches of BF’s dark humor show through. But it is the sense of “family” that exists between these coworkers that truly helps BF shine, and what kept me reading despite the flashbacks to my own dark days in retail. (No retail or grocery stores were harmed in the writing of this review.)