Metaphysical aspects aside, Blip is a slice-of-life comic where the mundane exists obliviously along side the surreal and supernatural. The comic’s protagonist, a young woman called “K.” by all her friends and associates, is oblivious to the ongoing conflict between the forces of Heaven and Hell over her life. Well, she’s oblivious on a conscious level at least; a fair ways into the comic we learn that K. knows the Devil, whom she calls “Uncle Luc” (and who in the comic is a very attractive and affable gentleman, showing courtesy to both his own minions and to his opponents among the angels) and was mentored by “Luc” in her dreams, being taught how to play instruments, draw, paint, and write. The forces of Heaven try to combat this by discouraging her artistic tendencies and ensuring her life is boring and nondescript. (And no, they apparently aren’t allowed to kill her. It’s against the rules.)

Needless to say, Blip does not ascribe to the notion that the Devil is evil. While it is revealed that he rebelled against God, he is not shown to be the metaspiritual boogyman of Christian mythos. Indeed, even the Devil seems to answers to someone… that being The Adversary, who (according to the Devil) is responsible for “ruining” K.’s life (even if it’s the angels who are doing the footwork). Likewise, we’ve not seen evidence that the comic is using the trope that “God is Evil.” An evil God wouldn’t care about rules and would do worse than ensure that a young woman’s life is uninteresting and uninspiring. While it’s not exactly a nice thing to do, it’s at worse a very vanilla evil.

Amusingly enough, K.’s life is replete with supernatural elements that she is unaware of. Of her two best female friends, one is actually a vampire, and the other a witch. A third former friend whom K. is antipathetic toward is a cyborg (and whose father is hinted at possibly being Dr. Frankenstein). And as I mentioned above, K.’s spiritual/dream mentor is the Devil. Interestingly, K.’s friends were unaware of K. being without destiny (or a “blip”) until the Devil tells K.’s vampire friend; needless to say, the knowledge that K. is anethema to God’s Plan is a considerable shock to them.

Despite the supernatural turmoil surrounding K., her life is fairly mundane with a boring job at a hospital’s medical records department, as well as the ongoing tediousness of K.’s life in general. Eventually she forms healthy relationship that the angels are unable to stop (thanks to the Devil’s minions distracting them until the roots of the relationship grew and the two started dating) at which point we finally catch a glimpse of K. being genuinely happy. Don’t get me wrong; the angels continue to throw monkey wrenches at K. and her relationship (including old exes for both K. and her boyfriend) and there are days which are full of suck. But that could be said for all people.

The mixture of supernatural and mundane elements works. Our frequent glimpses into K.’s life helps us care for a character who has the sort of life we can relate to, which helps anchor the more surreal elements and meta-conflict. What’s more, we end up cheering for someone who traditionally is considered a villain (though he is not necessarily a hero in this incarnation) except for his efforts to give one person a better life. And whether you enjoy a comic that has metaphysical elements that make you think or just enjoy a slice-of-life comic with a squeeze of supernatural lime, you’ll find Blip to be one comic you want to keep on your radar.

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.)

When I started reading the anthropomorphic comic Better Days (found thanks to a TV Tropes link), I had no idea of the ride that was waiting for me. The TV Tropes link seemed innocuous enough, and I’ve encountered teachers who let their beliefs bleed through into their teaching (I suspect many of us have). Unfortunately, those strips were the brief breath of levity in what was going to be a long and bumpy ride. BD has rape, tweenage sex (and that’s not a typo!), consensual incest between siblings (well, one instance that we know of), adultery (on more than one occasion), the depiction of armed military conflict, a man going into a mafia safe house and killing pretty much everyone there to save family, and more. If you’re easily offended, religious, or not conservative, you’re probably going to get offended by the content of the comic.

And yet, even with the growing Sueification of one of his main characters (Fisk) and the multiple injections of Drama in the comic (to the point that the mother once shouted “Is my life just a big lighting rod for drama!?” which I must admit I found quite amusing), there are some decent elements to the comic. For instance, when Sheila (the mother) was attacked and raped by an ex-boyfriend and her son (who was nine, and just starting to get his Sueification injections) went after the guy with a baseball bat, both Fisk and Sheila went into counseling afterward. Likewise, the incident of incest between Fisk and Lucy was intelligently done, and had long-lasting consequences, though perhaps not as severe as they could have been.

As for the adultery? Each time adultery occurs in the comic, divorce follows. Friendships are destroyed by it. Less realistically (perhaps) is how each incident results in a new stable relationship (Sheila ends up marrying the guy she slept with, though it takes a while for Fisk to forgive his eventual stepfather, and Elizabeth and Fisk end up together after she catches her new husband in bed with another woman… and possibly cheats on him in turn with Fisk). Likewise, while not technically adultery, when Lucy steals away a guy from his cheating girlfriend, that relationship ends up stable and happy. It’s a minor quibbling point, I know. The situation behind the adultery in the first story was logical, reasonable, and sad. The marriage wasn’t depicted as a healthy one, and the story itself was handled with considerable maturity. It’s just the end-result almost seems to say “adultery results in happily-ever-afters” which I’m sure was not the cartoonist’s intent.

Less forgivable is the “Sueification” of Fisk. He went from a “Crowning Moment of Awesome” in defending his mom from a rapist to James Bond (and I kid you not on this). The presentation of him fighting both in Desert Storm and in Bosnia were fairly well done, though the depiction of him in Ranger training fighting off a bunch of Marines in a training exercise was… pushing the boundaries. But once Fisk got recruited into a private intelligence agency to literally become a Bond-type… well, if you turn off your brain and go along for the ride, then you’ll probably enjoy it. Just… don’t think about it too much or you’ll start to find it annoying. Fortunately, outside of his initial recruitment into this corporate intelligence group and his taking out a bunch of Mafia (who admittedly were not expecting an ex-Ranger to invade with guns and grenades) to save a cousin they were using as a prostitute, we don’t see anything about his Bond activities. That’s likely for the best.

Amusingly enough, a couple years back cartoonist Jay Naylor pulled an April Fool’s prank by stating he was going to recast the crew as humans. The drawings he did were quite good (Naylor’s a talented artist who makes a living on his art, though sadly enough it’s the porn he draws that is how he makes his money) and I’m left to wonder just how much of an impact Better Days would have had if he’d drawn his characters as people instead of anthros. There is a degree of separation (similar to that found in science fiction and other forms of fiction) that comes with drawing the characters as non-humans. Just imagine the impact of seeing a nine-year-old boy taking a baseball bat to the man raping his mother… or of the brief images of the twins when they had sex that one time? Or the utter anguish of Fisk as his best friend was forced to move away because his mother slept with his best friend’s dad? Would these not have deeper meaning and more immediate impact if these characters had been human?

Then again, that degree of separation might help readers from becoming too offended by the story. It’s easy to say “it’s just a story” when you’ve cat-people and mice-people and the like as your cast. But seeing them as people… and it might have been too much for Naylor’s readers. And that’s a shame, because even with this degree of separation the stories hit hard. Better Days is one of those comics you’re either going to love or hate. It’s not easy remaining ambivalent about it. And while some aspects of the story could have been told better, and Fisk seriously could have been toned down… it’s worth reading. (Small note – Better Days concluded last year. Its sequel, Original Life, focuses on Fisk’s three kids and is a far more light-hearted tale which I’ll review later.)