The chances are that I will be long dead before Josh Simmons’ Jessica Farm reaches its projected conclusion around 25 years from now. And yet, perhaps peculiarly, this harsh reality is something that draws me to his epic project all the more alluringly. Since January 2000 Simmons has been drawing one page a month of this story, allowing its narrative to take shape without rigid pre-planning in this almost glacial incremental state. It’s a truly remarkable endeavour and there’s nothing out there in comics quite like it. Fantagraphics recently collected the entire series to date in one hardcover edition.
Jessica Farm takes place over the course of a single Christmas Day. Jessica herself lives in a remote farmhouse and is set for the normal customs of opening her presents and enjoying the festivities. But her home is also a world unto itself – its interiors far more capacious than its exteriors, and full of strange, supernatural-like creatures and beings throughout a never-ending succession of corridors and rooms. We meet some of those residents as we travel through its expanses with Jessica. But none has quite as foreboding a presence as her enigmatic, menacing father…
This is a story that’s randomness and unpredictability is, of course, to a degree informed by its method of creation. As a result it often feels like an elongated stream-of-consciousness. Or perhaps a canal-of-consciousness, punctuated by chronological locks to be navigated by both characters and readers. As the pages progress we can observe Simmons sometimes going with the flow of his creative impulses without structure or conformity but at other points drawing back and pulling all the seemingly disparate threads together. It’s a fascinating exercise.
Jessica’s quest to get to finally open her Christmas presents will introduce us to her grandparents and the wolf-like Smith family who live in the barn; to the war that both seem to be waging against the demonic forces that pervade the buildings; to the monstrous Crangleshitters and Jessica’s companion Mr. Sugarcock; and to her murdered toy monkey. It’s a bizarrely incongruous environment that in many ways reminds me of the classic 1970s British children’s TV series King of the Castle. A whole narrative universe within the ever shifting interiors of one house and its surroundings.
Simmons’s cartooning is frantic, dark and often furious and there’s the obvious interest in seeing how it evolves given that every few pages represent months of work. Obviously Jessica Farm needs a different application of criteria to judge it critically because this is perhaps the ultimate experiment in comics construction. To a large degree the how, the who and the what of Jessica Farm is unimportant. But the experience… well the experience of reading it is everything.
Jessica Farm (W/A) • Fantagraphics Books, $29.99
Review by Andy Oliver
