Nelson, v1: “Housemate from Hell”

I was a comic strip guy before I was a comic book guy. I wanted to be a strip artist in my early teenaged years. Everything I drew looked like rejected “Far Side” cartoons, though.

So I have a soft spot for comic strips.

And “Nelson” is a good little comic strip that, while it won’t win any awards, is an entertaining read that I look forward to reading more from.

The Devil Made Me Credit

The Orange Curse Cometh

I had seen “Nelson” over the years in the pages of Spirou magazine. His little strips would fill out pages here and there. I could read a few of them, and they seemed funny enough. It’s not my usual art style, but it worked for the gags they were trying to tell.

So when the translated editions started to pop up on-line in the fall of 2018, I was curious to read them en masse, like any good comic strip compilation book.

I liked the strip more than I thought I would.

Nelson is an “orange curse.” He’s a little devil who hangs out with Julie, a single office desk drone whose minor sins in life have brought this little devil into her life. (In the first strip, it’s because she didn’t pass along a chain email.)

The humor of the book is a split between his making life hellish for her, particularly in her office, and him torturing Floyd, Julie’s pet dog.

That Cute Devil

Nelson is mostly hapless at this mission. He tries hard to make sense of the world, but has troubles with it. His attempts to vex Julie often end with her having the last word against him. Nobody wins, but justice is served.

For example: Nelson wants to flip through the television stations to watch four movies at once, but that blows the TV up. He’s a cold and calculating prince of darkness who’s afraid of the dark. He sneaks into a movie for adults, but the chairs are also made for adults and flip closed on him.

His grandiose plans are limited to this one woman and her dog. He’s good at creating antics and small acts of destruction, though.

For the most part, he’s an agent of chaos in everyone’s lives. Little things are constantly going wrong, and he’s usually the culprit. Yet, it’s kind of cute. Nelson is cute.

He’s imaginative. He believes he’s stalking a snake in the jungle, and killing it with the slice of his machete is the right thing to do. Except that the snake is really the vacuum cleaner’s tube, and now he’s in trouble. Or the time he brands the couch with a cigarette lighter like it’s a horse. Or this time:

Nelson acts like a little devil half the times, a three year old curious kid a quarter of the time, and a cat the last quarter.

How It All Fits Together

The gags don’t connect in any way at all. There are a few repeated themes, maybe, but there’s no continuity and no attempt to make a “week’s worth” of strips around the same theme at any point. This book is pure rapid fire jokes.

Some work better than others. I prefer the gags with Floyd, the hapless dog with short term memory who Nelson is constantly terrorizing, though in very friendly ways. I like the office gags, whether it’s Nelson learning how to use a photocopier or just wreaking havoc at Julie’s office.

This is not the next Calvin and Hobbes. It’s not a groundbreaking or political comic strip. It’s not the artistic find of the century. But it is, in my estimation, a very fun comic with an absurdist sense of humor mixed with a little bit of a bite.

Nobody is perfectly pure. Everybody suffers. Everybody causes trouble.

The trick is that the gags work more often than not, in a variety of settings and situations. Bertschy has created a series wide open enough to let him do whatever gags he wants without making excuses for it. While there are recurring characters and settings, they’re easy enough to expand past for a new joke. That keeps things fresh.

The jokes are also visual. While there’s still a lot of dialogue in most of the strips, there’s almost always a visual element to the gag. You do need to actually look at the pictures. This isn’t a radio play drawn in four panels. Bertschy does well in including those visuals, whether as the punchline or as a set-up. There’s not a strict formula there; it’s whatever works. That’s what he uses.

Recommended?

Yes, I think it’s a fun read. It’s a fast read, for sure, but it’s the kind of strip you can easily imagine cutting out of the newspaper to hang on the refrigerator or your cube wall. I don’t know if people do that anymore. It feels like these days the closest you get is the guy in I.T. with the latest XKCD printed out and pinned to the board.

Three volumes of the series are out now, with more on the way. This a nice refreshing read between more serious adventure or drama books. It’s also a nice book to have around when you only have a couple or five minutes. It’s easy to dip in, get some quick jokes, and put it back down without ruining any kind of story flow.

— 2019.004 —

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