The Sharing Machine contingent has been a source of humorous fodder for me for a long while now. I’d been a daily reader of Toothpastefordinner et. al, and really dig the wry humor of the author, and co-Columbusite Drew. Though the comics are pretty quality, Drew’s side projects sometimes leave a bit to be desired (which totally didn’t keep me from collecting them). His older music projects are boarderline unlistenable at times (with the exception of a Kompressor track here and there) and Horsetown was pretty iffy for having come from the source of otherwise awesome humor. However, it’s notable that when Drew is on he’s on. Crudbump is terrific. So is mini-sequence “Dude I’m tripping Balls.” Perhaps the best recent thing is Drew’s Twitter; which seems to pick up where Superpoop left off with really really clever current-events-inspired banter.
That said; I had no idea what to expect when Veins was announced.
It’s an odd book to say the least. It’s printed in a pretty lo-fi method, the aesthetics of each page slightly reminiscent of something you’d produce for a high school English paper. Chapters roll by and page numbers are literally nonexistent. I’d guess it to have about 200 pages, though speed-wise, it reads like it has half that.
The content seems familiar but completely fresh. The first person text follows the thoughts of an outcast, nicknamed Veins, through stages of youth and an extended stage of pre-adulthood; though that loose definition is actually what the book is kind of about. The portrait of Veins as an outcast, is well developed through self reflection. Veins’ ideas seem completely logical yet in a very “toothpaste-for-dinner” way, completely and purposfully illogical in the context of contemporary Midwestern society. In monologue, Veins confesses to thoughts that make the reader quite uncomfortable, yet the matter-of-fact manner of his confessions prompt the reader to reflect upon the built-in-cruelty of normative society. It fall somewhere, pretty deliberately, between Catcher in the Rye and Flowers for Algernon.
What’s most interesting yet most frustrating about Veins I suspect comes from the same source. Drew is not a trained writer, so at times it seems like you really are reading a high school English paper. Character development can be absent, or patch there are some absurdly unbelievable plot elements. It could be argued that much like the Toothpastefordinner comics, the amateurism is the point. Though, I’d rather consider it less about being amateur, and more about being raw….in the same way that makes punk rock interesting. On one hand the book is extremely out-of-tune and non-contextual; on the other, its severely awkward realism seems to propel the book to being better than it actually is. Certainly, Veins is unlike anything you’ve ever read.
...so if you think you'd like it, you should probably buy it or maybe a t-shirt and support a pretty awesome webcomic.