The Jump
The JumpCartoonist: Wesley Griffith
Issues: 7
Buy It Here: Wesley Griffith’s Shop
This week, we’re launching a brand-new (hopefully regular) series called Self-Published Saturday. As the name pretty directly implies, it will be a showcase for the many (many!) fantastic self-published comics being put out these days. Also, it will run on Saturdays.
For the first installment, I’ve selected The Jump by Wesley Griffith, a very NSFW grimy-as-hell crime comic that wrapped up this month with the publication of its seventh and final issue. Launched in 2023, the book has been a showcase for the kind of explicit, hyper-violent, sexualized, and occasionally psychedelic-fueled, crime caper mayhem that reminds me of some of the late ’90s underground comix in the best way.
The premise of the jump is a crime caper gone wrong. It centers around Frank, a hapless bartender who gets recruited to be a getaway driver for a risky car robbery. But on the morning of the big day, his car won’t start — and he needs a jump, which sets into motion a chain reaction of brutality and opportunistic scheming across the bottom rungs of the population of his unnamed city.
In the world of The Jump, everyone is tainted and most people are corrupt. The vast majority of them show-up in the pages of the book with a cocky swagger or an unearned over-confidence, giving all indications they know exactly what they’re doing — until they suddenly don’t. And then they take a bullet, or a knife, or a boot, or a fast-moving car to the face. It’s a Stray Bullets-esque bunch of characters, in which people are rarely cliches (even masked motorcycle robbers eventually get compelling backstories), and sooner or later they all make a compromising mistake.
As a story goes, the appeal is in seeing the absolute upper limits of outrageousness the surprising beats aim to hit, from a running off with a webcam model to suddenly being part cyborg. Griffith’s storytelling is total unencumbered and free, and The Jump is all the better for it.
But where this one really shines is in the cartooning. As you can see, The Jump has a singular look to its art. In fact, it was the borderline minimalistic, heavy-ink aesthetic of these panels that first grabbed my attention when I came across them last year (I’m late to the party) on Griffith’s Instagram. The neat boxes that Griffith goes to for his layouts feel perfectly-suited for The Gram, but what makes it all the better is the attention-grabbing art inside.
The way Griffith draws The Jump wastes nothing, and there’s something to that spare approach that makes a punch to the face really stand out like a got-damn punch to the face.
With Griffith’s spare-but-precise clean line cartooning style, no panel is wasted. Even if sometimes that panel is just a close POV down the barrel of the gun. The Jump is wisely the type of book that might spend three pages on shootout that takes all of a few seconds, rarely (if ever) exceeding six boxes on a page, while at times reserving full page splashes for the big developments.
For me, part of the fun of spending the majority of my comics budget on self-published books is finding series like The Jump, that for a few different reasons would not work so well with a publisher. It’s not that the current publishing market is opposed to the sex and violence we find in The Jump (especially not the violence, at least in North America), but there’s something ineffable to the way the unique aesthetic, hyperviolence, and occasional scenes of late night HBO sexualization come together.
It makes The Jump the extra special sort of self-published comic treat, where when you get into it you feel as if you’re reading something as bespoke as it is forbidden, a story that runs on the sort of outrageousness that most-structured publishing ventures would tamp down in an effort to be more accessible.
The end result is an absolute treat for true comics sickos, and I can’t wait to see what Wesley Griffith draws next.
Buy The Jump now via Wesley Griffith’s Shop
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