I’ve always had a soft spot for comics – I won’t try to pass off my appreciation of them as necessitating the medium’s place among high art, but aesthetically deserving or not, I will probably keep reading them. Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is one of the rare comics that can draw me in years after I’ve discovered it and make me laugh so heartily that I run off to show it to my friends. I won’t beat around the bush – Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is a difficult comic to read. Not because it’s filled with heady philosophy or I’m a pretentious art critic who equates difficulty with quality. The comic is written and drawn as terribly as perhaps humanly possible. The whole thing is a send up of itself and everything like it, while remaining legitimately hilarious and entertaining on its own merits, or something like them. The book is even made to be terrible – it includes a commemorative coin garishly taped to the front cover, poorly spelled and randomly placed author’s notes, a hideous amount of comic sans, .jpeg artifacts from image compression, fake coupons for subway, and that’s only scratching the surface. Everything about this book is a joke. I hope you like laughing.
As it was not mentioned, the book also features a fake mug stain added to the cover to give the impression that it has suffered neglect and disuse even prior to purchase.