(courtesy & (c) official Jens K Styve site)
Discovering a new gold standard comic strip is always a rare and precious joy.
While there are a lot of very good comic strips out there, few merit a “drop everything and look here!” response with this reviewer’s attention only being seized in such a way that the heart is also passionately and enduringly engaged by the likes of Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Mutts, Get Fuzzy and most recently, Wallace the Brave.
To that illustrious list, you can now add Dunce by Jens K Styve which he created in 2016 and which has found considerable success in the creator’s home country of Norway with Serienett (Norwegian comic journal) breathlessly declaring Dunce to be the “Best Norwegian comic of the decade”.
That may sound like an audaciously laudatory thing to say but the journal has a point – Dunce is a brilliantly clever comic strip embodying fun and quirky characters, dialogue that’s witty and thoughtful and a delightful love of the gleefully absurd which powers many a successful strip like Mutts or Wallace the Brave.
The first volume of the strip in English, Arctic Tails – it will be followed in the northern Fall 2024 by Ungrounded – takes us past the Arctic circle in Norway to the city of Tromsø wherein live Jens K, son Gustav and their dog Brego, who are joined occasionally by Jens K’s odd but supportive friend Børge.
These gloriously idiosyncratic characters might be off-the-wall in a way that suggests the dynamic from cartoon series The Great North (set in the snowy remoteness of Alaska) but they are also wonderfully and affectingly grounded, their oddball pursuits encompassing very human needs to matter, to belong, to hide from reality and a host of other conditions that make being alive such a complex challenge.
It’s the innate humanity of the strip that lends Dunce so much charming, heartwarming appeal.
So, while it’s a bit bonkers when Jens K decides that the best way to handle doing his taxes is to hide under a table or Gustav becomes convinced that he and he alone can save the rainforest by bringing one Monstera deliciosa plant back to life, and Brego in typical unfussy dog fashion is happy to eat anything and everything (over and over to a startlingly vomit-inducing degree), it also feels very lovely and relatable.
You’ll be laughing at the sweet absurdity of it all just as it hits you that you might even do something like this because we’re all human and not everything we do makes perfect sense (or any sense at all, really).
In fact, if you step back and really take a hard look at our lives, it’s all a bit ridiculous much of the time, and while it’s grounded in some very real world, human concerns, that doesn’t take away from how odd we, and by our extension our lives can be, if we take the time to view them dispassionately.
Styve, interviewed on Tombersation where he discusses, among other things, the strip’s origin and inspiration, beautifully and affectingly distills what it’s like to be human (or a dog) and he does it in a way that affectionately pokes fun at things while empathetically acknowledging that that is just how life is.
In that respect it has very much in common with the classic comic strips mentioned earlier in this post, full to the hilarious brim with strangely identifiable characters doing quirkily offbeat things that actually ring true to anyone stumbling through this thing called life.
Arctic Tales is richly funny and heartwarmingly sweet, buoyed by clever writing and evocatively fun artwork, the two coming together with a spirit that embraces and loves life in all its fabulous weirdness, that doesn’t pretend to have all the answers and which celebrates how strange we can all be while being delightfully happy we get to be together to do it at all.
You can order Dunce: Arctic Tales exclusively from Amazon.