Review: Jitterati collection (2009)

Jitterati is Grant Buist’s strip comic of life in a cultured, coffee-drenched festival-heavy Wellington. It runs every week in the free local paper the Capital Times, and in Grant’s own words it tends to go like this.
I have a lot of love for Jitterati, no doubt because I am a coffee-drenched festival-going Wellingtonian with pretensions to culture. It speaks my language and talks about what is going on around me, and that’s cool. More than that, it’s important; we need media content that reflects our local environment or something in the feedback loop between person and community starts to break and you end up with the weirdness of everyone using packaged American culture as their reference point (as everyone who remembers the 80s and 90s will no doubt attest).
(Since this is a review, it’s also worth pointing out that I have known Grant for years, although for most of those years our relationship has been stable at the “say hello to each other on the street” level. And I’ll send him a link to this review. Hi Grant!)
I picked up a copy of the collected edition at Zinefest last year (along with a few other treats that I really should blog about too). It covers the complete run of Jitterati from its launch in 2001 through to 2009, reprinting about 75% of the strips (complete with marginal notes to explain the many, many topical references), as well as several short text pieces talking about stories from behind-the-scenes.
It’s a handsome A4 collection with four strips to a page, black-and-white interiors (with lovely print quality that makes full use of grayscale), and a card cover with colour spot illo. The title of the book was apparently stained on with coffee, which is a nice touch. Nicer still is the CD in the back, which contains the full run of the strips in colour, and two short films.
The Zinefest edition also came with some free Havana Coffeeworks coffee, which I finished off the other day. Lovely.
Grant’s art is extremely polished, as you’d expect after a decade-and-half of solid cartooning. He’s become extremely comfortable with the four-panel format, making good use of the limited space in every panel and getting lots of physicality and geography out of a strip that is basically three characters sitting around a table. Around the middle of the decade the strip acquires the photographed backgrounds that are now its trademark, and the mix of photographed background and illustrated foreground works beautifully to give the strip a nice sense of place. (It reminds me a bit of Herge’s Tintin, which used stylized clear-line character drawings set against highly detailed and realistic backgrounds and made them work smoothly together.)
The collection shows an increasing comfort with the four-panel gag strip format, too, with a good mix of gentle fun and outright cynicism. Lots of jokes about local politics and the theatre and arts scene, and now and then some variations from the standard patterns to mix things up.
I really enjoyed reading through this collection – as a tour of Wellington’s noughties culture, it carries a surprising amount of heft and is very enjoyable read as a bundle. The best part of this for me was reading over the years when I was in Edinburgh, and getting a nice cafe-level view of what was exercising Wellington at the time. (The controversy over the braying portaloo had somehow passed me by!)
So – I recommend it, unreservedly, to Wellingtonians. Inner-city latte-sipping theatregoers should get hold of copies and sit them on their coffee tables. Every cafe in town should purchase a copy to keep with their reading material. This strip is a mix of pop-art and journalism and it’s funny and it’s ours, and I give it a hearty thumbs up.
If you want to get one – well, they’re out of print at the moment but Grant informs me he’s doing another run in time for Armageddon Pop Culture Expo at the start of April. You can reach him through his blog and ask him to write your name on a list or something.
(Aside for any non-Wgtners who’ve come this far – does your town/city have a comic strip about what’s going on there? I’m curious…)