Jessica Farm

Jessica Farm #1-2

by Josh Simmons

Like a Lynchian take on Alice in Wonderland, Jessica Farm opens with an exterior of what could be any Midwestern farmhouse. Once inside, we track our titular heroine (she is a person, not a place) as she bounds out of bed on Christmas morning and goes about her routine, eventually breakfasting with her grandparents. The banality of the situation is subverted by a ratcheting sense of dread as we discover that Jessica’s increasingly nightmarish house — where the inside seems bigger than the outside, like Snoopy’s doghouse — is filled with creatures around every some whimsical, some sexual, some despairing, and some malevolent. Most terrifying of all is Jessica’s father. Will she even get to open the presents under the Christmas tree?Taking place over a single Christmas Day, Jessica Farm is a career-spanning comics project in which Simmons has been drawing one page every month for the past 24 years, starting in January 2000. This is a horror-fantasy-psychodrama that will appeal to fans of Charles Burns, David Cronenberg, and Dario Argento.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Horror, Graphic Novels Comics, Comics Manga, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics Manga

304 pages, Hardcover

Published October 29, 2024

Reviews

[Steph]

this is an ambitious graphic novel project, spanning decades. the 2024 edition contains the first half of the story, written steadily from january 2000 til december 2023. the second half is set to be written over the next 25 years, and published in 2050.

there's a tendency to describe any weird fiction as lynchian, which i think often does it a disservice. this story is bizarre in its own special way. i love a good horror fairytale, and i love the dreamlike quality of the passage of time here, how jessica is continually sidetracked by new faces and pulled into strange new places. everything is  pretty wonky and confusing, but makes more of a strange sort of sense as the story rolls on.

i also love the tangible sense of foreboding. jessica's towering father, with his obscured face and mickey mouse hands, is downright horrifying.

the violent action sequences are not my favorite, and i don't care for the penises and the whole sexual element here. but the creature art is so freaky and wonderfully gross!

props to simmons for remaining committed for the first half of his 50 year endeavor. it's hard for me to even conceptualize existing another 25 years from now, but i hope simmons will keep following through!

strength comes when fear turns to rage.

[Rachel]

3.5 stars
I'm all about the psychological terror, wacky characters, and mysterious circumstances in this novel. I wasn't bothered at all by the confusion around what is happening, where Jessica is going, and what she must do: I enjoy stories that leave a lot of questions up in the air while more and more strangeness comes forward. I didn't rate higher because the violence often felt long winded and unnecessary, as someone who's not into action scenes in general it's just not my style. The lingering threats and general sense of unease struck a chord with me more.

[Moon Captain]

I wish I could have read it more slowly. That's absolutely a skill issue with me, but with this book in particular you can feel the time that's been condensed into it, and it feels better if you leave your brain some space while reading: Starting in 2020 Josh drew a page a month and let the story go wherever he wanted. The story isn't complete but this here is a thick collection of 4 years or so. It is like a dream, a fantasy, a girl going through dark passages and encountering strange beings. There is an innocence and a beauty to Jessica and to the way all the characters interact. They smile like saints, exchange kind words and wisdom. Somehow, despite all the violence here, it's not a malevolent universe, and this book definitely isn't nasty like The Furry Trap, which apparently I gave one star a decade ago, hah!

[Amber]

Whoo.

I knew anything by Josh Simmons was going to be rough (horror), but I think the heart of it is what surprised me. 

How I interpret this comic is Jessica wakes up Christmas morning and knows there are many presents for her under the tree, but she is filled with dread. Any kindness from her father means there are beatings to come, so she lingers and goes through the rituals she has to get through her abuse - she talks with her stuffed animals, listens to music, imagines a boyfriend to take care of her. She gets to eat a lot, she imagines fantasic battles, though must of them are infused with her continued feelings of dread. 

There's blood, there's the well-endowed Mr. Sugarcock, action sequences, outfit changes, a tiny live-in crooner band, secret passages, fucked up babies, Mickey Mouse hands.... And more to come, apparently.

[Joseph]

initially struck me as a little too invader zim (lots of screaming and wacky smiling) and a little too indebted to david lynch (the band that pops up on the soap dish in the shower and performs for jessica felt very lady in the radiator) but at some point I got won over enough to finish it. Finding out that the author has just been making a page a month for the past 24 years and doesn't plan to stop until 2050 gave it a kind of charm. I love a gimmick. Also fun to watch the art evolve as it goes!

[Valerie Patrick]

"strength comes when fear turns to rage"

I really liked the beginning and the end with all the tense feelings outside of her safe rooms (her bedroom and the bathroom) and her father being this shrouded figure while her mother matches the vibe of safety, but the whole middle part was confusing to me and I'm not a huge action person

[Clint]

DNF. Made it about halfway through these 300 pages before I opted to not really read the dialogue as I looked at the pages in the back half.

Simmons’s commitment to creating this a page a month for the past 25 years is something I guess, as is his stated intent to continue for the next 25 years, but the result is a largely incoherent mess that’s boring and blandly weird and childishly provocative in a very textbook edgy alt comix style (a style I’ve enjoyed many times over when done better than this).

The back half has a few very impressively cartooned pages, but in general this looks and reads like indulgently scrawled juvenilia and it gives me secondhand embarrassment thinking of it instead being a quarter century effort.

[Olivia Cranston]

This reads like what I imagine being able to go through your dreams the next day would look like .

[Alyse]

Whew I did not like that one bit.

[Joanne]

Jessica Farm is what happens when Fatcop tries to go on a hero’s journey and forgets the map. It’s surreal, sure—but also a disjointed mess. Ambitious? Maybe. Enjoyable? Not for me.

[rndgmoat]

In which I am once again victimized by packaging, only to find myself reading a mess of a graphic novel.

[Lily]

eeeuhhhh woah a lot going on, but I like the Alice in Wonderland referencing. The sexual layer weirded me out of bit and gave me a little bit of the ick, but to each his own!

[Christine]

If you want to read all of Jessica Farm that has been published to date, you want to check out this book in this edition.

The artist explains the premise of the Jessica Farm series at the end of this volume.

I’m interested in knowing what happens next, but will I remember this book in another 25 years?

SPOILERS BELOW!

Plusses: The comic is charming and surreal, especially in the first half. I would have liked some of the themes to be explored in more depth, but, the author/artist has another 25 years to finish this narrative! Still, what’s the deal with Jessica and her father?

Minuses: The second half of the book was mostly fighting and gore, and a few key plot points. The fighting went on for pages and pages and pages, without much of the hero’s journey squeezed in. It was hard to distinguish with whom and why they were fighting. It lost the charming surreality of the first half. It was like a whole different book.

For me—this isn’t my graphic novel tribe. Jessica is sexualized in a way that doesn’t give her much agency—she’s a teenaged girl, a child, that’s sexualized by the male gaze.

1. Jessica’s assigned sexual partner for her quest comes from her grandma, and is donated to her mother. She has to discard her own former choice, the Captain, to leave her section of the house and get to her grandparents’ room.

While it’s cool that the book has a female protagonist, it’s kind of depressing that she’s reliant on “Mr Sugarc*ck” who’s a mostly non-verbal partner—is he an expertly endowed everyman for the reader to project themselves on to?

2. Why can’t Jessica, the teenage girl, meditate without a man’s help?

Why is it that Jessica, a teenage girl, and the only female in the rainbow cave, cannot float on her own? All the males can float on their own, blissfully putting aside their thoughts and fears. But poor Jessica only escapes her thoughts and fears through penetrative sex with Mr Sugarc*ck. She can float with a big c*ck inside her, but she can’t float on her own.

3. Cisgendered heterosexual pairs seem to form humanity and if you’re not paired, you’re inhuman or getting killed.

All humans at the farm in Jessica’s family are presented in male/female sexually coupled pairs. The family’s allies at the barn, the Smiths, no longer have any women and are a dying breed, thus are seen as less than human (wolves?). They are sacrificed to save the human couples in Jessica’s family.

Anyway, the author made me think about the book’s themes, which is a plus.

[chai lop]

horrifying and oddly, deeply tender, jessica farm is one of simmons’s fleshiest and densest stories. it’s sad and it’s unfair and it’s dark and it hurts and it’s rife with cynical, evil, corrupt beings lurking around every corner, but jessica and, later, her allies are able to bring a levity to the farm that feels like a breath of fresh air. despite the horrors she’s subjected to, jessica as a character feels genuinely down-to-earth and levelheaded and she finds joy in little pleasures around her, contrasting the hardened warrior that she has to transform into for the sake of her own protection and to extend a hand to the people who matter. the people who care. and she’s able to maintain this inner peace through unspeakable trauma and unimaginable horrors, both out of the realm of the real world and things far too real for most to want to touch on.

this book gave me a lot to think about and it soothed my own death anxiety. i love simmons’ early work and the sick brutality of it and this book never shies away from the insanity and the gore that he’s known for, but it does offer one of his strongest female protagonists ever with a warmhearted streak that’s a very welcome change from nihilism. definitely recommend to any extreme horror enthusiasts who are looking for something rich to bite into.

[Parker]

The beginning truly blew my mind. When it was just Jessica in the house. It felt like a cracked Alice in Wonderland (maybe my favorite book). Once she leaves the house I felt like the tone changed (part of the point of a book written one page a month for 23 years). Then I kind of came in and out of the changing tones and styles. I much preferred the existentialist surrealist tone of the first part and even the art. The dark interiors and dense frames. It cheapens later in the book. Simpler art, less dense, and the silly endless battle was my least favorite part. But there's still really great stuff later in the book too. Unique experience, inconsistent (part of the point?)

I think just some of Josh Simmons sensibilities (the more plotty genre-y stuff) just doesn't appeal to me whereas the more transgressive arthouse elements do.

[Peter Hollo]

I've read maybe the second collection of this sometime in the past. I've found Simmons' other horror stuff a bit hard to swallow, although Dream of the Bat with Simon Keck is... quite a thing.
But to be honest reading the entire first half of this 50-year creation is pretty incredible. Seeing Simmons' art and comics artistry improve, yet seeing how good he was right from the start is very impressive, and for all the gore, there's a lot to delight in here too.
It's good to have something to look forward to in another 25 years' time 😂

[Roi Assayag]

I am super surprised from this amazing graphic novel, I picked it up in a store on Amsterdam, I have read Simmons before and I didn't finish even the book. It's kind of a kids tale, with horror elements, but very surreal and really stretching the comics language to a new dimension.

The story is not super complex and I can see why some might criticize this part but it's not the main dish., l, the main thing is the art and the world building. It's stunning!
I will give this one 4.5 highly recommend!

[Brian]

This was extremely weird and bordering on incoherent. Our main character, Jessica, wanders around her house, talking to mostly inanimate objects. The book is very gross at times and graphic but for some reason, I Just kept reading it. The ending was very strange as well. I almost wish the book was done in color. There was one section in the middle that just was page after page of fighting that was very hard to follow and made little sense.

[Ann]

This was a bit of an out there story but it gets explained by the author as a project that he works on monthly with the hopes to complete it in 50 years. So the plot isn’t really planned out it is a “let’s see where this goes” concept. That in itself is interesting. I found the concept cool but the book weird!

[el]

This mansion holds dark secrets, violently unimaginable creatures, high friends in low places, and a powerful being destined to keep them all in check. I appreciated the details of the various corpses and types of death, as well as the headstrong protagonist, who seems to be growing from a young person to an adult in a time of great tumult. Excellent story.

[Ryan]

If you lick right here, you can see in every direction, at all times. Having most of the story collected in one book is the best way to read this. I purchased books one and two in the past, but don’t regret getting them again in one volume. Now we can see how Simmons’ work has improved over the years. Feels like he gets more creative with each page.

[lily odonnell]

This book is an amazing story of life,death, imagination, escapism, sex, romance, triumph, bravery, war … but really all just one girls way to escape trauma/abuse. Or that’s how I read it ! I loved it so much and look forward to another 25 years when it’s completed and who I will be when I read it. What a time capsule and astonishing book!

[Tom Hill]

Bizarre, but I kind of liked it. Not sure what's going on beneath the surface. It was interesting to see the art style change subtly over 23 years, but also crazy to think that something that takes so long to produce can be read so quickly.

[Tuck]

ADULTS ONLY it says on back cover
very dark noir, but some fun nice lay-down-my-life love thy neighbors, and fantastic art and styles and colors, wow.

if you are faint hearted, perhaps start inThe Notes starting pg 291, as book is pretty trippy

[Dair]

A fascinating project with weird and interesting results. Josh Simmons has been making this one page per month for over twenty years. He set out without a story firmly in place and let the story take shape naturally. I am excited to see where the next twenty years takes Jessica.

[Adam Schmersal]

Solid 3. One of the weirdest things I’ve read.

[Benjamin Dehr]

like The Phantom Tollbooth on acid & meth

[Winnie]

very weird!

[Rorscharch71]

Story ?
Art 4

When indie goes a bit too far

[Ashley Piekarski]

So disturbing... for so many reasons