The Bounce

by Joe Casey, David Messina (Artist)

The Bounce stars Jasper Jenkins, just your average, twenty-something guy who gained his powers though surreal circumstances. When he's not hanging out and doing a lot of nothing, he puts on a costume and hits the streets as the Bounce, a superhero in a world that's not used to super-powered heroes and villains. Jenkins may be a slacker superhero, but The Bounce is loaded with depth, as Casey and Messina explore what would make a person put on a costume and fight crime, the pressures of modern identity politics, and even some good old-fashioned superheroic action. The entire, mind-bending, twelve-issue saga of The Bounce is collected in this volume!

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Superheroes

270 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 2014

About the author

Librarian note: there is more than one author with this name

Joe Casey is an American comic book writer. He has worked on titles such as Wildcats 3.0, Uncanny X-Men, The Intimates, Adventures of Superman, and G.I. Joe: America's Elite among others. As part of the comics creator group Man of Action Studios, Casey is one of the creators of the animated series Ben 10.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Casey

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 2 out of 5]

in a world previously without superheroes, a new superhero named The Bounce fights crime and the various new supervillains who have been popping up to create mayhem and slaughter. more importantly, The Bounce and an obscure gent named The Darling stumble upon a parallel dimension of much power and an in-between dimension of much evil.

this is one of those sad situations where a laughably inept ending ruined what could have been a 3 or even 4 star book. still, enough interesting ideas and some really great art (in the modern vein) lift this above a 1 star.

the ideas are actually nothing new: watered-down explorations of various meta and metaphysical ideas previously put forward by everyone from Morrison to Moore to Busiek to Ellis; familiar stuff, but explored with intelligence and verve. I was pretty impressed with the intricacy and layers of the narrative. Casey is a smart, cynical fellow who isn't afraid of creating a complicated story and is still impressed by common human decency. I like that about him. there's quite a lot to like in The Bounce, from the absorbing art and challenging ideas to the relaxed and realistic characterization to the dismay on display at how dark the world and the people in it can get.

but that ending! ugh, so rushed and sloppy, with risible dialogue and a corny last-act monster running around in a lab. there were hints of that lack of control elsewhere ("The Darling" is not even the stupidest name on display; some of the dialogue is really eye-rolling; intriguing characters are introduced and then abandoned; use of "%" as a part of word that characters actually pronounce out loud - how exactly?)... but the ending really puts it center stage, to an embarrassing degree.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting concept. Good execution.

Perhaps best of all, I like that it's a comic story that comes self-contained in a single trade paperback. That's a bit of a rarity.

[Alex Sarll]

Joe Casey’s best work always reminds me of Grant Morrison, and this is no exception. Back when superheroes began, they were always erupting into worlds much like ours, but as the genre has built up history its main worlds have become progressively less like ours, such that ’superheroes erupting into our world’ has now been hived off as a subgenre. And what a world for them to find, eh? The news is always bad, the apocalypse feels like it’s looming closer every day, and nobody’s here to save us. Something is clearly missing. Indeed, perhaps the world of The Bounce is even worse than ours, for amid their torrent of terrorism and school shootings and the rest, crime is going up, whereas in this one it is at least going down, hard as that can be to believe. But still: what happens when costumed vigilantes intersect with modern US police brutality? Nothing good; it may be for the best that our hero’s power, as per the name, is basically being made of rubber*. Our hero who, because nothing in this world can be untarnished, we first see getting stoned in front of some tentacle porn; no mild-mannered nebbish he. And then at certain moments of transcendence, he finds himself instead in a shining city, empty but for its teeming superheroes, and one poor sap who can barely move for their efforts to save him… Messina’s art is great both for that insubstantial world and the grot of the ‘real’ one, not to mention the weird spaces in between; it reminded me a fair bit of Tony Harris, which confused me when I saw the name Harris on the spine, but that’s the co-creator and she’s an entirely different one. It’s not perfect – like a few previous Casey projects it feels a bit staccato at times, and I have no idea how the name ‘Golg%chk’ is meant to work. But with Morrison seemingly done with this territory for the moment, it’s not bad methadone.

*One of his antagonists is called the Crunch. Which, although nobody ever uses the phrase, made me giggle whenever somebody couldn’t handle him.

[A.J. McMahon · Rating 1 out of 5]

A confused and badly-written graphic novel that makes little sense and never manages to become interesting. There is a drug-taking guy who volunteers for a military experiment to take experimental drugs and as a result gets turned into a guy with superhero powers, who goes back and forth between our world and a parallel world where he talks to his dead friend about how he doesn't understand what is going on. Throw in a lizard-swallowing military-industrial-complex bad guy, a Cthulhu-type inter-dimensional being, and a bunch of stuff getting blown up, among other even more cliched things, and you have your typical self-indulgent graphic novel busily going nowhere and dragging us around in its tyre-rubber-burning circles. I am reminded yet again of how hard it is to find a graphic novel worth reading.

[alexander shay · Rating 2 out of 5]

A superhero comic but also not? This book was so confusing, and I feel like a lot of that was because the writers couldn't reveal the "why" behind everything was happening because it would effectively spoil the plot/end the story. I'm torn between saying this needed to be a shorter storyline (12 issues in total) because it drew things out way too long, and saying it should be longer because not nearly enough things are explained. So much relies on the reader being able to put the pieces together, and I still don't really get what happened. I don't really know who anyone was or what their purpose was, I don't get the whole other-dimension stuff or where superheroes come in... and the protagonist kept going between utter apathy and no life goals to being a good guy superhero, which made him feel inconsistent and not that likeable/relatable as a character. A good concept (I think...) but poorly executed. Dialogue is pretty cliche and flat.

But I think the thing that bothered me most was the heavy presence and constant repetition of how the world has gone to crap and everyone is miserable. Every other page features a news segment about starving children, wars, famine, etc. It gives the characters reasons to want to fix things, which seems like the main motivation behind the entire plot, but it is just so heavily smacked into you that it feels overwhelming and overdone, like we get it. It made the story feel more like a political piece than a story, like the story was an excuse to write an essay on how things suck and we need to change. Well done stories can get the same point across on a much more subtle and engaging level.

[Raewyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool art and set up... unsatisfying conclusion.

[Cory Mason · Rating 2 out of 5]

You ever wanted to read a comic book about a superhero who doesn't *do* anything?

[Line Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante y rápido

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well that was... interesting. Pretty cool concept taking superheroes and blending them with extra-dimensional sci-fi craziness. Artwork by Dave Messina is gorgeous, worth five stars on its own.. Joe Casey's story was a little hard to follow at some points. I felt that this book's characters had various traits of existing superheroes overlaid on them (I got a pretty extreme Peter Parker vibe from Jasper Jenkins' overall attitude and demeanor).

Worth a read if superheroes-meets-mindfucking-sci-fi. Probably wouldn't give it a second go.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the slacker superhero aspect of the book. That part was fun and The bounce is a great character. What I didn't enjoy is the new age BS storyline that the whole book culminates in. David Messina's art is sleek and clean. I dig it.

[Bert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Superpowers, alternate dimensions, military experiments,... Basic elements that result in a solid but not spectacular story. Not that it's bad, just don't go out of your way to read it.

[Corto Maltese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad at all, with a somewhat cheesy end (for my taste).

[Lukas Holmes]

Intriguing. A little confusing at times, but pretty well done.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this even though it was a tad bit confounding at times.