Everything Sucks: Kings of Nothing collects the first six issues of his recent Everything Sucks series; it was published earlier this year by Silver Sprocket and is probably still the most recent Sweater thing available in the market. I've previously looked at his books Please Destroy the Internet, Please Destroy My Enemies, and This Must Be the Place; Sweater has been making comics for about a decade and has an established style and tone, even if the characters have different names and specific relationships in each project.
Everything Sucks is vaguely anthropomorphic: Sweater draws his characters as animal-people, more-or-less, purely visually as far as I can tell. They don't talk about the issues between the dog-people and the cat-people or anything like that: it's just how he draws characters.
Noah is the main character, the young man who wants to be an artist but spends too much of his time watching movies and smoking. (He's also got a lousy job at a sandwich shop; it's lousy in part because he makes it lousy - and we get the sense that he likes having a lousy job to complain about.) His best friend is Calla, who doesn't quite live with him but is often there - he seems to rent a small house, which seems beyond the means of a part-time sandwich-shop loser, but we'll allow it for dramatic license - who is not an artist, as far as we see, but is even lazier and less motivated than Noah is. They have a friend Brad, who they don't seem to like, who lives in a van and wanders through the sewers looking for stuff to reclaim.
And the six issues collected here have stories about the three of them, in whatever small city or large town they live in, wherever it is. They hang out, complain, bicker, go out for food, get locked in a bathroom, argue, mostly avoid doing anything constructive, and squabble.
There have been a lot of comics about lovable, funny losers over the years, often in this kind of mode: a small group of young people, sometimes inspired by the creator and their friends, who hang out and do goofy stuff because they are young and aimless and unhappy with the world. It's a kind of story I tend to think a creator can do for about a decade or so: after that, it's just sad and not funny anymore. Michael Sweater works in that mode, and he's good at it - his art is gnarly and fun in that tattoo-ish way, giving it some visual pizzazz - but I wonder if the window for this kind of project might be starting to close. The characters in Everything Sucks talk more than a bit about being thirty, which is a big milestone for aimless young people. You can stay aimless your whole life, but you're really not young and full of potential past thirty. Then you're just aimless and slowly turning into a permanent loser.
I'd like to see what Sweater does next; I'm seeing small indications here that he might need or want to shift to something slightly different, as he and his characters age, and I'd like to see what comes next. For now, though, Everything Sucks is a fine look at three low-lives, doing what they can and getting by in amusing ways.
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