Old Man Winter is a slim volume that contains five short comics written and drawn by J. T. Yost. Stylistically it is similar to Box Brown’s Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing, which I reviewed earlier this year. This was not especially surprising seeing as both authors were recipients of grants from the Xeric foundation, a group committed to helping self-publishing comic book authors get their work into print.

While Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing was unassuming and quietly bittersweet, Old Man Winter is heavy handed and trite. The first story, from which the volume takes its title, follows a depressed old man with an “everyday” kind of realism. He lives a bleak life and pines after his deceased wife. He has a casually friendly relationship with a young clerk at a local store. Then he dies in his sleep.

The art has the cartoony realism common in undeground comix such as American Splendor, but is certainly not as striking or memorable as the masters of the craft.

The story itself is too short for us to develop a lasting attachment to the main character. Although not bad, the story remains forgettable. It does not help that Yost is walking in well-tread territory. So many stories have studied death in old age (see Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych for an excellent example), that it seems to me that you need to have something very significant to say (or a very original way of saying it) to stand out from the crowd.

“All is Forgiven” is a four page comic with an animal rights bent. The comic features no dialogue. In it we see a scientist experimenting on animals. He returns home to find a letter from his wife, saying she left him. The next day he goes into the lab and releases all of the animals. This comic pairs well with the fourth, “Road Trip”, another animal rights comic without dialogue. “Road Trip” juxtaposes a little girl being taken on a trip to an amusement park and then a McDonald’s, with a young cow being taken to a slaughterhouse and turned into hamburger (ending up, of course, at McDonald’s).

As an activist writer I found Yost heavy-handed and annoying. “Road Trip” had all of the guilt-laden preachiness of a Jack Chick tract. I found his attempt to humanize the calf by showing it crying offensive to my intellect, especially when animal rights television spots use actual footage of non-personified animals far more effectively.

The third comic is a non-fiction diary style comic (once again, much in the spirit of American Splendor) that recounts the author “logging” his friend’s family car as a young teenager, by which I mean he and a friend would take a log and place it on top of the car during the night. This comic was much like listening to Gary Keillor without the subtle wit or insight.

The final comic is a one page comic much like road trip that juxtaposes a teenager running away from home to join the circus with an elephant being taken from its home and forced into the circus (of course with a healthy dose of cruel treatment by the handlers). I think I can sum up my feelings about this volume in this way: it is not the subject matter of the comics that I don’t like, but rather the poor execution, which leaves me largely apathetic, if not annoyed.

Until next issue, proliferate the nerdverse!