Customer Reviews

Jump Start

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Robb Armstrong is a genius. No two ways about it.

"Jump Start" is a delightful strip and I'm lucky my local paper carries it. Considering the paucity of good strips featuring black families, this one has set new standards in many ways.

Joe and Marcy, the Jump Start couple are professionals. He is a police officer and she a nurse. They have intelligent conversations and are delightful and believable.

I like the fact that race is simply a part of the story and not the focus of the story. One of my all time favorite strips in creation was a Jump Start strip. Joe and Marcy's friends, Clarence Sr. and his wife complain about how people "act stupid around them" because they are an interracial couple. Joe tells them, "friend, they aren't ACTING." Translation: If folks can't accept interracial families, then the stupidity is NOT an act. I LOVE THAT STRIP!

The Jump Start kids, Sunny and baby Jojo are adorable. I love the way Sunny remains bilingual -- fluent in English and baby talk. Baby Jojo acts like a crib sized executive with his day care pal Benny his faithful partner/employee/man Friday. It is so hilarious to see the way the kids interact!

I love all the strips when Sunny runs from the comb. One can almost feel her pain during these feared comb out sessions. Is there a child in the world who likes to have their hair done? I sometimes doubt that. I love the one where Sunny thinks dreadlocks will save her from the comb. I also like the fact that Sunny and Jojo have playmates of all races because that is how the world really is -- made up of all races.

Robb Armstrong is a genius!

Robb Armstrong manages the difficult feat of creating characters who are funny, real, and deep. And for what it's worth, I am a white male in my mid thirties. His characters speak to everybody, because of the deep truths they portray. In fact, I wish they were real, and lived next door to me. Failing that, I look forward to reading his strips for years to come. I'd put them up there with Doonesbury and a few others as classics of the genre.

I say hats off to Robb Armstrong for creating and hitting it big with his very popular comic strip all about a whimsical African-American family! It all begun with the high-school courtship between Joe and Marcy. Then they got married, launched their very busy careers as a policeman and a nurse, and along came their two very precocious kids, Sunny and Jojo (what curious names!) Then the whole family goes tumbling into the wildest adventures with a bragging Pop and a doting Mom, household chores, police car chases, shootin' up with the bad guys, the hectic emergency room, the crazy day-care scene where small kids all act like grown-ups, and of course, Sunny's very bushy, untamed hair! And it's all told in a true-to-life vein shot through with intoxicating flights of fantasy and very saucy, well-crafted satire, especially where Joe turns into a very muscular superhero every time his ego gets stroked and the whole family being chased around the house by rabid IRS agents! Rather like "Rose Is Rose", only with a very endearing cast of black folks!

I have been a fan of Jump Start since it was introduced to my local newspaper. It is a breath of fresh air seeing African Americans depicted in such a positive and realistic light. I can't wait until Mr. Armstong compiles another book with the addition of Jojo Cobb! An excellent read. perfect for the Coffee Table.

I've had this book since it came out and can hardly wait for the next one! I've been a daily fan of this strip for years. Robb Armstrong has a genuine knack for showing the American family.... You'll laugh when you start reading the strip and start sayin " Oh Yea!" I've done that! or at the very least thought about it. So here is hoping Marcy, Joe, Sunny, and Jojo come to another book soon!! Thanks NT

I have been laughing, loving and learning with the Cobb family for more years than I care to admit. Good clean fun, always interesting, never a dull moment. When does the next book come out -- it has been a loooong while and what about a movie?

The writing is good, the drawing is good, and the visual humor is excellent, but what really got to me about these strips us how happy everybody was. The characters bubble over with joy and energy. It made me smile. Then, because I was in such a good mood, I enjoyed the strips even more and got into an even better mood; a vicious cycle. Looking past how happy the strip is, the other striking thing is the really outstanding use of visual humor.

I have not read the strip in the newspapers, so I base my opinions just on this collection. The strip is about a generic young couple--Joe and Marcy--and their baby, Sunny. Strips focus on typical parent situations--the baby won't sleep, baby is heavy when carried, parents and grandparents brag about baby. Other things that happen are that Sunny hangs out with other babies in day care, Joe and Marcy buy a house, and Joe yearns for a Range Rover.

It's a reasonable setting for a strip. Could be boring (boy, that happens a lot), wry, angry, appealing, charming---it all depends on the cartoonist. Armstrong is really good so it is not boring at all. As I mentioned above, the tone is joyful, appealing, charming (as opposed to ironic or angry). I really got to like Joe, Marcy, and Sunny. I wanted to read more about their lives.

The drawing is really good. There are lots of details in the backgrounds and lots of detail in the main characters. The drawings are also pleasant to look at. I've seen other strips where the drawing is well-done but the characters are deliberately made ugly so that I don't like looking a the strip; that is not the case here.

Armstrong makes good use of camera angles. A big problem with cartoons is what to do when your strip is basically 3 or 4 panels of the same guy talking. Armstrong shifts the camera angles around a bit so these strips are not visually deadening. Sometimes the characters engage in a little busywork while they talk--picking up a box, shifting the baby from one shoulder to the other, writing on a clipboard.

Armstrong uses visual humor. There is one strip where Joe is carrying the baby through the mall and the baby gets drawn bigger and bigger in each strip, until Joe is practically crushed under the weight of the baby, a nonverbal joke that the baby seemed heavier the longer that Joe has to carry her. In another strip, the parents are in a bed looking completely frazzled and wornout and the bed is covered with 6 baby Sunnies in all sorts of sprawled out positions, a joke that babies are such restless sleppers that they seem to take up the whole bed when they sleep in it.

Sometimes word panels have pictures in then instead of words. When people are bragging about their kids then the panels tend to have a picture of the kid's head instead of words. One funny comic strip just has two grandmothers talking about their grandkids, and Sunny's granmother's word panel sort of pushes out the other woman's word panel so, victory!, Sunny's grandmother wins the impicit bragging contest.

People's thoughts are sometimes drawn as if they were real. When Joe complains that he feels old, for one panel he gets drawn as an old man. When the harried parents feel that Sunny is the real boss of the household, a panel is drawn in which the parents are kids and Sunny is a domineering adult.

This sort of visual humor is used sparingly, not something that happens in every strip, but it is great to see it. You could overdo that sort of thing so it is probably good that it only happens occasionally.

There is a low level of exageration that happens all the time. When the parents are frazzled they look REALLY frazzled, Sunny's hair is impossibly bushy, reactions of alarm or happiness are out of proportion. It helps here that Armstrong can draw so well. In Armstrong's drawings I can tell the difference between exagerated reactions and subdued reactions.

Man, reading this collection really brought home to me how bad contemporary cartoonists are these days. They are all talk. They don't use the visual part of the cartoon at all. The few that are well-drawn are just realistic and don't really play around with the drawings. That's fine, and I respect that those well-written and realistically drawn strips (there are only a few of them anyway) don't want to break the reader's belief by engaging in fantasy. Also, I have read that cartoonists can't have interesting pictures any more because the newspapers have shrunk down the size of comics so much that they can't fit anything in but word balloons and heads. Fine again. Nonetheless, it sure was nice to read sucn an enjoyable cartoon collection as this one.

Judging from the number of daily strips compared to the number of Sunday strips, I think this collection is edited and is not a complete set of strips over some fixed period. That might be why they seem perticularly good--the less successful strips have been weeded out.I wish there was another collection that I could buy.

I really enjoy reading about joe,marcy and sunny. They are todays family. mr. armstrong gives them real life issues with a humorous touch. I look forward to reading about them in the L.A. Times as well as in this very funny compilation. I want more>>.