Robb Armstrong

For a long while I read dozens of newspaper comic strips every day, but I fell out of the practice about five years ago. As I was reading through this collection of selected strips spanning JumpStart's 30 year run, I thought to myself how I had missed my regular visits with Joe and Marcy Cobb and their extended family and that I needed to pick up some more books from the series to catch up. And then I found out that this is only the fourth collection ever, and the previous one came out over show more a decade ago. I know I can find it online, but why the heck isn't this more popular? It has to be among the longest running comic strips with an African American creator and cast. Sure, some of the one-off gags are pretty corny, but I really like the family drama narratives and the relationships between the characters, and comparing the strips included here from 1991 to the ones from 2018 shows that Armstrong is running right now at a creative peak.

More JumpStart please! show less

This excellent strip, about a middle-class couple (Joe, a cop, and Marcy, a nurse) who happen to be black has quietly moved up the notches to become a favorite strip of mine. I thought it was a travesty when my newspaper cancelled it a few years ago; this is the best "black" (although it rarely makes race an issue) strip out there. The art is fine, the writing clever and funny, and the strip is permeated with a gentle humor given strength by the evident love Joe and Marcy share. Also, the show more strip has adopted a "real-time" format since the birth of Sunny, a move of which I approve and would like to see more of. show less

I really like this strip: funny, warm. human, nice, with a couple that truly loves each other - and did I mention that it's a "black" strip, even though that is generally incidental? This book also has a great cartoon novelette about how Joe and Marcy fell in love, courted and married, and includes the birth of their first child. I also really dig Joe's parents.