A couple of decades ago, back when I was a lowly undergraduate college student with dreams of making it big on the county fair circuit, one of my happiest times came at the start of each semester. All of the bright young academics would file into the campus bookstore, queueing up to purchase new editions of textbooks which were sure to shape the course of our futures. Several years into this routine, however, the shine wore off as I became accustomed to the grind of the educational-industrial complex. That was probably after I’d realized how little these same books were worth when we re-sold them three months later, and how much more economical it would have been to just photocopy a classmate’s copy. No, about halfway through my college experience, the lone highlight of this semi-annual shopping spree was having a chance to browse through the bookstore’s small fiction section.
Some of my favorite reads came from this bookstore, last-minute grabs thrown on top of my stack of required reading, and it was exactly this way that I came across “Jim’s Journal.” The book was just a thin volume of comics, simply titled “I Went to College, and it Was Okay”, and I guess the shape must’ve reminded me of those old Garfield collections. In any case, I ended up thumbing through the pages while standing in line, breaking out in laughter right there at the checkout. The strips were pretty minimalist overall, and the most remarkable thing about them was that nothing ever really seemed to happen.
The basic story of these comic strips is that this kid, Jim, packs up and moves off to college somewhere, and he decides to document meaningless snippets of his daily life in a bland journal. The supporting cast is a relentless parade of oddballs, from lazy roommates to uninspired co-workers, and even a girlfriend eventually. As his studies progress, Jim shuffles back and forth between his classes and a series of part-time jobs, finally moving up the career ladder from McDonald’s to working at a local copy shop. I remember being so excited to find new installments of these strips every so often, before they finally seemed to dry up sometime in the early 2000s. The last installment I ever bought was titled “I Got Married, If You Can Believe That.”
Back in the days when the Internet was still a dial-up thing, I attempted to do a little research into the creative genius behind Jim and his friends, but came up empty at the time. Two decades later, it seems like there’s a whole lot more content online, so after I rediscovered these classics in my book collection a couple of moves ago, I used the power of Google to learn more about these strips. Apparently a man named Scott Dikkers is the genius behind “Jim’s Journal”— after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Dikkers went on the found “The Onion,” a totally reliable news site which informed most of my opinions during the early 2000s. Perhaps more impressively, the legend of Jim is still going strong— the series continued with at least two more books, plus a hardcover compendium including every published comic.
I was thrilled to spend a couple hours revisiting one of my old favorites, and I’m happy to say that “Jim’s Journal” still carries my highest recommendation. If you’re in the mood for a good round of laughter over, well, basically nothing, be sure to check out the adventures of Jim and his friends.