Specifically, the minicomics Post and Quit follow a tour by a band that spun off from JITB's Pitch Girl: an "Electro Booty Jamz" band called Rayd Titties that was comprised of guitarist Corbin, DJ Jennet (another long-running character in the Enricoverse) and bass player Becky Vice, a breakout supporting character who earned her own spinoff miniseries while Enrico was still in the midst of finishing the main comic. Each of the issues is a contemplative inner monologue from the point of view of a different character, striking a very different tone from JITB's jittery, larger-than-life feel. It's obvious that Enrico thought a lot about structure in these comics. As always, he let the story dictate a lot of the format, as the panel structure varied on virtually every page.
Other than the narrative structure, the most notable thing about these comics is the way that Enrico obviously set out to challenge himself as a draftsman. Most of JITB was set in clubs, cafes, bars, etc, with lots of talking heads. In Post and Quit, he draws the backgrounds that one might see in exploring the Pacific Northwest. Lots of nature and lots of weird roadside attractions; it's obvious that he did some research with regard to the latter. Post, Corbin's story, deals with a character who was starved for love and stability in JITB as she tries to comes to terms with the way her old band broke up and how lead singer Bianca left their lives. In this story, a number of the characters consider where they've wound up in life as they start to get older, with some neatly tracking it into their personal narratives and others, like Corbin, who find themselves facing a lot of dark thoughts late at night.
Post's title is a play on words in several respects. It refers to the postcards and letters that Corbin is sending to her friend, zinester and close friend of Bianca, Alec Supernova (an Aaron Cometbus stand-in) through the post office. It's also a reference to this being post-band breakup and part of a transition to a different kind of living. If the ending of JITB made this transition seem easy, these minicomics reveal what happens after the honeymoon period. She can't help but reflect on her life in the old band and how it ended, miserable as it was. There are references to Bianca's imaginary "spirit guide" that she used to talk to and an encounter with a young woman at the end of the tour who was escaping a bad situation in a small town and reminded Corbin very much of a young Bianca.
Corbin is the sort of character who drifts from one situation to another, rather than going out and seizing something in the way that Bianca did. Corbin doesn't just wonder what Bianca's doing; instead, her musings are her way of trying to understand Bianca as well as trying to understand her own motives, especially since she slowed down on her drinking and casual sex. She doesn't want Bianca back in her life, telling her what to do, but there's an almost manic certainty that Bianca possesses something that she simply doesn't comprehend. Enrico himself wrote that by the end of JITB, Bianca was the character whom he understood the least, even if early on she was very much an Enrico stand-in. Time and the vicissitudes of life have a way of changing one's perspective. The key at the end of the comic is that Jennet kisses Bianca, after years of insisting that she wasn't attracted to her but was still her best friend. There is a lot to unpack there, but I sense that will come in Jennet's chapter.
Quit sees things from Becky Vice's point of view. More than anyone, Becky is a character whom at a very young age understood that life was a series of trade-offs, and the choices she made offered her an enormous amount of independence but very little in the way of emotional security. For Becky, this story is one about beginning to feel the weight of time and aging and understanding that even the most independent person needs to have a support system as they grow older. When the tour starts, Becky finds an unopened pack of cigarettes and vows that this will be her last pack, as a sort of tour companion. It's an understanding that she has to start making other trade-offs now in deference to growing older. If she gave up on getting married and having children as a trade-off for having full control of her time, then starting to live a little healthier was the trade-off for giving up a genuine pleasure in smoking.
Becky's thoughts are in big block print, fitting for a larger-than-life character such as she. She's an admirable character in many ways for facing up to her own failures and reminding herself that she chose this life to lead when she starts to get down. At the same time, she's human. She's lonely sometimes, no matter how satisfying being a performer might be. More to the point, she's not just lonely--she chooses to isolate herself, which is very different from both Corbin and Jennet. She confronts that aspect of herself as well, vowing to also get in touch with Alec after the tour. Becky is a glorious marble maze of a person, constantly shifting herself back and forth in an effort to keep the ball rolling and avoid pitfalls. While there will always be something of the hedonist in her, she's a pleasure-seeker who's now starting to understand of certain things that had perhaps escaped her in the past.
In terms of the art, Enrico's distinctly stylized technique is at its peak here. There's a clarity and confidence in his line that wasn't always there, when he would simply fill panels up with detail. He makes great use of negative space in both of these comics, as committing to do a story about the outdoors forced him to do so. His characters were sometimes so stylized as to look stiff, but his line has also become much more fluid. He still likes to throw a lot of eye pops at the reader for comedic or referential effect, but they're less jumbled now. These comics are downbeat and hopeful, restless and realistic, and uncompromising in writing narratives about characters while admitting that people's lives are rarely clean or simple enough to be framed in narrative terms.
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