Review by Karl Verhoven

Tedward may have super cool hair, but his repressed libido almost guarantees relationship failures. Presenting dates with a non-disclosure agreement devised by his mother and his collection of dolls also contributes. Strangely, Tedward doesn’t seem to have any trouble arranging a date in the first place, but once he’s on them things rapidly go wrong.

Josh Pettinger has absolutely no sympathy for his character, who’s put through seat-squirmingly embarrassing circumstances of ridicule playing on his repressions. In-store intercom announcements of condom fittings, a job cleaning the sperm off orgy participants and meeting his elderly neighbour just as he’s considering entering the sex shop are just some of the humiliations awaiting Tedward.

Pettinger delivers these pitiless situations in a series of short stories drawn in a simple, flat and unpolished underground style, brightly coloured and accentuating discomfort. Whatever the situation, Tedward looks awkward, and when the stress accelerates he’s seen breaking out into sweat, never more so than when he’s coerced into taking a sauna. Given the variation in the art, the strips collected here were obviously produced over a fair period, and the initial style gives way to a more polished version, with Daniel Clowes an influence.

Just as the art heightens the humour, so does the dialogue, which Pettinger crafts exquisitely. We’re not sure if Tedward even realises his new best friend is gay and coming on to him, or whether he’s just embarrassed at the idea of being naked in a home-made sauna. His excuse for not removing his coat, though, is masterful: “My body retains an immense amount of moisture and I have incredible temperature regulation”.

Sexual embarrassment as a punchline is eventually replaced by Pettinger skewering with sharpened precision a resolutely ordinary life characterised by a lack of ambition and almost total naivety. Each successive corner Tedward backs into has a more embarrassing outcome. It culminates with Button Willow’s sixth annual Papier Maché Tracy Island competition, featuring a grotesque Thunderbirds-related dream and a surprising pulling together of earlier plot threads.

Sometimes surreal, and consistently absurd, Tedward is a classic bathroom book.