The Complete Stay as you are.
The Complete Stay as you are.
When the emperor wore plaid and people still hung phones on walls, Brad Yung’s weekly comic strip Stay as you are. was a beacon to the slacker generation that bathed in irony and rejected everything else.
A true underground underdog, the strip appeared in photocopied zines, alternative weeklies, small-town newspapers, and a few national magazines. Too savage, too biting, its targets too spread out and numerous to mention, the strip knew it was never going to achieve mainstream success and didn’t care.
The Complete Stay as you are. honours these remnants of a simpler, yet more complicated time. A review once called Yung the world’s first meta-ironist — if that’s true, he should probably apologize. But he won’t.
Review quotes:
“Yung’s Stay as you are. mini-zines might just be the ultimate Gen-X underground comic. … Collected at last, the zine is still despairingly hilarious…. Far from an exercise in nostalgia, Stay as you are. is like putting on an old favourite album and finding that its subtle tunes and painfully true lyrics affect you in surprisingly new ways.”
— Broken Pencil
“Stay as you are. was a true underground underdog, a seminal alternative Vancouver comic strip. … The Complete Stay as you are. faithfully honours the memories of a simpler, ironic, complicated time. The strip took a unique look at the culture from the late 90s into the 2010s.”
— Columbia Journal
“Yung’s series is more than a time capsule: it captures a Generation X mindset. … Irony was the generational currency, from Seinfeld to the dialogue that Kevin Smith built his career on. Yung pairs this cool detachment with a sarcastic takedown of his own generation’s artistic output.”
— Quill & Quire