Rayne Summers is a douche. No, really. He’s the kind of asshole you’d probably just want to punch in the face if you met him in real life. He’s got a high-income job, is cocky as hell and women are constantly falling all over him, even as he continuously looks for new sexual conquests.
Yet, the more I read of Velcro Pants are Awesome, volume two of the Least I Could Do web comic’s print edition, I actually kind of started to like the guy. He’s a scoundrel, yes, but in the same vein as Indiana Jones or Han Solo. It’s clear that this trait is on purpose, as Rayne is also a huge nerd (as I imagine authors Ryan Sohmer and Lar deSouza are).
So instead of coming off like a total bastard, over the course of the book Rayne becomes like a close friend that you’re glad never chose a frat to join and still loves to get drunk and hit the town or just play video games with you.
Having never read the comic before, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading Velcro Pants. At first glance, a comic about an arrogant, perpetually sex-driven 20-something and his high jinks doesn’t sound like it’d be all that great to read.
But, surprisingly, Least I Could Do has two things going for it: A refreshingly honest approach to sex (or at least talking about sex) and a continuous bombardment of pop-cultural jokes about anything from Star Trek and Battlefield 1942 to Apple commercials and porn stars. There are also a couple Keira Knightley boob grabs.
There’s even a particularly good reference to Calvin and Hobbes, which, at the very least, makes me respect the creators of Least I Could Do a lot more than I might have—it shows they know their stuff and appreciate elevated work in newspaper format comics.
The authors of the strip also aren’t afraid to make jokes about blow jobs, masturbation or even necrophilia. This is less like a teenage sex comedy than it sounds, thankfully.
Actually, minus a lot of cursing, the dialogue here isn’t much different from an exchange you might overhear between two 20-somethings bitching about sex or women, which gives the comic a demographic limited to that age range.
It also means there are plenty of nerdy things Rayne does, like imagining his Audi is a Transformer or building a house resembling Minas Tirith (alongside numerous obligatory references to Star Wars).
You might say overall, the strip is like Penny Arcade if it weren’t solely focused on video games, or a far raunchier and slightly nerdier Questionable Content. It ain’t The New Yorker, but there is a certain audience that will appreciate this humor. Some of it’s even pretty funny!
Which is fine, for online. But unless you really like the art style, want to support the artist—which is generally a good thing—or would want to read this again, there’s not much point in owning a print edition of Least I Could Do.
Like just about all daily Web comics, their story arcs are fairly short and there are plenty of one-off strips, but all of the content here is also readily available online at www.leasticoulddo.com, where you can read everything the authors have written since 2003 for free.
It’s a funnier comic than I thought it was going to be, but do yourself a favor: save a tree and read the e-version. That way, at the very least, you don’t have to deal with that ultra-annoying long rectangular book format used by few comics aside from Garfield. Ick.