Xavier, Doug and Tim are three single men living together and working in the same local restaurant - Xavier and Doug are short order cooks while Tim is a dishwasher, aspiring to become a cook. The book follows their attempts at dating in modern-day Canadia.
I normally think Nick Maandag is the jizz - The Follies of Richard Wadsworth is a great comic, really funny, and Harvey Knight’s Odyssey has its moments too - but his latest book Betas is just bad.
It’s a dull satire on the current political climate replete with irritating phrases like “cultural appropriation” and “toxic masculinity” as the guys date progressive women who are only about social justice. This leads to scenes like Xavier and his date having a consent app AI monitoring their intimate moments, or a club with a cartoonishly hawkish bouncer who enforces a no staring/no touching policy where the guys are surrounded by naked women that leads to one of Tim’s balls exploding from blueballs.
You get the point pretty early on - it’s political correctness gone mad!!1 - but Maandag continues to hammer home this very obvious message over and over throughout the book. Tim can’t get ahead because of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) hirings, despite his seniority at the restaurant (and his passivity because, hoho, he’s a beta), while their boss has to crawl around on all fours all day because of White Atonement Day (chortle, wot a beta).
This repetitive and thoroughly unentertaining story culminates in an extended and wearisome sequence where an offhand remark lands Xavier in front of a Human Rights Tribunal. What follows is page after page of uninteresting, unremarkable dialogue where common sense is roundly ignored to once more underline the obvious satire/it’s political correctness gone maddd1! again.
Maandag is a genuinely funny cartoonist - there’s many a chuckle to be had in Follies - but aside from one weird scene (Doug used to be a flasher and he thinks telling his date this information is appropriate?!) Betas is a punishingly unfunny read, despite its many attempts at comedy. Doug was too strange to find his failed dates funny, while I wasn’t sure what to make of poor pathetic Tim or his fate. As for Xavier, the book’s conclusion is very dark and points the finger at the other end of the political spectrum for extremist behaviour, which doesn’t feel convincing at all.
I agree with the viewpoint that all of this social justice and DEI shit can get out of hand, and maybe because I don’t live in Canada, where perhaps this stuff is more pronounced, I’m not as exasperated as the characters/Maandag might be (although I live in the UK and I get the impression that the perception of the UK is on the wacky PC side too even though it doesn’t feel like it is in everyday life); like most people, I’d like to think I’m on the side of common sense over identity politics slop.
But even if my biases were being confirmed, I still needed more than just that from a comic. Betas is missing interesting characters and a storyline that I cared about, as well as the usual Maandag humour and imagination. As it is, it’s such a tediously plodding and unrewarding read that I’m not sure even Maandag fans will get anything out of it. Really disappointing stuff.
To paraphrase The Dude: you’re not wrong, Nick, you’re just tiresome.
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