Check, Please! (webcomic)

Check, Please! is a 2013 webcomic written and illustrated by Ngozi Ukazu. The webcomic follows vlogger and figure-turned-ice hockey skater Eric "Bitty" Bittle as he deals with hockey culture in college, as well as his identity as a gay man. Ukazu provides fans of "Check, Please!" a variety of extra content through her Tumblr and a dedicated Twitter account, establishing a piece of transmedia storytelling to expand on worldbuilding. A large fan base has accumulated around "Check, Please!", and when Ukazu set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund the physical release of a first volume of the webcomic, she reached her goal with ease. In November 2019, Ukazu started up a Kickstarter to fund a "Check Please!" "chirpbook" containing Bitty's best tweets. The Kickstarter surpassed her goal within a single day.
In May 2017, Ukazu created an official website for "Check, Please". On April 7, 2020, book two of "Check, Please!" came out in bookstores, containing the comic's ending before it was posted on the website. Ukazu then started posting the remaining comics one a day onto the website ending on April 11 with the final comic which was itself entitled "Check, Please!". However, the Year Four comic "Parse" and the Extra comic "Pranks" were left as existing only in book two and have not been posted to either the Tumblr page or the official comic page.
Content.
The plot of "Check, Please!" follows Eric "Bitty" Bittle, vlogger and (initially) freshman student at the fictional Samwell University, a Massachusetts private university. Formerly a figure skating champion, Eric landed a scholarship through a co-ed ice hockey game after sending in film of his skating skills. The character joins the school's hockey team, and is an instant hit with his teammates due to his cheery personality, culinary skills, and kind nature. "Check, Please!" details his interactions with the hockey team as Bittle interacts with four players and the female team manager: a cocky man named Shitty, the inseparable friends Ransom and Holster, stern and skilled team captain Jack, and sarcastic team manager Lardo. Meanwhile, Eric has to navigate his own sexuality due to his budding crush on Jack and eventual relationship with him. The webcomic follows the four years Eric spends at Samwell University in "real-time", and the plot focuses on events such as coming out, school stress, collegiate and professional athletics, and graduation.
The story of "Check, Please!" is told through Eric's narration, though the webcomic features short intermissions titled "Hockey Shit with Ransom and Holster", in which characters explain the rules and terminology of hockey in a humorous manner. Each page of "Check, Please!" may be in a different art style, depending on what Ukazu sees fit. Ukazu provides a variety of extra content through her Tumblr, answering readers' questions to the characters of the webcomic through short response comics. "Check, Please!" pages are aligned horizontally, as to imitate the look of online videos appropriate for Eric's vlogs.
Ukazu makes use of transmedia storytelling by creating a Twitter account for her character Eric. Between updates, "Eric" writes tweets to fans of his vlog, an element Ukazu uses to interact with her readers and expand the narrative of the webcomic.
Plot.
In Year One, former figure skater Eric "Bitty" Bittle, joins the Samwell Men's Hockey Team where his cheerful personality and baking quickly wins over fellow teammates "Shitty" Knight, Adam "Holster" Birkholtz, Justin "Ransom" Oluransi and team manager Larissa "Lardo" Duan. However, Bitty displays a fear of checking, often curling up into a ball on the ice when someone tries, earning him the ire of team captain Jack Zimmermann, the son of hockey legend Bad Bob Zimmermann and who hopes to revive his own failed professional career following a public overdose that forced Jack to drop out of the NHL draft. Nevertheless, Jack helps Bitty through his fear with early morning checking practices while Bitty finds the courage to come out as homosexual. Jack and Bitty maintain a fraught relationship, complicated when Bitty scores in front of Bad Bob and is later put on Jack's line. During the playoffs, Bitty agrees to a risky play that leaves him with a mild concussion. Despite the team winning the game, they ultimately lose the playoffs. Bitty is given the room of graduating team goalie Johnson in the hockey team's frat house - the Haus - and reconciles with Jack, who is voted team captain again, before they part ways for the summer.
In Year Two, Bitty's fear of checking returns worse than ever due to his concussion and he faces potentially being cut from the team. However, Jack helps Bitty through his checking phobia once more and he retains his spot on the team. Joining the team in Bitty's sophomore year are goalie Christopher "Chowder" Chow and defensemen William "Dex" Poindexter and Derek "Nursey" Nurse. Bitty often finds himself mediating for the latter two who are constantly at each others throats despite being paired up on the ice due to their differing views caused by coming from two very different worlds. Now friends with Jack, who faces decisions regarding his own professional hockey future, while working together on a class project, Bitty realizes that he is falling in love with his team captain, feelings which only grow deeper as time goes on. The team makes it all the way to the NCAA Frozen Four, but ultimately loses their last game. At the end of the year, Ransom and Holster are elected co-captains while Jack, who signs with the Providence Falconers expansion team, buys a new oven to replace Bitty's old one after it breaks down for good. Jack and Shitty graduate with Shitty heading off for Harvard law school, but Bitty can't bring himself to admit his feelings to Jack. After a talk with his father, Jack rushes back to the Haus and surprises Bitty with a kiss before having to leave again.
In Year Three, Bitty and Jack have officially begun dating over the summer, but keep their relationship a complete secret to protect Jack's professional hockey career. Joining the team is excitable Tony "Tango" Tangredi, reserved Connor "Whiskey" Whisk and later new manager Denise Ford, a theater major, while Jack becomes close friends with Alexei "Tater" Mashkov, an extremely friendly and extroverted Russian player on the Falconers. Jack and Bitty struggle with the pressures of keeping their relationship a complete secret, Bitty in particular, leading to Bitty having an emotional breakdown. The two subsequently reveal their relationship to their closest friends who had already figured it out, but kept quiet out of respect. Jack and Bitty later reveal their relationship to Jack's parents and to the Falconers who also prove to be supportive, Tater in particular. SMH ultimately gets knocked out of the playoffs early, but Jack's career with the Falconers soars and he is elected alternate captain partway through his rookie year while Bitty is elected captain of the Samwell team for his senior year on a rare unanimous vote. Living with Jack through the summer, Bitty struggles with telling his parents who don't even know that he's gay yet, particularly Bitty's father Richard "Coach" Bittle with whom Bitty has always had a distant and difficult relationship. The Falconers win the Stanley Cup and Bitty and Jack share a kiss on center ice, coming out to the world.
In Year Four, Jack and Bitty have to deal with the aftermath of their public coming out which also revealed their relationship and Bitty's sexuality to his parents. After Coach Bittle comes to Samwell for Family Weekend, an explosive confrontation between father and son over Coach's apparent inability to recognize Bitty's relationship leads the two to reconcile and develop a closer relationship. Jack is invited to spend Christmas in Georgia with Bitty's family where, after some initial tension, Bitty's parents prove to be accepting and supportive of their relationship. At the same time, Bitty leads the Samwell Men's Hockey Team through a stellar season, joined by freshmen Johnathan "Hops" Hopper, River "Bully" Bullard and the Swedish Lukas "Louis" Landmann. Adding to Bitty's struggles, he is the first openly gay NCAA men's hockey captain, garnering Bitty attention from the media and fans that is both good and bad which Bitty takes as a chance to become a role model to those like himself. Tension between Dex and Nursey after they are forced to share a room causes Dex to move into the Haus basement while Bitty accidentally discovers Whiskey kissing a lacrosse player and is frustrated by Whiskey's constant rebuffing of Bitty's efforts to befriend him. The Samwell team makes it to the Frozen Four where Bitty skates through a massive check from a homophobic player on the other team and checks the other player so hard that they are both flung into the Samwell bench and Bitty loses a tooth; Samwell ends up winning the NCAA championship.
At the end of the comic, Bitty decides to give his room in the Haus to Whiskey, leading to the two finally talking about the kiss Bitty witnessed and Whiskey's struggles and Dex is elected the team's new captain. Bitty gives a class speech encouraging people to find a place where they can truly be themselves and accepts Jack's marriage proposal. After graduating, Bitty signs a deal to write his own cookbook and dedicates his vlog to covering his work on the cookbook with Jack as his first guest star.
Development.
"Check, Please!" is written and drawn by Ngozi Ukazu, a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Ukazu can't skate, but has a large amount of knowledge on hockey and hockey culture. She credits this to three months of research she did at Yale, as she was writing screenplay "Hardy", starring a hockey player who falls in love with his best friend. Ukazu describes "Check, Please!" as somewhat of a reaction to "Hardy", as her screenplay was rather depressing. "Hardy" featured themes of "addiction, externalized and internalized homophobia, the anxiety of graduating and feelings of failure." Ukazu described "Check, Please!"-protagonist Eric as "born to balance that out," and she suggested that "Check, Please!" conceived out of the question of whether "someone like Bitty [can] survive in a world like Hardy's."
Ukazu's ice hockey stories are inspired by narratives built around hockey players such as Jonathan Toews, Sidney Crosby, and Patrick Kane. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of "The Daily Dot" described Ukazu's relationship with her webcomic as though Ukazu herself is part of the fandom. Ukazu draws short comic strips that were described by Baker-Whitelaw as "fanfiction of her own creation," and Ukazu's constant interactions with fans of the webcomic on Tumblr accentuates this.
In 2015, Ukazu launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to publish a first volume for the webcomic. Due of its large fan base, "Check, Please!" quickly reached its initial goal of $15,000 USD, eventually making $74,000 USD. A second Kickstarter campaign was launched September 2016, raising nearly $400,000 on a $32,500 goal, becoming the most-funded webcomic on Kickstarter. In June 2017, it was announced that First Second Books would publish two volumes of the webcomic. A third Kickstarter campaign was begun in November 2019 so Ukazu could launch what she described as a "chirpbook," collecting Bitty's best tweets to round out the "Check Please!" story. Within a single day, Ukazu surpassed her original goal of $26,000. In April 2021, Ukazu started a final Kickstarter campaign to bring Year Four to print and quickly surpassed her original goal of $63,000.
Reception.
Chloe Goodwin of "The Rocky Mountain Collegian" described the story of "Check, Please!" as "addictive" and praised Ukazu as an "extraordinary artist". Goodwin mainly applauded Uzaku for her worldbuilding, describing the setting of "Check, Please!" as "a vast detailed universe." Writing for "The A.V. Club", Caitlin Rosberg described "Check, Please!" as a "passion project", praising "the clear care and love that goes into every page of content." Rosberg particularly enjoyed Ukazu's characterization, stating that each character has his own motivation and character quirks, even if they're all supposed to be "bros".
In 2017, "Check, Please!" won a Reuben Award in the "Online Comic: Long Form" category. In 2019, it won the Harvey Award for Digital Book of the Year, and an Ignatz award for Outstanding comic.