Check, Please: #Hockey

Check, Please: #Hockey (2018) is the first of two published volumes of a long-running sports webcomic by the same name that started in 2013. Written and illustrated by Ngozi Ukazu, the coming-of-age story follows freshman Eric “Bitty” Bittle as he navigates the college hockey landscape and comes to terms with his identity as a young gay man. The webcomic runs for all four years of Bitty’s time at university; the first volume contains the first half of the series (freshman and sophomore years), with the second volume* to cover the other half of the series (junior and senior years).

Bitty is a former competitive ice-skating junior champion from a small town in Georgia, who attends Samwell University in Massachusetts on an athletic scholarship. His hobbies include vlogging and baking pies, and although he played hockey in high school, he is terrified of getting checked. He also must make friends with his new teammates, Shitty (no one knows his real name); the duo Holster and Ransom; Jack, the captain and son of a hockey legend, who has a lot to prove; Lardo, the diminutive female team manager; and Coach Hall. Interspersed throughout Bitty’s narrative are short interjections (called “Hockey Shit”) from Holster and Ransom, who explain hockey terminology and culture to the nonprofessional reader.

The freshman year starts as Bitty is in his dorm room, excited to be at college. His initial expectations are quickly dashed—his new team has lamentable hygiene, the players rough-and-tumble sorts, unlike Bitty. He also is terrified of being checked: he tends to panic and assume the fetal position on the ice, to the consternation of his teammates and coaches. Jack, the disgraced son of famous hockey player Bob Zimmerman, tries to help Bitty acclimate to checking with an impromptu early morning “check clinic” at the ice rink in order to help Bitty conquer his fear. Bitty improves his skills, and during a game against Yale, Bitty scores the winning shot.



Near the end of the fall semester, Bitty comes out as gay to his teammates. The son of a high school football coach, he is nervous about it (he grew up in a small town in Georgia and so it is implied that he has experience with homophobia), but Shitty tells him it is a non-issue, that the team has his back. The year ends with the team going to the playoffs in the spring, but not advancing to the finals. Bitty gets checked and a concussion. However, afterward, he is given an award for embodying team spirit and enthusiasm, and Jack is once again voted in as team captain for the next year. Bitty spends most of the first year convinced that Jack hates him, but by the end, they are tentative friends.

In the second year, the focus moves away from hockey and more toward the players, especially Jack and Shitty, who are both seniors and graduating at the end of the year. Shitty is preparing for law school, and Jack is working with agents to try to go pro in the National Hockey League. Bitty moves into the frat Haus, where most of the hockey players live, and he immediately begins planning to clean up the place to make it habitable. The rest of the players are excited for him to move in, because of Bitty’s cooking and baking skills.

However, on the ice, Bitty’s terror of being checked has not abated—if anything, it’s worse. He passes out twice in one week when a teammate brushes by him a little too roughly on the ice. The coaches take him aside and tell him that if he wants to stay on the team (and keep his scholarship) he must conquer his fear of checking. Jack takes the time to help Bitty get over his fear of checking, and in return, Bitty helps Jack with a baking project and realizes that he has fallen in love with him. At the end of the fall semester, one of Jack’s former hockey partners, Kent Parson, drops in during a kegger. Parse is one of the top hockey players in the country and has the stellar career Jack wants and could have had if he hadn’t overdosed on anxiety medication and lost his chances. It is also heavily suggested that Jack and Parse used to be more than just friends and teammates.



In the spring, Shitty learns that he has been accepted into Harvard Law, and Jack signs a contract with Providence in Rhode Island. They are leaving school, but at least they aren’t going far. The team makes it to the final four playoffs once again, but once again, they don’t make it to the finals. Nevertheless, Holster and Ransom are elected team co-captains for the following year. The spring semester is a time of upheaval and saying goodbye to Shitty and Jack. The team turns out for their graduation, and before he leaves, Jack kisses Bitty goodbye, which absolutely shocks Bitty because all the while he thought Jack was straight and that his feelings were unrequited.

One of the interesting differences between the webcomic and the graphic novel series is in the polish. Readers of the webcomic watch Ukazu’s skill and art evolve over the years, from black-and-white panels to more sophisticated full-color panels. The graphic novel revises the original black-and-white panels and publishes them in full color to smooth out the style for more conformity. The first volume of the duology has been nominated for at least three awards: The Harvey Award for Digital Book of the Year, the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, and the Goodreads Choice Award for Graphic Novels & Comics. Fans of the anime series Yuri on Ice! (following professional men’s ice skaters) and C. S. Pacat’s Fence comics (following elite teenaged fencers), would be interested in this series, for the combination of delightfully well-rounded characters, sports, and LGBT inclusivity. However, there is a fair amount of swearing throughout Check, Please that might upset some readers.

*At time of summary-writing, Vol. 2 is forthcoming in 2020, but the entire webcomic is accessible full-text online, for free.