The Great British Bump-Off: Kill Or Be Quilt by John Allison and Max Sarin

Allison and Sarin were the team behind (the bulk of) the Giant Days comics series, which ran for a number of years and was pretty successful, as I understand it. Before and since, Allison has also had an array of related webcomics - he started with Bobbins in the late '90s, transitioned that to Scarygoround for longer stories this century, ran an offshoot called Bad Machinery involving two sets of mystery-solving kids for about a decade, and has most recently done offshoots like Steeple and Solver - which are set in the same fictional world as Giant Days, though the Giant Days cast has not reappeared as often as other Allison characters have.

For some bizarre reason, John Allison is not a giant of world comics, beloved by millions, even though he has been making wonderful, smart comics with zippy dialogue, quirky plots, and fascinating characters for around thirty years now. In my darker moments, I think of that as yet another indication that we are a fallen race, and that we simply can't have nice things. More realistically, Allison can be quite British, which may have limited his appeal to the segments of the American public who have trouble breathing with their mouths closed. (Oops, there I go again with the cynicism.)

What I might grandly call the mainstream of Allison's work generally involves each new series having a few characters from the last series, doing something new with a somewhat different cast. Thus Bobbins turned into Scarygoround, with a cluster of the same people, and then a couple of those people turned up as background characters in Bad Machinery. The Bad Machinery kids are young adults now, and so they're popping up in their own series - fan-favorite Lotty Grote in the print-comics series Wicked Things and then Solver stories on the web was first.

But her mystery-solving compatriot Shauna Wickle has also gotten a spin-off: first The Great British Bump-Off, in which the mystery-loving young woman competed on a reality show whose real-world analog you may be able to figure out from the title.

And, about a year later, Allison and artist Max Sarin (with colors by Sammy Borras and letters by Jim Campbell) brought Shauna back for a sequel: The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt. It keeps the title of the first miniseries for continuity, but Shauna is not on that reality show, or any reality show, this time, nor does anyone actually get bumped off.

Instead, Shauna has borrowed a narrowboat for the summer, to wend her way down the canals and rivers of Jolly Olde and have some fun minor adventures. Unfortunately, her first stop is in Barton-on-Wendle, where her lack of knot-tying acumen leads to the boat getting free and gaining a very expensive scratch down one side. So she needs to get a job to pay for that repair, which drags her into the intrigues of the two quilt shops of Barton.

The proprietors of those shops hate each other, and accuse each other of trying to sabotage their shops - which is plausible, since the EV of one of them bursts into flames right after Shauna arrives and the other's shop has an extensive flood caused by a deliberately-blocked drain soon afterward. Shauna works in both shops, as an undercover spy for both proprietors against both proprietors, as she tries to figure out the villain behind the mayhem.

It all comes to a head at the big annual quilt convention in town, and Shauna does solve the mystery - and bring the quilting community of Barton-on-Wendle back into harmony, with the aid of the traditional feisty old lady quilter - in the end. It is lighter-hearted than some of Allison's stories - as I noted above, nobody gets murdered in this one, and there's no supernatural element, unlike Bad Machinery - and has a lovely ending, including return visits by many of the Bad Machinery cast.

I tend to be slightly old-school with Allison: I think no one draws his comics quite as well as he does. But Max Sarin is a very close second, with similar body language and faces. And drawing is, of course, time-consuming - an Allison who writes more than he draws can make more comics, which is a major enticement. So now I just have to figure out how to make an audience of millions fall in love with all things Allisonian, so that he will have to increase production to fill the massive demand.

If you haven't yet read John Allison's work, perhaps you can help? Buy one of his books, or, if you prefer free samples first, either this page or this one offer lists of currently-available Allison projects on his website. And then tell all your friends, so they can tell tell all their friends....