By Night, Vol. 1 by Allison, Larsen, and Stern

I am unabashedly a John Allison fan; I'll say that up front. I may not have been quite as much of a long-term Allison fan as some -- I discovered him around the time Scarygoround begat Bad Machinery, if I remember correctly -- but I've been reading his stuff for a decade or two and writing about it here for nearly as long.

So if I say that his new-ish series By Night, whose first volume I just read, is slightly disappointing, I want to be clear that I mean that I am not gushing about it in the manner I usually do for Allison projects. It's fun and zippy and quirky and interesting; it's a good comic. It's just not as Allisonian (at least to me) as I hoped.

So, now that I've just deflated the whole thing before I even started, what is this By Night comic, anyway?

Well, it's written by Allison, as I implied. Art is by Christine Larsen (probably best known for a stint on the Adventure Time comic; possessor of an awesome website with lots of excellent art) with colors by Sarah Stern (whose website is only very slightly less awesome). It began in mid-2018 and seems to have ended with issue #12.

It's about two young women, former friends from school who meet again in their dead-end town in their mid-twenties and go on a quirky supernatural adventure together, eventually pulling in a larger cast of oddballs from that town. So far, it sounds very Allisonian.

But the town in question in By Night is Spectrum, South Dakota, and Allison is exceptionally British. (One might even say quintessentially so.) There are other parts of By Night that made my editor's red-pen hand twitch, but the core of my uneasiness is that Allison's dialogue and phrasing here is often not quite American, while also not quite being as sprightly and clever as his usual. He is definitely aiming to write Americans, and it was a grand experiment...I just think that it doesn't play to his strengths.

Anyway, Jane Langstaff is the studious, serious one and Heather Meadows is the free-wheeling wild child (as we have seen often before in Allison's work). They meet up again in this dying town, and Heather convinces Jane to go along on her mad scheme to investigate the newly-unprotected Charleswood Estate, which was once the commercial heart of the town, back before its founder and driving force disappeared mysteriously. They go there, and discover a portal to an alternate world populated with fantasy creatures and various dangers, wandering in and out a couple of times, guided by a goofball local, and...well, that's about it in these four issues.

I assume there's a larger story about that mysterious founder, and probably Deep Secrets about the fantasy world, and these issues have plenty of plot, but it doesn't end up going in ways that makes much of a story. Things happen, then other things happen, and a few more people learn about the portal -- but what, if anything, any of that means isn't clear at this point.We also don't see much of the fantasy world; the story tends to cut away from it to go back to our world -- either because Allison is more interested in the real-world end, because he's setting up for a bigger reveal later, or just because, I can't say.

There's one more collection available, of the next four issues, and I expect a third will be forthcoming to finish it up. (Well, maybe I hope it will be forthcoming; from the publication schedule, I would have expected it last fall.) I plan to see where this goes; it's not a long story, and the creators are all doing good work. So I reserve the right to later say that I've changed my mind, and this is just as awesome as other Allison works. That would be a nice outcome, actually: I want to love things.

If you're less of an Allison fan than I am, I wouldn't pick this as your entry point. Giant Days or his webcomics (which have the advantage of being free) are much better for that. But if you want to see how he handles Americans: here you go.