Super Trash Clash by Edgar Camacho

Dul loves videogames - we see her first in this story as a young woman, maybe mid-twenties, and spend most of the time with her as a pre-teen, but that's the one thing we know from the beginning and hold on to as central. Her hard-working single mother, on the other hand, has no time or energy to spare for frivolity like that, and worries that Dul is spending too much time on them. (She isn't: that's clear. She's a hard worker, doing well in school. She has a hobby, and it's '90s fighting games, which is entirely reasonable, because it the flashback section is set in the '90s.)

Super Trash Clash is the name of Dul's story. It's also the name of a game she gets, unexpectedly, from her mother, for her birthday. Unfortunately, the game she wanted - the good one - is Super Encounter Champions 2. Super Trash Clash, the game, is famously lousy.

(Super Encounter Champions is Street Fighter, more or less. Super Trash Clash looks more like Bad Dudes on levels from The Simpsons, and made me wonder if I was the crazy one for being a huge Bad Dudes fan who never played any Street Fighter games. On the other hand, Trash may also be referencing some famously bad real game that I'm forgetting right now.)

Dul plays the game with her best friend Misa, but it is lousy. So they decide to trade it, and get Super Encounter Champions 2, the one they really want to play. That works, and they play the good game and everything is fine.

Until, very soon after, Dul has an attack of conscience. Her mother went out of the way to get her that specific game, and probably remembers its name. Dul really wants to swap back - but Trash is very rare, and the copy she traded away has, she quickly finds, gone through several other hands already.

I haven't done more than mention the frame story, which is small: adult Dul starts us off by finding a copy of Trash, buying it, playing it, and then flashing back to her childhood for most of the story. It's not a big frame, but it is important: this was a major event for Dul.

Edgar Camacho (whose first book was Onion Skin) tells all of that in a quirkily specific drawing style - his eyes are particularly interesting, expressive and believable while sometimes being at odd angles and not quite matched - that references a lot of '90s videogames along the way. It's the kind of thing that gets called a "love letter" to the underlying material, which is true here: I think Camacho loves these games as much as Dul herself does, and that comes through in the story.