Book-A-Day 2018 #140: Giant Days: Not On The Test Edition Vols. 1 & 2 by John Allison, Lissa Treiman, and Max Sarin

Once upon a time there was a town named Tackleford, somewhere in the bits of England that Americans like me understand only dimly -- not near or part of London at all, not even defined by being near or part of some other UK city we've heard of. Cartoonist John Allison set his webcomic Bobbins there, telling a loose skein of related stories about the people in that fictional town.

Time went on, and Allison reconfigured Bobbins into Scarygoround, to feature longer stories and shift the cast of characters somewhat. One of the major characters of Scarygoround was Esther De Groot, a pale teen and half of one of Scarygoround's great love stories.

But time continued to go on, and Allison set his stories in time. So Scarygoround, in its turn, ended, and, as part of that ending, Esther left the main narrative to go off to Sheffield University -- name changed slightly, I think, to underline it is not exactly the University of Sheffield -- and appeared in three self-published print comics by Allison under the title Giant Days. But Allison's major follow-up project focused on a new, younger generation of Teckleford folks: Bad Machinery, in which six originally-tweens solve somewhat supernatural mysteries and take the piss out of each other.

And time? Yeah, it kept going on. And Allison came back to Esther, and Giant Days, with what was originally planned to be a six-issue miniseries drawn by Lissa Treiman. Today I'm looking at two big hardcovers that reprint the first sixteen issues of that now-ongoing series -- issue 38 has just hit as I write this -- so once again one of Allison's creations has surprised him and us and gone in unexpected new directions. (Which is, obviously, entirely a good thing -- repeated serendipity is something to look for in a creator.)

Treiman left the book after those first six issues, and was replaced first by Max Sarin alone and then Sarin inked by Liz Fleming. Whitney Cogar has provided colors for all of these issues. (And, yes, all of the creators besides Allison are women -- Giant Days is a story about women, something unusual in the boy's club of print comics.) In the way of comics, Giant Days was first collected into paperbacks, with four issues each -- and then, when those were successful, two paperbacks were jammed together along with additional material (so far, one of Allison's self-published Giant Days stories in each, plus variant covers and sketch pages) to make the Giant Days: Not On the Test Edition. Volume One came out last summer and Volume Two in January, with a third big hardcover scheduled for November.

The two books are subtitled with a semester: Fall and Winter. Since actual British universities generally only have Fall and Spring semesters, the titling may be slightly off -- and I'm curious to see how they'll handle the second and third year without being completely confusing. But, since the end of this second book seems to be close to the end of the actual second semester at Sheffield, my current estimate is that with three years of college, two semesters a year, and eight issues per semester-book, Giant Days could potentially run to 48 issues. (If a year has three or four "semesters," that will stretch things out somewhat, obviously.) Since all of Allison's previous projects actually ended, I'd expect Giant Days to run its course and stop as well.

I've already written about all of the pieces re-collected in these two books -- the original paperback volumes one and two and three and four -- as well as writing longish posts about the related Allison projects Scarygoround and Bad Machinery (collections one and two and three and four and five and six and seven), and this post is already quite long, even without actually mentioning anything that happens in these books. But let me explain..no, no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

At Sheffield, Esther (goth, drama magnet) quickly fell in with Susan (studious, sensible) and Daisy (home-schooled, innocent), who live on the same hallway. Male hangers-on comprise Ed Gemmel (quiet, nice, at first infatuated with Esther) and McGraw (good at building things, has a history with Susan). They do the usual young-people-in-college things -- studying, dating, fighting corrupt student administrations, taking tests, attending balls, making films for a contest, obsessing about where to live the next year -- with Allisonian twists on them.

It's good; it's mostly focused on women and their lives and is a great entry-point into the larger John Allison universe, since the quirky supernatural stuff is almost entirely absent. Allison writes great dialogue and sets up naturalistic but silly plots, while first Treiman and then Sarin (and then Sarin + Fleming) give it an expressive, open art style that rhymes with Allison's own work but doesn't try to imitate.

Look: if you read comics about anything like the real world, particularly the parts of the real world that actually have believable women in them, you need to check out Allison. And Giant Days is one of the best, easiest ways to do that. So do it.

Book-A-Day 2018 #366: Giant Days: Not on the Test Edition, Vol. III by Allison, Sarin & Fleming

Yes, this is day #366 of last year's Book-A-Day. I've run over; so sue me. As of today, it looks like Book-A-Day 2018 will extend to number 379 on the 14th.

You really don't need to know anything about creator John Allison's extended Tackleford universe to read and love Giant Days -- the connection is very loose and tenuous, and I don't think Giant Days has ever actually shown us Tackleford. But I still ran through the whole world-building story when I wrote about the first two hardcover omnibus collections this May, so people might think that Giant Days is hard to get into.

It isn't. There are these three friends at a fictional college somewhere in England: Esther, Daisy, and Susan. They are written with style and verbal flair, and drawn with panache and energy. Their adventures are just that little bit bigger and more exciting than actual life. They are quirky, distinctive people who are fun to read about. You are missing out on something wonderful if you don't read about them.

Which brings me to Giant Days: Not on the Test Edition, Vol. 3, which collects issues 17-24 of the comics series. The stories here take place at the end of their first year of college, over the summer, and the beginning of the fall term.

(This is a British school, so they seem to be on a trimester system and on track to graduate after only three years. There may be Americans who will be completely thrown by this, but I expect they're already cowering in a cool dark room right now, utterly terrified by the oddities of life.)

As usual with Giant Days, it's character-based humor with everything turned up just a couple of notches from real life -- and you can get to know the characters through any of the stories, so you don't actually need to start at the beginning. (That's obviously the best place to start, but it's not required.) So the three women have further love complications, and house complications when their second-year house rental turns out less nice than they'd expected. There's a plagiarism scandal, that music festival, a horrible housemate for McGraw and Ed (their male friends), new unpleasant neighbors, a brush with the criminal underworld, and an extended visit from Susan's father.

The big draws are Allison's sprightly, crackling dialogue and the energetic art from Max Sarin (pencils), Liz Fleming (inks), and Whitney Cogar (colors), all of which add up to a thoroughly entertaining, wonderful set of stories about a group of quirky, believable people.

Also included is the third (of three) self-published all-Allison Giant Days stories in the back of this book, which Allison made a couple of years before starting the min series with collaborators. [1] So, to my mind, not only is Giant Days one of the very best comics series out there, but the Not on the Test Editions are the best way to read that series. Period.


[1] Some might say they are prequels; those people are wrong. Prequels are works made later but set in an earlier time period. Works made earlier are just works made earlier.

Wicked Things by John Allison, Max Sarin, and Whitney Cogar

I have to assume the plan - or maybe the hope - was that this would replicate Giant Days's success, and turn into a long-running comics series. And maybe it still will: I get the sense that the days when a publisher could say, mid-run, "hey, the numbers are great, and we're just going to keep on going with this book!" are now over, and were even basically over in 2013 when Giant Days started. So there could be another Wicked Things series: we're still in early days, since this paperback came out (checks planned posting day) last month.

Anyway, Wicked Things. It collects a six-issue series from 2020 about Charlotte "Lottie" Grote, the biggest character from writer John Allison's Bad Machinery webcomic, who also made a few appearances in his popular Giant Days comics series. He's joined here by the core end-Giant Days crew, with Max Sarin on art and Whitney Cogar on colors.

(I pause here to mention that I've seen reviews of Wicked Things issues that refer to Lottie as a fan-favorite who first appeared in Giant Days and thus afterward appeared in Bad Machinery, which betrays an essential lack of understanding that time is a thing that goes forward.)

Anyway (once again), Lottie has spent the few years since Bad Machinery ended still solving odd crimes in Tackleford, even if the rest of the Mystery Tweens gave up and went on to more normal teen lives. As this book opens, she's on her way to the gala Solver Awards in London, where's she's nominated in the Teen Detective of the Year (16-18) category. She is also accompanied by Little Claire, the only other character old fans will recognize.

And, as the reader settles in, expecting a biting satire of comics awards and related stuff, the whole story shifts: Lottie wins her award, but isn't there, because she's being framed for a murder.

Well, attempted murder. Luckily for her, the victim is alive. Unluckily for her, the victim is also in a coma, and unable to report that Lottie is not the (attempted) murderess. And one of the top coppers on the case is convinced enough by her protests of innocence - no one else is; it's a very good frame - to put her on a kind of work-release to "assist the police with their inquiries."

In this case, that means spending her nights in a kind of halfway house, locked in with a few other possibly-reformed criminals and monitored by ankle bracelet, and spending her days at the cop shop making tea and being ignored by the actual police as she spins crazy but generally-correct theories about the crimes those cops are investigating. She does remarkably little investigating of the actual murder she's accused of, possibly because Claire is digging into that (not well) and possibly because she's more excited by the other crimes the cops around her are working on.

It does all come together in the end, more or less. (The moment where Lottie is cleared of the attempted murder seemed less than definitive to me.) Lottie's crime-fighting instincts are nearly always correct, but nearly always unheeded, which is amusing but would need to be adjusted if Wicked Things turns into an ongoing series.

And it reminded me that Allison keeps doing big action stuff - Scarygoround was full of it, and Bad Machinery measured it out more carefully in bursts at the end of each case - but not always successfully in an American floppy-comics context. (It's one of the things that I thought made his By Night, which also tries not-entirely-successfully to translate his essential Britishness to a middle-American setting, not as strong as it could have been: he's just not the guy for the big fight scene.) It works reasonably well here, but Wicked Things, if it returns, would be less slice-of-life and "bigger" than Giant Days was, so I do wonder if his current audience would be as interested.

I would love myself more Lottie Grote, especially on a regular basis, so I hope they would as well. Globe-trotting teenage detectives - or even mid-England-trotting - would be a lot of fun. Let's hope Allison, Sarin and Cogar get to do more.

Giant Days, Vols. 11-14 by John Allison, Max Sarin, & Whitney Cogar

I go on a lot here about endings: how important they are, that it's not a story without an ending, and especially that comics have been allergic to endings for several decades now, much to their detriment.

But that still doesn't mean I'm happy to see a long-running story that I like come to its ending. I get that "what do you mean, there isn't any more?" feeling. It's just that I know it has to happen.

Giant Days is now over. It was the story of three young women at a particular point in their lives, while they were undergraduates at the fictional Sheffield University, and undergraduate life in the UK only lasts three years. Writer John Allison and his artistic collaborators - originally Lissa Treiman as the primary artist, then Max Sarin for most of the run, and Whitney Cogar on colors the whole time - spun out fifty-four issues of the main series and a handful of one-offs over the course of four years of comics, so the comic took more time than the actual life would have.

Now, some artistic teams would have kept Esther, Susan, and Daisy in college for decades or longer - if it was an American comic book or syndicated newspaper strip, they could still be in their first year until at least 2050, or the heat death of the universe, whichever came first. But - and, again, this is important - stories don't work like that. You can put out product in which nothing important ever changes, in which no one ever grows or learns, but you're a hack and you know know it. Allison and Treiman and Sarin and Cogar are not hacks, and they want to tell stories that matter about real people that change.

So this was inevitable: they would graduate, their days at Sheffield would end. It doesn't mean we won't get more stories about some of them, in some permutation, in the future: remember that Esther was a major character in Allison's webcomic Scarygoround for nearly a decade even before Giant Days. But this time is over.

For most people, it ended a couple of years ago. I'm just catching up on the back quarter of the series now, since I finally gave up waiting for more of the Not on the Test hardcovers to emerge. So I read Volumes Eleven and Twelve and Thirteen and Fourteen all together, a year's worth of comics in a day or two. It's not a bad way to read an episodic humor comic, I have to say: stories based on characters get better with familiarity with the characters, so reading a big chunk all at once can be really resonant.

I'm not talking about the specific issues here, because there's more than a dozen of them, and that's really not important. Each one is a small story, one moment in this larger story, and they add up together to Giant Days, all fifty-some of them. They're all good, they're all stories, they center on various parts of the cast - mostly Esther and Susan and Daisy, but some McGraw and even enough Ed and Nina to make me wish I got a lot more of that. (Hey, John Allison! If you randomly read this, Ed & Nina in the Big Smoke together could be fun, at least for a short-run thing. Maybe other people than me would even like it!)

I read these because I wanted to know if Giant Days ended well, and it does. (Well, also because I was enjoying it a lot, and why give up in the middle on something you like?) If you've managed to avoid Giant Days for the last six years, I don't know what I can say here to convince you: it might just be not to your taste. But it's a smart, fun, well-written, colorful, amusing, true, real, occasionally laugh-out-loud series of stories about people I think you will recognize and like, and if that's not what you're looking for I frankly have to worry about you.

Giant Days, Vol. 7 by Allison, Sarin, Fleming & Cogar

I took a nearly two-year hiatus from reading Giant Days, patiently waiting for the publisher, Boom! Box, to put out more hardcover Not on the Test compilations. But as it has been two years, and no further hardcovers are showing up even on forward publishing plans, I have to assume that Boom! Box have done the all-too-common publishing thing of realizing Plan X was not feasible/profitable/possible and quietly scrapping it without telling anyone.

So I'm back to the trade paperbacks with Giant Days, Vol. 7, blinking in the light and trying to remember who everyone is and what happened in the last issues I read around Christmas 2018.

(See my previous Giant Days posts: Volumes one, two, three, and four, Not on the Test 1 & 2, Not on the Test 3, Extra Credit.)

This volume has stories set during the Christmas break of their second year (of three, in the British style) and through the dark days of winter immediately following. As usual, each issue has a self-contained story -- Giant Days has always been a series easy to drop in and out of, to pick up at basically any point. Sure, it's better if you know who the characters are and what they've gone through, but the action of any issue stands on its own; you never end up in Part 8 of the Great Grade-Fixing Scandal plotline.

So here we have an issue about the holidays, mostly with Susan and her bevvy of sisters, an issue mostly about McGraw and Ed's horrible housemate and his MMORPG love, an issue in which Ester's new enthusiasm is fighting The Man (specifically The Man as exemplified in a big corporation that owns franchised grocery stores), and an issue in which there are mysterious and frightening noises in the garage attached to the women's apartment, which exacerbates other interpersonal-problems but is solved via Cute Overload.

That should be vague enough that those of you who haven't read these issues won't be spoiled, I hope.

As always, John Allison writes zippy, fun dialogue and creates fully-rounded, deeply imperfect people. The artists (Max Sarin pencils, Liz Fleming inks, Whitney Cogar colors) give it a great dynamism, pushing the humor levers just far enough but not too far -- this is a funny series about people, rather than a pure humor book full stop.

So, yeah, this is still great, and I have seven more books like this to catch up on. Luckily, my local library system has all but one of them, so there will likely be a series of shorter and shorter posts about further Giant Days volumes over the next few months.

Giant Days: Vols. 8-10 by Allison, Sarin, and Cogar (with Madrigal)

Giant Days ended a little more than a year ago, which eventually spurred me to stop waiting for the probably-never-coming fourth hardcover collection and actually read the back half of the story in the paperbacks that do exist. So, once again, as is inevitable with comics, I'm writing about a huge chunk of middle today.

It's not inevitable that I do it eighteen months late -- Vol. 10 came out in June of 2019 -- but I am hoping to get to the end in the next few months, if that matters.

Anyway: this is the middle. Esther and Susan and Daisy met in the first issue of Giant Days, back in 2015, as they started their studies at the fictional Sheffield University, somewhere in the UK. (My guess is that "somewhere" would be Sheffield, but writer John Allison can be tricky.) Their stories are funny but grounded -- Giant Days is pitched somewhere between slice-of-life and sitcom-wacky, or maybe wanders through both of those territories, depending on the story and the circumstances. But these are real people depicted mostly realistically. Most of the series was drawn by Max Sarin, and colored by Whitney Cogar. (Julia Madrigal drew two issues in the middle of this particular batch, and the first six were drawn by Lissa Treiman. Oh, and Liz Fleming was the inker over Sarin's pencils for roughly the second year.)

My posts on the earlier stories: one, two, three, and four, Not on the Test 1 & 2, Not on the Test 3, Extra Credit, and seven.

And so today I have twelve issues of comics, originally published between August 2017 and July 2018 and then collected as Volume Eight and Volume Nine and Volume Ten. (Do I need to tell you that each volume collects four issues? I hope you can do simple arithmetic.)

This batch of stories covers the end of their second year -- when the three women lived together in one house, which arrangement is breaking up in various complicated ways in Volume 8 -- and the beginning of their third and final year at Sheffield. (Giant Days is published out of the US, but, like most things Allisonian, it presents a distinctively British view of the world and never goes out of its way to soften or explain that. I imagine there were a lot of American readers confused why everyone at Sheffield is only there for three years.)

Some of the volumes focus mostly on the women's academic careers, some on other activities, but most of them -- and these three fall into that -- are mostly about their interpersonal relationships: with each other, with their chosen boy- and girl-friends, with housemates often horrible and sometimes just overwhelming. You know: living with other people, having mostly-adult relationships with other people -- the kind of thing most of us really learn to do when we're in college and off on our own for the first time. (Note that "being in college" and "off on our own for the first time" are separate things that are often encountered together, but not necessarily. They are here.)

The tenth volume also sees the world of work looming, at least for Esther and Daisy. (Susan is pre-med, so she has several more years of school ahead of her.) And that presents new concerns and complications, in ways that may be familiar to readers of Allison's other stories. (His main characters tend to be young and fiery, and as they age and settle down, they turn into background characters in the next story.)

This is the point of Giant Days where the end comes in view, in just the same way that the start of the last year of college prefigures the end of that year (and of college in general). So there's a bit of bittersweet starting to come into the emotional mix here -- this is a time of life, and those never last forever. But endings are what make stories: without an ending, all you have is random moments. (Insert your favorite drive-by superhero-comics insult here.) So I'm looking forward to the ending: Allison is good at endings; he's done a lot of them. And there's still four more books of stories for me to read.

The Great British Bump-Off by John Allison and Max Sarin

John Allison's fictional world - well, mostly a fictional UK, and even there heavily mostly-Yorkshire (does that count as Midlands or the North? I'm never sure where the line is) - is big and complex, especially after thirty years of stories.

The fictional town of Tackleford was central to his webcomics from Bobbins to Scarygoround to Bad Machinery, but the last decade has seen that world expand to include a fictionalized version of Sheffield in Giant Days (with first Lissa Treiman and then Max Sarin on art), a fictional town in Cornwall in Steeple, and (less successfully to my mind, and perhaps not really in the same world) a small US town in By Night.

Allison started in that halcyon early-Internet era when you could just do a webcomic and (as I understand it) basically live on the proceeds, but that time seems to have passed: the market power of Google has driven the revenue flow of ads down massively and the subscription model for individual strips that aren't primarily about tab-a-into-slot-b never really worked. So my sense is that the Bad Machinery books were relatively successful, and Giant Days definitely a hit, but both of those stories hit their natural end. Allison has been poking around with other concepts since them - I've already mentioned Steeple, which was awesome but seems to have ended due to lack of publishing support, and By Night, which was an interesting experiment. His cast already has mixed and reshuffled across properties - one of the main characters of Giant Days had been important in Scarygoround as a teen - so several of those ideas are largely "what comes next for This Person?"

So Charlotte Grote, from Bad Machinery and a few guest turns in Giant Days, had a Wicked Things miniseries and turns up in occasional Solver stories on Allison's site. And now her compatriot in supernatural detection, Shauna Wickle, does what every young person worldwide seems to want to do these days: goes on a TV reality show.

The show is UK Bakery Tent, and the story of her time there is The Great British Bump-Off, written by Allison and drawn by Max Sarin. It was a four-issue miniseries from Dark Horse about eighteen months ago, and then collected into this one volume late in 2023.

As you can guess from the title, the show here is a version of "The Great British Bake-Off," and there is...a murder! Well, an attempted murder, at least. And The Show Must Go On, so someone has to solve the murder - and that will be Shauna, if she has anything to say about it. (With the aid of two of her fellow contestants - the nana and the quirky guy.)

There's a fairly large cast - a dozen contestants/suspects, the hosts of the show, and a couple of production people as well - and all of them except Shauna are new Allisonian creations. Even though Shauna is officially "the quirky one," I have to say they're all quirky, in amusing and entertaining ways - each, as I've implied, cast by this show to be a "type" and to fill a specific role.

(One member of the cast, who works in IT, has a complex model of all of the types with detailed predictions about how long each will last in the competition.)

Shauna runs around, trying to balance high-pressure baking competition with also high-pressure  snooping, hindered by the fact that most of the contestants don't know the truth about "the accident." But she is a John Allison heroine, with endless reserves of energy (and sass, though that seems too American a word in this context) and so of course she does solve the mystery in the end, and succeeds in not being eliminated in the first week.

The book ends with the equivalent of the credits sequence explaining everyone's fate in later life - "later life" here meaning "the rest of the competition." Like everything else Allisonian, it is quirky and specific and a lot of fun.

I don't know if we're going to get more Shauna Wickle stories - this seems awfully like a one-off, unless she turns into the kind of "influencer" whose career is going on reality shows - but it's an amusing Allison romp with great energetic Sarin art, so anyone jonesing for more Giant Days (or something not too far from it) should be very happy.

Book-A-Day 2018 #275: Giant Days: Extra Credit, Vol. 1 by John Allison and various artists

Every serial story in a popular medium about a group of friends eventually does the "what if they didn't become friends?" alternate-world story. It's required, whether by some iron law of the universe or just because there are only so many ideas and a writer inevitably will grab that one in a moment of desperation. The rule is clear: these people must become friends. No matter what else happens in the universe, they will be true and loyal and special to each other...eventually.

For Giant Days, that time was the first Holiday Special in 2016, with the epic-length (and I don't just mean the title) "What Would Have Happened If Esther, Daisy and Susan Hadn't Become Friends (And It Was Christmas)." That story also saw the welcome return of original series artist Lissa Treiman to drawing Ether, Daisy and Susan -- and also to drawing an amusing Daisy-as-the-Watcher character who intermittently narrated the story.

Because, you see...writer John Allison knows the "these people have to be friends" story is silly. I think he likes it because it's silly. And he's always willing to lean into the silly in any of his interlinked comics; they're set in a world of bizarre occurrences and strange manifestations, but where a good (and appropriately British) self-deprecating remark will get you out of anything.

Giant Days: Extra Credit, Vol. 1 is the first collection of sidebar Giant Days stories -- it has that 2016 Holiday Special, another similar special from 2017, a third holiday-ish story sandwiched between the two longer ones that maybe was a backup in one of those specials (it's not really explained, and doesn't have a cover attached to it), and three shorter stories entirely by Allison at the end. Let me back up and tackle them each separately.

First up is that "What if?" story, and it goes the way all such stories must go -- they all settle into their separate lives at Sheffield, a little less happy and fulfilled than they are in the "real" continuity, and have friction with each other until Fate throws them together and they team up to defeat the obligatory Mean Girls. (Oddly, there only seem to be Mean Girls at Sheffield in alternate-world stories -- they showed up in one other similar story -- but not in the main continuity.)

Next is an oddball tale of Desmond Fishman, one of the quirkiest character from Allison's online comics, who joins Esther's family for the holidays, in a story drawn by Caanan Grall. How does it go? Well, if you don't already know Dez, let me say the title is "How the Fishman Despoiled Christmas."

The other long story is from the next year's Holiday Special, drawn by Jenn St-Onge in a nice style that felt more realistic than I was comfortable seeing these characters (at least at first). It has the horribly punny title of "Love? Ack, Shelly!" and sees our three heroines go up to the Big Smoke to visit with Shelly for the holidays and try to fix her love life along the way.

Filling out the end are three stories drawn by Allison himself -- two short ones in comics format from various Giant Days ephemera, and a "Destroy History" sequence that launched (and subsequently ended) a spinoff strip from Scarygoround about Shelly and her work for the Ministry of History. Webcomics are the purest expression of Allison, so this is some of the best stuff in the book. He has a distinctive sense of humor, which you will either love or completely fail to get. I'll leave you with the first strip to see how it affects you:

Giant Days, Vol. 2 by John Allison, Lissa Treiman, and Max Sarin

I will keep telling you to read John Allison's comics until either you do so or you stop listening to me entirely. So take that part as read -- like Scarygoround and Bad Machinery, Giant Days is a lovely mix of smart dialogue and real characters and quirky situations. Though Giant Days, being set away from Tackleford, those quirky situations are less likely to involve dimensional portals and selkies and alien potato creatures. (At least so far....)

Volume Two finishes up the first term at an unnamed British University for our three main characters -- Susan and Daisy and Esther -- who have a big formal dance, and a big visit back to Susan's hometown during the break, and the big finals, and then...um...a big new boyfriend for Esther? (Parallelism can only go so far, it seems.)

These four issues also see the big art hand-off, as original artist Lissa Treiman bows out after what was supposed to be the six-issue mini-series and Max Sarin steps in. To my eye, Sarin's lines are a bit thinner than Treiman's, and his her art seem to have less depth...but, then, when does anyone ever think the new artist on a favorite comic is an improvement? He She does a good job, and I'm sure I'll bitterly resent it if he she ever leaves Giant Days and someone else takes over.

So: female-focused writing, with believable people and real-world situations and some of the best dialogue available in comics anywhere. What are you waiting for?

Giant Days, Vol. 1 by John Allison and Lissa Treiman

This series does not necessarily have to be connected to Allison's webcomics, if the reader doesn't know of that connection. One of the three main characters -- gothy center-of-all-drama Esther De Groot -- was a major character in Allison's strip Scarygoround, but Giant Days is a mildly alternate version of that Esther, who went off to college in about 2004 from that strip and landed in college in about 2013 in these comics stories. (That's one long road trip on the way to school!) And this comic is set entirely at college so far, with no excursions back to the Tackleford of Allison's webcomics, and I don't expect there to be any.

Giant Days is about three female friends: Esther, tightly wound Susan, and happy-go-lucky Daisy. Allison is amazingly good (particularly for a man) at writing about young women and their friendships and daily life -- Giant Days is all about the small moments in life that don't feel small at the time. These three freshmen at an unnamed UK university study (or don't), have crushes and dates and boyfriends and friends who are boys, get angry and happy, and just talk to each other. It's the moments they'll remember fondly ten or forty years from now, presented cleanly and with truth, the story of three specific women and their lives.

Allison is joined here by Lissa Treiman on art -- he draws his own webcomics -- and she has a great energy and vigor that works well with his story. (But don't get too used to her; she's only on this series for these stories and the first two issues of the next collection.) Look, I'm clearly in the tank for Allison, but this series is a lot of fun -- particularly for young women, who don't get to see people like themselves in comics all that much.

Books Read: March 2021

Three months in, I think this is the model: I type this up the weekend after a month ends, and then mostly fill in the links the next month. As always, it's mostly for my own use, as an index of this blog. Here's what I read last month:

Allie Brosh, Solutions and Other Problems (3/2)

Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, and Albert Monteys, Slaughterhouse-Five: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (3/6)

Joe Sacco, Paying the Land (3/7)

Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (3/13)

P.G. Wodehouse, Money for Nothing (3/13)

Eleanor Davis, The Hard Tomorrow (3/14)

Ryan North, Erica Henderson, and Rico Renzi, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 8: My Best Friend's Squirrel (3/19)

John Allison and Max Sarin, Giant Days, Vol. 11 (3/19)

John Allison and Max Sarin, Giant Days, Vol. 12 (3/20)

John Allison and Max Sarin, Giant Days, Vol. 13 (3/21)

John Allison and Max Sarin, Giant Days, Vol. 14 (3/21)

Noelle Stevenson, The Fire Never Goes Out (3/27)

Andi Watson, The Book Tour (3/28)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/23/21

This week, all of the books came in the mail, and they were all things I bought. I got some money out of the couch cushions from That Hegemonic Internet Retailer (back in the fat days of this blog, I'd get a few affiliate bucks every month, but now it only hits their threshold every two years, if that), and spent that on these things:

Prosper's Demon by K.J. Parker -- I think we all know by now that Parker is the same writer as Tom Holt, but it was secret for a long time. (I liked the rumors that Parker was female, one strand of which actually attached to Holt's wife, but they did not turn out to be true.) The Holt books have been mostly humorous fantasy -- I think his first two, way back, were myth-flavored fantasy of a different sort -- but the Parker books are darker fantasy. I really liked the Scavenger trilogy, which I bought for the SFBC early in Parker's career, but haven't read much of his work since. (I do have two Parker novels on the shelf, along with so much else.) This one is a novella and it looks to be strongly driven by voice, so I think I can get to it much faster. No promises, though.

Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails is a random nonfiction collection written and published by Lawrence Block, best-known for writing mysteries and thrillers. As his intro explains it, he assembled one book of all of his writings about crime fiction, and another book of all of his writings about philately (we all have our hobbies) and then this book was every else he had left over. That sounds sufficiently random for me -- a whole bunch of short pieces by a writer I like on things that are neither stamps nor writing.

Giant Days, Vol. 12 by John Allison, Max Sarin and Whitney Cogar -- My library system has all of the Giant Days books...except this one. They have 1-6, which I didn't need. They have 7-10, which I've already requested, received, and read. They have 11 and 13 and 14, which I'll be asking for soon. But they did not have this one, because libraries -- like so many things in the USA, to its detriment -- are organized and run entirely at the lowest possible governmental level, with the barest minimum of oversight and planning, so that no one actually ever keeps track of things like that across what should be a unified, useful system.

(On the other hand, that messy uncontrolled system is getting me seven books of Giant Days that I don't have to buy myself. It's not bad, it's just another example of ways Americans refuse to work together whenever given an option, because something something socialism.)

Trese, Vol. 1: Murder on Balete Drive by Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo -- I read and reviewed this, a decade ago, and loved it then. It's now actually generally available on my side of the Pacific, so I'm going to read it again -- and, I hope, buy and read the rest of the series as they're all republished by US-based Ablaze. It's the first in an urban fantasy series of graphic novels, about Alexandra Trese, a paranormal investigator in Manila. The art is dark and lush and enveloping, and the world is equally so: this is an urban fantasy set in a specific place, using Filipino myth and folklore to tell its stories in a rich and resonant way. (So much urban fantasy is a thin soup of fifth-hand random European tropes -- all the same werewolves and vampires and maybe a banshee for spice.)

Also, this is being turned into a TV series for Netflix, so read it now and you can be one of the annoying hipsters once everyone else loves it.

Steeple by John Allison with Sarah Stern and Jim Campbell

I have two theories about John Allison's best stories, or maybe two versions of the same theory. One goes that his best works are organized around triumvirates - I should perhaps say triumfeminates - such as Bad Machinery and Giant Days, which allows the three main characters to bounce off each other in complicated ways. This theory goes on to say that the more straightforward, less convoluted Allison works are more likely to have two main characters (q.v., By Night) who contrast each other in a more obvious way. [1]

The other theory is more straightforward: in every generation of Allison protagonists, there is a female character who embodies chaos, around whom reality itself sometimes bends, who is a force of nature, who both the complications of the narrative and the audience love. Shelly Winters, Charlotte Grote, Esther De Groot - that kind of character. The Allison stories that feature one of those characters are the best ones.

Steeple is a contrasting-two-people story, and neither of them (yet?) have risen to the level of an Allisonian Chaos Magnet. So I might perhaps say at this point that it's not quite as zany as his best work, but that might also be said, in a different way, that it's more accessible and less likely to hare off in random directions for no obvious reasons.

This story is set in the same universe as Tackleford - though, like Giant Days, it touches other parts of that world only very lightly. We are in the small town of Tredregyn, Cornwall  - that's in the far Southwest of England, for those geographically challenged, about as far you can get from Tackleford's Yorkshire and still be in the same country. In Tredregyn, there are two churches. And, in each of those churches, there's a young woman with good intentions.

Just arriving at the local parish - I think it's CoE, and I think it's St. something-or-other's that only gets mentioned once in the book and which I can't find now - at the beginning of the book is the new parson Billie Baker, to help out the Rev. David Penrose.

On the other side of town, there is a Church of Satan, run by Magus Tom Pendennis and Warlock Brian Fitzpatrick - though I had to look up their full names online; they're just "Tom & Brian" in this book - where Maggie Warren does what she wilt as the whole of the law when she's not slinging pints at the local pub. (First lesson: God pays better than Satan. Maggie needs a side job; Billie does not. Who knew?)

Billie and Maggie meet cute when Billie arrives in town, and become friends, even though their lives are deeply opposite to each other.

So that's one major conflict: they're friends but they work for (to put it mildly) competing organizations.

The other major conflict is weird supernatural stuff, as it often is in Allison: Tredregyn is in danger from a race of aquatic monsters who want to drag the town and surroundings back beneath the sea whence it came, and apparently they could be successful in this if the local priest doesn't spend his nights punching said monsters in the cemetery. Penrose keeps asking for strong, burly assistants to aid him in biffing the salty foe, but his superiors keep sending him thin and weedy types. Like Billie, for example.

Now, those sea monsters are said to be sent from the devil, but they don't seem, at least in this first storyline, to have any connection to the Church of Satan. So it may be that the devil has legions who know naught of each other, or perhaps the sea beasties are actually the spawn of Cthulhu or Belial or some different evil entity. Or perhaps the Church of Satan is the modern, free-living kind of Satanism, and has mostly or entirely sworn off actual evil in the sense of conquering the world and dooming souls to eternal torment and suchlike.

This first volume of Steeple stories - it doesn't have a "Vol. 1" anywhere on it, though a second volume has since appeared, and a third is coming this summer - collected five comics issues, written and drawn by Allison with colors by Sarah Stern and letters by Jim Campbell. Each issue is basically a standalone story, mostly along the lines of Giant Days, so my assumption is that the hope was to do a few issues, assess, and then do more issues for years and years. That did not actually happen; subsequent Steeple stories have appeared on Allison's webcomics site, so my guess is that the American comics market continues to Be Difficult.

As I said, both Billie and Maggie are pretty sensible, though they are in one of those weird Allisonian towns. I could wish for a bit more mania and craziness from both of them, to juice the stories up, but these are early days yet. These five adventures are quirky and fun, and the status quo gets upended pretty seriously at the end, which I hope will lead to odder, stranger stories for the next batch. So far, I'm counting this as solid B+ Allison, with signs that it could ascend to the top tier quite easily. And it's entirely standalone, thus being a good entry point for new readers.

[1] Potential counter-argument: what about things like Bobbins and Scarygoround, which have larger casts around whom the plots circle? How do they fit into this schema? There I pull out a timeline, and argue that the count of Allison's central characters for a given story tend to diminish over time, and so, therefore, in about 2030 he will publish a comic featuring no central characters!

2020 In the Rear-View

For most of the Years of this Blog, I had several standard posts on the first of the year -- a listing of my favorite books of the prior year, a meme-ish thing where I linked to the first and last sentences of each month, and occasionally other things (launching or ending a Book-A-Day run, the weekly Reviewing the Mail post when it was a Monday). That hit a peak for the Book-A-Day run of 2018, but last year's beginning saw just one white-flag-waving post to say that I wouldn't post a list of favorites, since I read too few books to feel comfortable doing that.

This year was slightly better, but (as I type this on December 28th) it still looks like I'll end the year having read about 75 books, which is about half of what I thought of as my latter-day nadir. In the '90s and Aughts, I usually read 300+ books a year, topping out at 419 in '93. That dipped into the 140-180 range mostly for the last decade, with bumps for the Book-A-Day years of 2014 (383) and 2018 (433).

So I'm still not comfortable saying, "I read six dozen books, and here are the one dozen best ones!" And I will not be doing that here.

But I also neglected to do my monthly lists of books read this year, for all of the same ennui and way-too-much-work and did-you-notice-it-was-2020? reasons. So instead I will list everything I read last year, linking to their posts, and maybe include a sentence or two about the ones that would be Favorite Candidates in a better year.

So my favorite books of the year are contained in the list below, and it may even be clear to the reader which they were. But you're probably better off checking out someone who read more books (particularly new books) during 2020 if you're looking for serious recommendations.

(You may also note that I began the year rather, um, slowly. And it may be quite obvious what days I was on vacation this year. Reading during working days was a thing that basically didn't happen in 2020.)

Adam Hart-Davis, Eurekaargh! (2/6)

Gideon Haigh, The Uncyclopedia (4/20)

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (5/3)

Charles Burns, Free Shit (5/4)

Doug Gray, The Eye of Mongambo, Book One (5/5)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 1 (5/6)

Jason, O Josephine! (5/7)

Rick Geary, The Wallace Mystery (5/8)

Jaime Hernandez, Is This How You See Me? (5/11)

I'm glad I don't have to calculate the Top 5 Jaime Hernandez L&R storylines, because that's a thankless task. These days, I think "Love Bunglers" is #1, but does "Death of Speedy" come next? Or "Flies on the Ceiling?" Or something else? The main story in this book tries its best to muscle into that company, and arguably does so. Jaime's one of the few whose "Top 5" needs about ten entries.

Box Brown, Tetris (5/12)

Landis Blair, The Envious Siblings and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes (5/16)

Kevin Huizenga, Glen Ganges in: The River at Night (5/25)

A masterwork of comics and of literature in general, from a creator who keeps finding new ways to get better.

Caitlin Major and Kelly Bastow, Manfried Saves the Day (5/29)

Ian Frazier, Hogs Wild (6/28)

Kim Deitch, Reincarnation Stories (6/29)

Martha Wells, Network Effect (7/3)

An actually new SF novel that I read quickly and can highly recommend. Pity you've all already heard of it....

Ulli Lust, How I Tried to Be a Good Person (7/5)

Ken Jennings, Because I Said So! (7/10)

Jasper Fforde, Early Riser (7/26)

Another excellent, and still reasonably new, book from a quirky author. He might not need my recommendation, either, but he does have it.

Calvin Trillin, Killings (8/6)

Steve Erickson, American Nomad (8/23)

More people should read Erickson's two non-fiction books about American presidential campaigns, Leap Year and this book. They won't, but they should. Erickson's visionary style gets at essential truths in a way nothing more straightforward can.

Jonathan Bernstein, Knickers in a Twist (9/1)

Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World (9/2)

Jason Lutes, Berlin, Book Three: City of Light (9/3)

Rick Geary, Carrizozo: An Illustrated History (9/4)

Lawrence Block, The Night and the Music (9/5)

John Allison, Bad Machinery, Vol. 8: The Case of the Modern Men (9/7)

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado (9/13)

P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime (9/26)

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (10/2)

John Kessel, Corrupting Dr. Nice (10/11)

Daniel Pinkwater, Adventures of a Dwergish Girl (10/18)

Lawrence Block, A Time to Scatter Stones (10/24)

Vera Brosgol, Be Prepared (10/29)

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (10/31)

Another book I got to slightly late (post-several award wins). Just about as good as everyone says, but I may be souring on the entire idea of "these people are really good at violence, which is wicked kewl, and so now they will kiss."

Brian Fies, A Fire Story (11/7)

Bill Griffith, Nobody's Fool (11/8)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 7 (11/9)

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Paper Girls, Vol. 6 (11/12)

Roger Rapoport and Marguerita Castanera, editors, I Should Have Stayed Home (11/16)

Jacques Tardi, I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, Vol. 2: My Return Home (11/21)

Michael Kupperman, Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 2 (11/22)

Aaron Renier, The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Nights of the Waxing Moon (11/23)

Raina Telgemeier, Guts (11/25)

Paul Kirchner, the bus 2 (11/26)

Lavie Tidhar, Central Station (11/27)

Gina Siciliano, I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi (11/28)

Tom Gauld, Department of Mind-Blowing Theories (11/29)

This probably would have made it onto my list -- Gauld's writing is smart and funny and his art is stylish and precise, all things I love.

Rich Sparks, Love and Other Weird Things (11/30)

If I wasn't doing the only-one-book-per-month thing I usually do -- which would have been unusually punishing in 2020, where I had three separate months where I didn't finish a single book -- this might have also made it onto the list. Sparks is both unique and consistently funny, in his ideas and his drawings, which is a really big deal.

Guy Delisle, The Handbook to Lazy Parenting (12/2)

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth (in Tales of the Dying Earth, 12/2)

Ben Sears, House of the Black Spot (12/3)

Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary, The Brontes: Infernal Angria (12/4)

Tillie Walden, Are You Listening? (12/5)

A book both quieter and more impactful than it seems at first, and another big graphic novel from one of the strongest (and most prolific) new talents in the field.

Gou Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: The First Volume (12/6)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 8 (12/7)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 2 (11/9)

Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future 3 (12/11)

Jon Rivera, Gerard Way, Michael Avon Oeming, & Nick Filardi, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 1 (12/12)

Gou Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: The Second Volume (12/13)

Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future 4 (12/19)

John Baxter, A Pound of Paper (12/19)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 3 (11/20)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, Jenna Ayoub, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 9 (12/21)

Cecil Castellucci, Marley Zarcone, Ande Parks, Marguerite Sauvage, & Kelly Fitzpatrick, Shade the Changing Girl, Vol. 2 (12/22)

Herge, The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 4 (12/23)

Ryan North, Erica Henderson, & Rico Renzi, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7: I've Been Waiting for a Squirrel Like You (12/24)

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (12/25)

Proof that 2020 was not entirely horrible (as, in its own way, was November 3rd). I hope writing this gave Clarke whatever she needed to keep writing more stories -- Jonathan Strange was a great book, but I'm greedy enough to think she could be a great writer, with many more books in her. Piranesi is a fine signpost, giving me reason to think that's true.

Seth, Clyde Fans (12/26)

Jeff Lemire, Royal City, Vol. 3: We All Float On (12/27)

Jeff Lemire, Frogcatchers (12/28)

Lawrence Block as Jill Emerson, Threesome (12/29)

Barry Blitt, Blitt (12/29)

Edward O. Wilson, Jim Ottaviani, & C.M. Butzer, Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation (12/30)

Michel Rabagliati, Paul at Home (12/31)

If I did have a Favorites list, this would certainly be on it -- a great new book from a master of cartooning, grappling with life in later middle age when the troubles and changes start to stack up hard and fast. And the fact that I read it on the last day of the year is something I'd call out to validate my eternal "the year's not over until it's over" instance.

As I type this, I have seven books that I've read and haven't written about, though a few are in series that I will clump together. And I have posts scheduled through mid-January, on my new, weekdays-only standard. So I expect I will come back and fill in the missing links (ha ha) once those go live.

I also note that I read more books in November and December than the previous ten months. That seems to be a good sign, but I have no idea if it means anything.

But this is what I read last year, and, if there's any lesson, it's this: unexpected crap happens. Life is weird and twisty. You can figure out how to deal with it and head in the direction you want. You may not get as far as you want. You may not go as quickly as you want. You may suddenly be hit by a nasty unexpected disease, as nearly 20m Americans have been. You may even die from it, as almost 350k Americans have. (I don't want to be a Pollyanna here: we will all die, some sooner than others, and everything we want to do past that point will be gone.) But you can at least adapt and keep your goals in mind in the time you have.

This lesson is more widely applicable than to your reading life.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/19/22

This is needlessly complicated, and explaining it serves no purpose, but....

So I was buying some books online recently, taking advantage of a sale at a comics-shop's online presence. Those books take a while to get packed and shipped, so I haven't seen them yet. But there were a couple of things that I couldn't get from that shop, which are holding up me reading other things for position-in-the-series reasons.

So I ordered these two books from the massive hegemonic retailer - yes, you know the one - because they were in stock and I could get them quickly. And, yes, they arrived before the other books, which I'll list here eventually, once the box shows up.

So these are books I bought so I can read them before other books I bought to read. Simple as mud, right?

Trese 2: Unreported Murders by Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldismo is, as the title subtly indicates, the second in a great urban-fantasy series of comics stories. I saw the original Philippine edition of the first three books in the series over a decade ago, and raved about them then. (See my post for ComicMix partially about the first two Trese books.) I lost my copies of the original editions in a 2011 flood, but they're finally getting published on this end of the Pacific: see my new post on the first book from last year. There's also a Netflix series, so all your friends might be talking about this soon. (Or "they" might "ruin" it: you never know with adaptations and fan reactions.) Anyway, these are great urban fantasy stories: taut, dangerous, with gloriously inky art from Baldismo. Read 'em.

Steeple collects the first series of comics of that name - there's since been a second one, and I think at least one further online story yet uncollected - by John Allison. I also think this is set in his common universe, along with Giant Days and Bad Machinery and Scarygoround and Bobbins, though this seems to be a "stuff going on over there, not in Tackleford" story, like Giant Days. I've had the second book for a while, but had a hard time finding this one, and have been avoiding reading the online comics until I could start from the beginning.

And that has been painful, because Allison is one of my favorite comics creators, and I see his stuff (whatever it is at the moment; right now he has a goofy Giant Days/Batman crossover running which is wonderful but makes me wonder if the Warner lawyers will come knocking) in my RSS feeds pretty much daily.