What I Bought 5/5/2018

How did everyone's Free Comic Book Day go? I tried a couple of different stores, but they only had a half-dozen or so of the different options, and none of them were the ones I was interested in. Kind of a bummer.

Giant Days #38, by John Allison (writer), Julia Madrigal (artist), Whitney Cogar (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Relax girls, if it's one of those Escher houses, you'll double back to each other in no time.

Daisy settles into her job as mentor for the arriving students, including cracking down on one poor guy who was just trying to get a little high. Boo, don't be a narc, Daisy. Susan, who took no part in apartment hunting, has still decided she hates the place McGraw chose, and is carping endlessly. Hey, I like to do the same thing, but that doesn't make it less shitty. Esther tries to head off the unpleasant things Dean Thompson told their housemates about her, but has possibly succeeded in playing into his hands. Daisy's proposed solution is the worst possible idea, given that we all have a pretty good idea which poor bastard will end being Esther's "fake" boyfriend.

It's a nice mix of quick conflicts and longer term ones. Things get started on Daisy's work as a mentor, with the potential for future issues if she can't accept there are situation beyond repair. Esther gets what is likely going to be a subplot that won't resurface for a couple of months. And we have what appears to be a brief conflict for Susan that gets resolved within the issue. Throw in some jokes and it's good times all around.

Something I'm noticing is that with books I've come to expect creative team stability from, I start glossing over the credits, which can lead to surprises (it happened with this week's Squirrel Girl as well). So I wasn't expecting a different artist, but Julia Madrigal handles things well. Although I can't tell if Dean Thompson looking thinner and missing his topknot hairdo is meant to signify a change for him, or just Madrigal straying from the established look. On one of the first couple pages, I thought Madrigal had a bit of Phil Foglio's style in hers, but it never cropped up after that. She does a good job with the sequences where a character goes through a wide range of expressions and postures in rapid succession. She doesn't seem to exaggerate as much as Max Sarin did, though that might be that the issue didn't call for it. But when she does need to, she pulls it off. Although she gives most of the characters a pair of lines running diagonally across their nose (except the ones with upturned or button noses, like Daisy and Esther). Not sure what that is, but once I saw it, I couldn't stop seeing it.

Street Angel: After School Kung Fu Special, by Brian Maruca (writer), Jim Rugg (writer/artist) - I'd say you should see the other guy, but that might be too graphic for sensitive readers.

I think this is part of a hardcover book Rugg and Maruca released last year. That was listed as 40 pages, this is just 25, so I'm guessing they cut off the school dance portion, which did make a good stopping point. The last page here, works well as the final beat of the story up to that point, but you can see how the story could go forward from there.

Anyway, Jesse actually comes to school and finds she's been challenged by some loser ninja-in-training named Jacob. Jacob then spends the rest of the day antagonizing her, which seems like a stupid idea when you plan to fight her later. Jesse's also dealing with her best friend Bell, who is trying to get Jesse to go to the school dance, because otherwise Bell's parents won't let her go. The two situations resolve in a way none of them expected.

I feel like the book's playing with that whole idea of young boys pulling girls hair or calling them names because they can't just say "I like you." Only here, no these two really don't like each other. Jacob smashing Jesse's face into her lunch is just him being a jerk. And Jesse really has no time for any of it.

Maybe it's the book being in color, but it looks like Rugg simplified his style some. Especially on the characters who aren't Jesse, he seems to have adopted a more bare-bones, broadly expressive approach, not going too heavy on the details. It works; there's no difficulty following what's happening, faces convey what they need to. There's a good sense of pacing in the set-up for some of the bits. Jesse plunks Jacob in the face with a dodgeball at one point, and the sequence builds over a page-and-a-half. Rugg and Maruca even distract from it a little by having Bell talking about Juan, some boy with a crush on Jesse. You see Jesse picking up the ball and wonder if she's thinking along the same lines as Bell, just trying to be cool about it.