We've had really nice weather the last three days. Highs in the 70s in December is probably something I should be concerned about as a portent of climate issues, but oh well.
The astronaut's corpse acts as essentially a Cryptkeeper, introducing us to each of the short stories. The first is about a group of people that live within a grove of trees which drift from world to world, seeking something. They live, die, and are reborn within the grove. Second story is a press conference for an alien musician, complete with a staged freakout for media attention. Who keeps insisting they're a solo act, despite there being someone with a guitar sitting right next to them. The third story is about a man who buys a steel factory and encourages his son to find a new use for it. The kid builds a war suit.
They aren't horror stories, unless the idea of a parent's best intentions for a child having unexpected outcomes is particularly terrifying. Wouldn't call the stories uplifting, either. Just kind of about the different things people do. Persist, against the odds. Wreck something perfectly good out of short-sighted ego.
Gabotto has a style that straddles the line between detailed and busy. He's very good at drawing wrinkles, warts, jowls, things like that. Sometimes it's easy enough to pick up the details. Sometimes it kind of becomes a mess and I can't tell exactly what I'm looking at on the character's face. He mostly favors solid colors, with shading that looks like watercolor effect. It's light enough the lines show through, so that helps. I think sometimes the panels are just a bit too small for what he's trying to include.
Ultimately, the one problem I may have is I'm more interested in the astronaut than the stories he's telling. How he ended up drifting through space, what he's going to encounter. His situation changes over the course of the issue, so they might go into detail on that, but it's obviously not the focus.
Dio (the girl on the cover) wants to find her deceased lover's ashes. Gordi (the little floaty guy) is her friend and gave her some guidance. She's also hired a large fellow named Turtleneck Jones as a bodyguard of sorts. Which is good, because Gordi sold her out to save him family from the Teeth, whatever that is. The Teeth wants the magic socks that were the MacGuffin in the third Grrl Scouts mini-series, which I thought got returned to the aliens that brought the, but maybe this isn't Earth they're on. Anyway, Dio and Turtleneck are confronted, things look bad, and Turtleneck shoots himself in the head, which no one is happy about.
I picked up the first three Grrl Scouts mini-series over the last few months, and I was a little concerned about the shift in art style between Work Sucks and Magic Socks. Shouldn't really be surprised Mahfood's art changed in a nearly 15-year span, but I didn't really dig the more fluid, looser look. It made me think of someone making art on the side of a building. But it works better here. I don't know if he's gotten better at it, or I'm more accepting because it's a new group of characters. I don't have a preconceived notion of how Dio or Gordi are supposed to look.
I think part of the issue with Magic Socks was the coloring was still somewhat realistic, and so it clashed with the art. This time around, Mahfood's going strictly for mood. Stark black skies, buildings and cityscapes out of strictly separated blues and yellows. It lends an air of unreality to things, so when a character's design gets really simplified for a single panel reaction to something, be it terror or shock, it doesn't seem out of place. There's even a two-page stretch where Dio explains what happened to her lover, and it's done like a series of tiny panels scrawled out on notebook. I don't really know why Mahfood went with that approach, but the basic black lines on flat yellow paper look makes it sharply different from everything else in the comic.
2 comments:
I was genuinely surprised to see that Grrl Scouts is still going. Orr has returned. Whatever. I was a pretty big Jim mahfood fan at one point, but sort of lost track of him when he moved on to painting skateboards or whatever was going on.
Yeah, Magic Socks came out in, 2017, I think. Did Mahfood do some Tank Girl stuff in the last decade, too. I'd swear I saw something like that at some point. Maybe it was just variant covers, though.
There's a one-page comic in the back of this issue where he talks about how he'd worked out some sort of deal with a production company run by Margot Robbie a couple of years ago for a Grrl Scouts TV series, that Disney was interested in at one point, but it fell through. Grrl Scouts really feels like a concept better suited for Adult Swim, given the violence and copious drug use and sex.
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