Image Description: book-cover of Giant Days – Volume 5 by John Allison. The background is white with the text on the front cover in red. The top half the cover focuses on Title text and credentials. Lower-half of the cover features Susan kneeling on the ground with her expression contemplative. Susan is wearing a suit of knight-style armour, she’s holding a sword (upright) by the hilt in one hand, and a cigarette in the other hand.
Title: Giant Days, Volume 5
Creators: John Allison (Author), Max Sarin (Illustrator), Liz Fleming (Inker), Whitney Cogar (Colorist), Jim Campbell (Letterer)
Social Media: Goodreads
Publisher BOOM! Box
Format and Price: Paperback from my local library
Stars: 4 stars out of 5
About The Creators
John Allison: John Allison is the author and artist of the British webcomics Scary Go Round
Max Sarin: Freelance illustrator and comic artist goofing around and enjoying life.
Whitney Cogar: Whitney Cogar is a freelance illustrator based in Savannah, Georgia. She specializes in sequential art such as comics and storyboards. She is a colourist for the 2017 Steven Universe comic series and has also done storyboards and art assets for the film “The Conspirator” as well as art assets for the film “X-Men: First Class”.
Jim Campbell: Jim Campbell is a professional comic-book letterer, one-time writer (perhaps again in the future!) and occasional artist (although his enthusiasm rather outstrips his actual ability). He knows more about print production than mortal man was meant to know and has also scanned more images than you’ve had hot dinners. Unless you’re ninety years old.
Liz Fleming: Liz Fleming is an award-winning travel writer who writes a weekly and a monthly travel column for The Toronto Star, regular features for Cruise and Travel Lifestyles Magazine and a travel column for TripAtlas.com.
About The Book:
Going off to university is always a time of change and growth, but for Esther, Susan, and Daisy, things are about to get a little weird.
Their freshman year is finally coming to a close and Daisy, Susan, and Esther say goodbye to Catterick Hall forever. Literally forever. It’s being bulldozed and re-purposed as a luxury dorm next semester. But as one door closes, another opens and between the end of semester hookups, music festivals, and moving into their first home together, the life experiences are just getting started.
Written by Eisner Award nominee John Allison (Bad Machinery, Scary Go Round) and illustrated by Max Sarin, Giant Days Volume 5 finishes off the freshman year in style, collecting issues #17-20 of the Eisner and Harvey Award-nominated series.
General Observations:
~Sum of Our Parts: This volume seemed to lack a cohesive story arch/plot to connect all the issues together, and normally this would bug me, just a bunch of small adventures shoved together without a lot of resolution or character development, however, I enjoyed this volume. I don’t read this series for the plot, I read it because I enjoy the character interaction, and I enjoy the creator’s sense of humour. So there were a few small adventures: going to a music festival, Esther and Ed getting entangled in a shifty-business organised by Dead Thompson, and Susan still hasn’t moved on from McGraw (but in a cute sad puppy kind of way). This volume focused on experiences and reflection.
~I’ve Found This Humerus: As stated before, it’s the humour that really carries this series, some it’s visual humour but most of it is character interaction humour. While at a music festival, Susan has her food accidentally spiked with drugs and gets herself locked in a porta-potty, naturally, Daisy and Esther are there to the rescue. A potentially scary situation is turned into something super funny. Then there’s the fact that the festival has this huge mud-slide and there is mud everywhere (why do you British people do this to yourselves? Bush Doofs are at least relatively dry). This results in the whole festival breaking down and there are small background moments of weird desperation. Such as when a huge guy who looks like a biker is seen trying to trade a fancy fountain pen for a toasted sandwich (this makes sense in context).
All in all, a good breather volume before the ladies begin another year of university, while there’s little foreshadowing to support it, I suspect there’s going to be some good plot-related shenanigans with Susan, Daisy, and Esther living next door to Ed, McGraw, and Dean Thompson. I look forward to the next volume.
Available For Purchase: Amazon | Book Depository | Kobo Books
Ambiguous Pieces 