Team Girl Comic #3
It’s finally happened: my brain is falling out. I can’t think of any other reason why a good chunk of these stories left me utterly flummoxed. Well, other than the fact that maybe they weren’t particularly good stories. Just to get this out of the way early, I know that some contributors to this comic are young (13ish) girls, and if I happen to overly criticize one of their stories, it’s meant to maybe give them constructive criticism that will help them over the long run (you’d be hard-pressed to find ANYBODY who was a brilliant comic artist/writer at 13). It’s a fine line to do that without also looking like a jerk, so my apologies in advance if I wander over that line. I have only the best of intentions! Anyway, it’s best to start with the stuff that I liked. Hoo boy, a functioning table of contents would have been nice too. OK, positive stuff, like I said: Karena Moore with the dog and the magic talking boots, Colleen Campbell with a funny one panel strip, Gil Hatchers’ strip on the problems of huddling for warmth with a mechanical bear, Penny Sharp and her series of fake full page phone ads, Emma McLuckie commanding a robot, Gil Hatcher lamenting her terrible skills as an older sister (before getting a nice physical reminder of why she’s too hard on herself), Laura Armstrong and her tale of robot rights, the smudgingly creepy ending to the story by Heather Middleton, Karena Moore’s midge story and Gil Hatcher’s story about trying to hide a candy purchase. The other stories either made no sense to me or left me cold. The story about the bear hugs was OK, but it was clearly resized for the comic (not the fault of the artist, obviously) and that really screwed up the look of it. The wordless “welcome home” story made no sense at all to me, “the interns” could maybe get better but it’s “to be continued” after two pages, the wordless story with a security camera flew right over my head and the “kids” story had a punchline that wasn’t remotely funny to me, but maybe it would make more sense if I had kids. Yes, I purposefully avoided using artist’s names for the bad bits, but that’s also because I wasn’t sure who did at least a few of those stories. If you’re looking for a good/not so good percentage (always useful in an anthology), I’d put it at roughly 80/20 good to bad, which is still a great ratio for one of these things. That and the fact that this group of women mostly from Glasgow is doing this at all is something that should be strongly supported by anybody who complains about all the middle-aged white guys in comics. Oh, and have I mentioned how much I love that cover? No price listed, but $5 seems like a reasonable guess.
