West, Max – Sunnyville Stories #5

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Sunnyville Stories #5

That page sampled below somehow sums up my wildly different reactions to each issue of this series. I’ll be rolling along, taking note of a good thing here and a bad thing there, and something like that page will come along and throw me completely off track. Max says in the afterward that these stories are based at least partly on his own experience, so if we assume that this is meant to take place in the 90’s (Max was born in 1980, so dances where he was at all interested in girls wouldn’t have happened until then), then were there still really any people who complained about the rock music? And Wang frickin’ Chung, of all things? I’m almost certainly reading way too much into what is essentially an all ages comic (with a clear emphasis on younger readers), but that kind of thing just jumps out at me. Oh right, I probably should have set this up with some kind of synopsis of the comic. I’ll get this blogging thing down eventually! Or whatever it is that I do here. So anyway, Sam and Rusty go off to a shady printer’s shop and run into a friend who lets them know about a dance that’s coming up. Rusty is terrified, as he can’t dance and will be humiliated when the whole town discovers this fact about him. So there’s training, some wisecracks here and there, and the night of the dance finally arrives. I won’t spoil any possible surprises further than that. Overall it’s another OK issue. The crowd reaction shots to some generally awful jokes could be toned back a bit (I doubt that every single person in earshot would find some of these lines funny), and I sometimes get the impression that Max writes to the page count rather than just using what he needs for his stories. Or maybe he’s just establishing his world for future issues, as otherwise the six pages in the printer shop could have been condensed into “hey, there’s a dance coming up!” pretty easily. He did throw in at least one line about the pinball game from issue #2, so he’s clearly keeping track of everything carefully. It looks like he has two more issues planned for 2012, so after #7 I’ll go back and read them again, maybe rank them in order of preference to see if any larger picture has developed. Why? Why not, that’s what I say! $4