Giant Days: Extra Credit Vol. 1 SC
Writer: John Allison
Artists: John Allison, Lissa Treiman, Canaan Grall, Jenn St-Onge
Publisher: BOOM! Box, an imprint of BOOM! Studios
Cover Artist: Lissa Treiman
Colorists: Sarah Stern, Jeremy Lawson
Letterer: Jim Campbell
Price: $14.99
What you love about Giant Days, this is more of that.
Guys! Giant Days is so good. Why didn’t you discover it earlier?
Gaint Days: Extra Credit is a BoomBox Collection of special holiday issues and short stories that have otherwise been uncollected. It’s a terrible place to start your Giant Days experience. It’s an excellent collection otherwise, putting some classic holiday stories in your pullbox just in time for the Summer Solstice, but if you’re not already reading Giant Days, you’re going to want to fire up your Wikipedia finger for a quick background study.
Giant Days is the Eisner and Harvey award nominated ongoing series about a group of young women living on campus at the University of Sheffield. The series is a direct spin-off of author John Allison’s previous work Bobbins and Scary Go Round. The writing is sharp and clever, and the art is whimsical and fun. The whole thing works.
Extra Credit has two Christmas-themed stories and a couple of shorts that depend rather heavily on the reader’s understanding of the characters, but as a whole, the softcover is readable as a stand alone, don’t get me wrong. Giant Days is so good; you owe it to yourself to start at the beginning. Collections should be available in hardcover at your local shop. (If not, demand them.)
The tone of Giant Days is 50% “Love and Rockets” without the adult edge, 40% of the better seasons of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and 10% Keith Giffen’s “The Heckler.” With a pedigree like that, you owe it to yourself to at least check it out.
