Reviews 

“Wicked Things” #1

By | March 20th, 2020
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

What more can really be said of the comic book-making clinic that John Allison and Max Sarin put on with “Giant Days” month after month? Each installment was a breezy look into the world of three girls careening toward adulthood. As all good things must, it ended on a bittersweet note, but the world that Esther, Susan, and Daisy inhabited lives on, and readers get to revisit it with another Allison creation on the cusp of entering her university experience. John Allison calls Charlotte “Lottie” Grote of “Bad Machinery” Mystery Girls fame the crown jewel of his shared universe, and on the basis of this first issue alone, it’s easy to see why. And it also makes the dire circumstances she finds herself in by the issue’s conclusion all the more compelling.

Cover by Max Sarin
Written by John Allison
Illustrated by Max Sarin
Colored by Whitney Cogar
Lettered by Jim Campbell

The Eisner Award winning team of John Allison and Max Sarin return to the world of Giant Days for a new series about everyone’s favorite child detective; Charlotte Grote. Nineteen year old Charlotte Grote has her whole life ahead of her; headed straight to Oxford and a future as a real detective-until she’s framed for murder! Given the choice between going to jail basically forever or joining the police, Lottie decides to hit the beat, all while trying to find the real murderer. Lottie may have been running rings about the police since her 9th birthday, but she’s never been on this side of the security tape. Could the future of law enforcement be 5’2″ with an extremely strong bangs game? Yes. Very yes.

“Wicked Things” #1 starts out innocently enough with Lottie enduring the early stages of the ritual that all soon-to-be co-eds must endure, the emerging prospect of decommissioning the childhood room in one’s parent’s home. This time, the ritual leads to a clever reveal that reunites Lottie with Claire Little who has submitted her friend’s name as a nominee for a magazine’s best teen detective at an award ceremony being held at The Savoy, a swanky hotel in London. The arrival in London leads to the kind of slice of life humor we’ve grown accustomed to reading from Allison, and coupled with Sarin’s sparkling cartooning, readers might feel like they’re experiencing a “Giant Days” backup story. This is not a criticism or slight. Instead, it serves a definitive storytelling purpose of letting readers get comfortable with a familiar rhythm of fish-out-of-water growing pains for our protagonist before yanking the rug out from under us in the book’s final pages. While the swerve is not unexpected for those who use Previews copy to determine their buying habits, the comfortable environs and character mannerisms established in the book manage to make the book’s climax more shocking with a final panel that’s completely unexpected.

While a featured character in a not insignificant publishing history, Lottie’s depiction in this first issue doesn’t’t rely on reader knowledge of the character’s previous exploits or behavior. Everything you need to know is economically sandwiched between the issue’s high quality covers, and speaking of covers, Sarin’s depiction of Lottie on the issue’s cover complements the character’s brash and sassy depiction inside perfectly. Even the seemingly simplistic series logo has a bold, high quality polish. Kudos to the designer who developed the classy mark in this age of overworked or minimalistic treatments.

In a book like this it’s easy to give short shrift to creators like Allison and Sarin who continue to perform at a high storytelling level, but it’s even easier to forget to mention the contributions of others like colorist Whitney Cogar and letterer Jim Campbell. Cogar’s coloring straddle the deft line between photorealistic and flat coloring by striking a impressionist’s control of shading to achieve depth and form. Any gradations are subtle and relegated to backgrounds (give or take a few police lights). This is an accomplished colorist at work. Campbell’s versatile lettering here and on other Boom! titles only adds to the company’s evolving and growing reputation as a publisher to be reckoned with. Boom! books always look good, and with increasing consistency, the substance matches the style.

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Returning to Sarin’s cartooning, it’s welcome to see the line unadulterated by another inking hand, and Sarin manages to pump more vim and vigor into the characters than two dimensional static images should allow. While the phrase “action packed” would be a misnomer, Sarin’s depictions leap across and off the page, and the clean lines that might give off an antiseptic aesthetic still manage to be teaming with life. One feels as if they’ve entered the world of an animated short with every issue of Sarin’s work.

It’s completely conceivable that Allison’s chosen milieus and protagonists simply don’t vibe with all readers. Even if supernatural events sometimes take place in his stories, at their core, they are about young people growing up to face the real world on their own whether they like it or not. Even if it’s not your scene, what could be more universal than that? While it’s true that Allison seems to traffic in the same thoroughfares with his stories, he does seem to be exploring a different facet of the experience of “growing up” with each endeavor even if it’s a subtly different one. In “Wicked Things” #1 it’s clear that he’s setting out to tell the story of how life plans change, and not in some gradual way as a result of gained experience and knowledge, but quite literally in a matter of minutes on a fateful night in a posh hotel in London. Allison’s most beloved character will have to grow up in a hurry.

Final Verdict: 8.5 – In a fair and just world, we would always get comics by Allison, Sarin, and company. In a wicked and depraved one we’d get them too.


Jonathan O'Neal

Jonathan is a Tennessee native. He likes comics and baseball, two of America's greatest art forms.

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