Christmas joy and celebration! That’s what you might think you’re getting when you open up the seventh volume of Giant Days, the greatest most wonderful-est life-sliced comedy graphic novel out there.
This issue centres around Susan’s return home and the way she feels towards her mummy is the way all of us do.
But alas, things at home are not as Susie might hope, with both her mum and her dad still in the middle of domestic disagreement—and now it feels like the Christmas holiday I know and bear. Family leaves the most beautiful scars behind, doesn’t it? Susan doesn’t really know how to help the situation along, and conversations with her dad do nothing to make things betters. Thankfully, it is Esther who comes up with the finest ideas to save the situation.
You’d think it a good idea, at least, before actually meeting the sisters. Big family chaos is caught perfectly throughout, whether it’s the drunk Susan having a very frank chat with her mum or the army of small nieces and nephews assaulting Susan as she tries to engineer very obvious attempts to push her parents closer:
Does it work? I’ll let you decide.
The following issues puts McGraw and the scruffy one back in our sights. They have a problem, and that problem’s name is Dean, McGraw and Ed’s insufferable roommate whose attempts to weaponize sauerkraut are bearing great success:
Something is amiss, and it is this: Dean, that horrid human being, has fallen in love with someone over an indie MMORPG and all my worlds have turned interconnected. Speaking of interconnected, Esther is working on a comic book store and we see Dean’s—sigh, lady—through her eyes first.
This brings about something I never expected to see from Esther—a measure of pity for Dean! After the femme fatale that is Posy seems ready-set to consume the humongous nerd, our goth queen decides to save a life. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished:
How about the next issue? This is the one in which Esther learns all about globalization. It’s one of my favourite issues, because it’s an Esther Lore™ one. The queen of darkness tries for wokeness, and discovers that ideological purity might not, in fact, be the thing she wants so much as to bone the ideologically pure activist she meets. It doesn’t go altogether too well, because…
This is how hate of moralists is born.
Issue #28 deals with the post-apocalyptic nature of those hours after a first fight. Things get real wobbly, as they tend to, after two in the morning—an effect you can corroborate yourself with ease, just by thinking of all the horrible decisions you’ve made (See? No alcohol required!).
And that’s what Giant Days Vol. 07 is all about! It’s even better in execution than the panels and pages would have you believe, I promise.
The Grimoire Reliquary 