Giant Days: Extra Credit collects the two 2016 and 2017 Holiday Specials along with the shorts that appeared in Boom Box Mix Tapes 2015 and 2016 and a strip from John Allison’s Scary Go Round site. I picked this up to read the non-Holiday Specials stuff, as I’ve already read those (and I’s a Giant Days completionist), but I still found the Specials just as charming on re-read.
Allison parodies Marvel’s What If…? series as a Watcher-esque Day-Zee wonders What Would Have Happened If Esther, Daisy and Susan Hadn’t Become Friends (And It Was Christmas?). Everything’s a-topsy-turvy: Esther falls in with the mean girls, Daisy becomes a shut-in and Susan and Ed Gemmell are lovers whaaaat?! It’s such a fun story seeing the girls become friends in a different way and team-up to get revenge on the bitch posse. And it’s great to see original series artist Lissa Treiman return to draw again.
Giant Days parodies Love Actually in Love? Ack, Shelly! with the girls Megabus-ing it to London at Christmas time to visit one of John Allison’s recurring characters, Shelley Winters, who’s unlikely buds with Esther. I never saw the movie (I has a penus) so I can’t say I got any of the references but it’s a cute, amusing story and I loved Jenn St-Onge’s art – the backgrounds are bland but the characters’ expressions are delightful and she draws the cutest cat evarrr!
Allison can’t write bad Giant Days stories but the remaining four short stories show that he can write less than brilliant ones. How the Fishman Despoiled Christmas is about some weird fish person (part of the Scary Go Round-verse, I suspect?) what steals Esther’s family turkey. It’s kinda funny but kinda pointless? Which is also how I’d describe Fridge Raider, where the girls investigate some missing food from their student digs.
Music is Important is better as it’s funnier – the girls start an impromptu band to help out a mate, except none of them know how to play the instruments! The final story is Destroy History which reveals Shelley’s mysterious job at the wonderfully-named Ministry of History. She must travel back in time to 1941 to convince Hollywood movie star Hedy Lamarr to get involved in the war effort (Lamarr was a real person who also invented wifi – I know!). It’s not the best – none of his Shelley Winters comics are as good as anything Giant Days-related – but Allison’s art is particularly great in these two stories, nailing the characters’ looks and depicting time-travel really imaginatively.
Like every book in this amazing series, Giant Days: Extra Credit is a magic read! Ah, bring it in, Giant Days, come on. Daaaaaw! Yes, feel the love - never change!
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