Giant Days is my rock. No, not a giant jacked American-Samoan man with a winning personality that makes everyone like him despite starring in one terrible movie after another, but my constant go-to-never-fails great read.
But WAIT - a less than stellar rating for this tenth(!) book?! Is my rock crumbling - is this the end times???? To that I say nay - or maybe yay, but for reasons completely separate from comics - unless artist Julia Madrigal is gonna be coming back.
Not that I begrudge series regular Max Sarin a break. She has been an absolute trooper, drawing every issue after original artist Lissa Treiman left in Volume 2, producing nothing but impossibly consistent high quality the entire time. At this point I’d say she’s easily surpassed Treiman as the defining Giant Days artist - she’s made the title that much her own.
So Julia Madrigal takes over art duties for a couple issues here and… eeeeewwww! I haaated her art! The lines are awfully scratchy like (I suspect) they were drawn digitally, on a screen, on a really shoddy art program. And everyone looks - not right! Too cartoony, too weird. Maybe the jobs fair storyline, Daisy as a residential mentor and Susan and McGraw’s domestic strife wasn’t the most compelling material either but I do wonder if Sarin had drawn these issues whether I’d have enjoyed them more.
Sarin draws the other two issues and John Allison’s writing is mostly top-notch as ever. Daisy and her gran have all the feels after her gran finds out she’s gay. I love how Dean Thompson is becoming the Joker to Esther’s Batman. Daisy learning about unwinnable scenarios featuring three people, Coby, Ash and Maru, was brilliant - Trekkies will geddit.
By far the best was the resolution to last volume’s cliffhanger between Esther and Ed Gemmell, which I really liked and found immensely satisfying. I thought John Allison handled it perfectly and not only ended a long-running storyline wonderfully but began a new one for Ed effortlessly well too. Ed and Esther remain my favourite characters.
The art preferences might just be me but, if I had my druthers, I’d put the series on hold next time Max Sarin needs a break rather than have the title suffer a lesser replacement artist. Then again, Boom gotta make they cheddah so… bah! Alright, enough: Volume 10’s unsurprisingly great and Giant Days is still my Dwayne Johnson!
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