#437 - Bad Summer Vol. 1

After the last blog post, I hadn't planned to write another until the the following Friday as I normally do, as I had gotten slightly away from the set day that I preferred.

However, while I was surprised to get through the Expanse read so quickly over the weekend, I was even more astounded to find the time to fit in another comic read, albeit this later one being a little shorter than the first.

As we (the family and I) waited on Sunday Lunch, I got a short amount of free time, which i used to read Bad Summer Vol. 1. Written and drawn by Ed Laroche, this comic told the story of Alain and Shar, a working class couple whose life and interactions in their neighbourhood within Los Feliz takes a brutal twist when an unbearable heatwave falls upon them all. With both the temperature and their stress levels reading boiling point, Alain and Shar begin to unravel just as those around them begin to start to show cracks in their sanity from the vicious heat.

Now, honest to God, I don't remember where I had heard of this comic. If I could hazard a guess, I would assume I saw it on someone's top comics list of some past year, leading to me placing it on my own wish list (which now swells at a current level of over 700). Whatever the reason, Bad Summer has sat on my wish list gathering dust like so many other comics until a sale during the summer (an apt time given the title) brought from sitting on my wish list to sitting on my 'to read' list.

However, as time has gone on, my enthusiasm to read it has wavered, given that I wasn't entirely sure what it was about.

Thankfully, now that I've read it, any concern I had about Bad Summer has melted away like an ice cube in Los Feliz. I found this comic to be completely captivating as it seemed to tell an emotional story about a couple struggling at life while have an extra wrinkle hitting their regular chaos. In fact, all of this had me thinking of it like it was the film, Marriage Story in it's progression.

Of course, this made the loop I was thrown for even greater when the 11th hour twist hit, completely upending my reading experience as I reached that final page and needing to know what came next.

Now, I thought the art is rough (certainly initially) but, while the style never changes, I found that it actually works for the story. As the pages went on deeper in the events taking place, I thought that the art really gave the book a look like everything was definitely cooking and things were definitely getting more heated.

In one of those biased occasions where I thought a comic my not be great because I'd never heard of it, Bad Summer actually turned out to be most excellent. The only disappointing thing now is that the title says 'volume one' and so there must be a 'volume 2' out there. Unfortunately, Comixology doesn't have it so I'm gonna have to try and figure out a way to find it, because I really want to know what happens next.

You know, maybe it's on comichaus?