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The Avant-Guards, Vol. 1 by Carly Usdin
5.0

This is an unabashedly queer, silly, sweet sports series. Charlie is a new transfer student at the Georgia O'Keefe College of Arts and Subtle Dramatics. She is extremely surprised to find a group of ambitious oddballs trying to start up a basketball team. The ringleader is Olivia, a bubbly extrovert, who begins a campaign to recruit Charlie... and maybe also to ask her on a date. I went to a series of small, weird, artsy schools so I was especially delighted by the smallness and weirdness of the Georgia O'Keefe College. Campus clubs include a coven, a D&D group, a cooking club called Endless Pastabilities, an acapella group, and so on. The art is very charming, full of bright colors and visual humor. My one complaint is that this trade volume only collects the first 4 single issues- in my opinion a trade volume should have 6 issues, but this was a choice presumably made by the publisher, not the author. I look forward to what's coming in book 2.