Last Night at Wyrmwood High by Kathleen Gros is a short and sweet story of three friends at a high school populated by supernatural creatures. Since they can remember the seniors have always pulled the same old boring senior prank, and they want to make a splash for their senior year. This lighthearted comic with a heartwarming moral could easily be shared with a young audience. I adored Gros’s use of color, swathing most of the story in shades of purple, and using a yellow and green motif to differentiate an important flashback.

I have no idea what to think. What a book!

I varied from discomfited to angry throughout the reading of this book and ended up finishing largely because I wanted to go into reviews with all the information gathered from reading. I read the bulk of it in a single sitting because I didn’t want to have to pick it back up. I found the article ‘The Spectre of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi’ by Nadim Damluji very valuable in instructing my reflections on this book (including commenting on things that were, in the author of the article’s opinion, done well that had not stood out to me) so I’ll point any interested folks to check out that article.

Each of the stand alone stories in this collection focuses on different characters but a common theme of “teenagers with powers”, although in actuality not all the characters are teenagers and the “powers” vary wildly from devastating paranormal abilities to a penchant for being extremely lazy? I sort of love the very loose definition of powers, and found this collection to flow together very naturally with its focus on characters that are in some ways outsiders. Cloonan uses a wide range of highly varied art styles here, making each story feel like it could be drawn by a different person - quite the feat. ⁣
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My favorite stories included Bad Blood, a story about estranged half-siblings catching up after the death of their shared father; Breaking Up, which interlaces a couple's break up with the good and bad memories they shared; Volume One Love Story, about a woman with a mild OCD that writes herself thousands of post-it notes to get her through her days; and Stranded, in which a woman travels to the past to give her younger self advice. ⁣
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Cw for several depictions of suicide. These stories were the most difficult for me, and I’m not sure if I am comfortable with their portrayals, although it’s not something I’m very knowledgeable about the right and wrong ways to depict. ⁣

TJ and Amal's burgeoning friendship and eventual romance is a delight to witness. I found the story construction to be so lovely, enjoying moments where Weaver chose to omit dialogue and lean on her characters' expressive facial expressions and body language, and the witty and sweet interactions and antics the characters share. This story made me laugh often, and was full of heart as Amal works through how to stop running from his family driven fears. ⁣Weaver's art too is gorgeous and adds to the enjoyment of reading in the way of the best graphic novels.

This collection was very spotty for me, a lot of the stories felt underdeveloped either in concept or execution. A few standouts I really enjoyed included Godfather Death, which tells the story of a woman who can predict when someone will die; Black Bull, about a woman who seeks her fortune with a bull as her companion; and Nautilus, which depicts a young girl who is saved by some sort of water spirit and their resulting friendship. Five of the stories in this collection were actually prose stories with minor illustrations, rather than comics, so that was unexpected and I didn’t like it. Overall, not awful but I like the concept of this book a lot more than the actual resulting book.

I read a book.

What’s neat about this crossover event is that these characters are from different worlds and realities, and the arcs often focused on two characters initially at odds who find common ground and respect for each other. I feel like I would have loved this even more, because it very much reminded me of the latest Avengers movie but for Dynamite, and of course I don't really know Dynamite's body of work (except I kind of do because apparently they write comics about Sherlock Holmes and Dracula and Tarzan).


The collection features the issues in the order they were published, so some of the arcs are woven together in a kind of confusing non-chronological order. I'm not actually convinced the stories are meant to fit together perfectly cohesively, because sometimes the characters would part ways and then inexplicably be back in the same world in the other arc, so I tried not to get too bogged down in the details while reading.


Overall this was a lot more fun than I expected, and I'm glad I read it. There are some solidly awesome girl power moments, despite the very male gaze-y aesthetic, and the villain is totally contemptible for his treatment of women in a way I enjoyed rooting against.

Vaughan and Guerra clearly thought a lot about all the implications of a catastrophe of this magnitude, from planes and cars crashing to the loss of the majority of the people making up the world's governments. The depicted reactions to the new landscape by individuals and communities were varied and interesting. I'm pretty intrigued and will probably continue this series, even though this kind of gendered storyline always opens up so much room for issues.

Min Jin Lee is a masterful writer, and the years she spent researching and conceptualizing this saga are evident alongside her beautiful prose. I sort of disliked the frequency of the skips forward in time, but each section marvelously fills in details in such a way that I never felt a sense of incompleteness from the missing time, so it's hard to say really what my qualm can be with the skips.⁣
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Now that I've finished getting kicked in the heart by this brilliant novel, I guess there's nothing left to do but sit here on Team Waiting For Min Jin Lee's Third Novel!