WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Bad Machinery
1 Comment | Posted: March 17th, 2010 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading
I was never really sold on Scary Go Round, despite really loving the visual aesthetic used by John Allison on his longform webcomic, but his current project, Bad Machinery is about as perfect as these things get. It’s a story of a smallish English city, its football team, a group of primary school students, their teachers, a pair of mad Russians on opposite sides of a major issue and what may or may not be supernatural happenings, and it’s all told with humor and dare I say grace? Yes, I dare. Allison uses the daily format well, spinning multiple plot plates at the same time and switching back and forth without losing the audience or leaving them hanging for two long. Highly recommended and it’s good enough to make me look at re-evaluating his earlier work.
Hmmm, interesting. See, I loved Scary Go Round – and Bobbins, before that – and I was really massively sorry to see SGR end. This new strip . . . well, it just seems really, really dry to me. The last couple weeks have been a bit more jazzy, almost as if he is correcting for the flat tone, but it still seem really monochrome as compared to SGR.