Day 683

Aka Friday 14^th December 2018

…prepped for next week’s interview and recovered from going out last night…

…I also finished reading the ‘AAA Cookbook’, which gives a nice insight into a period of Mr Cauty’s life after he finished being a pop star. Shining some light on what the AAA was/is and what they did. And there are some great pictures of the AAA going about their business. It’s also, by being about the nitty gritty of the time of the AAA, inspiring, in that if you want to do something then just do it.

…I also read these three John Allison related comics:

• ‘Giant Days – Where Women Grow And Men Plunder’ is a fun tale of Ed Gemmal visiting Nina, his girlfriend, and her family in Australia, where trouble occurs due to bad blood and a massive sausage. It’s like the best bits of Giant Days mashed together with the best bits of Home & Away and Neighbours, all the while dealing with the complicated feelings that are involved when you meet your partners family for the first time. 10/10. (Written & Illustrated by John Allison, Colours by Whitney Cogar and Letters by Jim Campbell) 

•  In ‘By Night’ #6 things come to a head for Barney as we learn why he stole the footage and he faces some consequences (although Jane and Heather are yet to catch up with him) and Gardt gets a reprieve. Unlike the (relatively) self-contained issues of Giant Days, you can feel that we are mid-way into the story as the stakes are getting higher and our heroes are re-grouping and getting their second wind. But I feel that there is a slight misfire with the introduction of a rapper/rap group, but they do lead to the issues cliff-hanger, so it’s not all bad. 8/10. (Written by John Allison, Illustrated by Christine Larsen, Coloured by Sarah Stern and Lettered by Jim Campbell)

• ‘Giant Days’ #45 in which we see some fallout from ‘Giant Days – Where Women Grow And Men Plunder’ as alcohol comes between Ed and Nina. For what is a pretty dark topic Messrs Allison, Sarin, Lawson and Campbell do their usually tip-top job of creating a beautiful comic that is full of life’s ups-and-downs, levity and jokes and fun. 9/10. (Written by John Allison, Illustrated by Max Sarin, Colours by Jeremy Lawson and Letters by Jim Campbell)

…and I did the G2 Crossword:

…which goes a bit better as I only need to cheat on a quarter of the clues (six out of 24). The answers weren’t gushing, but they were certainly trickling, and I learnt that the ‘Elbe’ is a ‘river rising in the Czech Republic and flowing into the North Sea’, that ‘borsch’ is a ‘soup made with beetroot’ and ‘Tyrol’ is the ‘Alpine region of Austria and Italy’.