Things You Might Enjoy, If You Enjoy This Sort Of Thing: Episode Seven

Scary-Go-Round
John Allison
http://www.scarygoround.com/index.php

This week we have yet another webcomic review. This wasn't originally meant to be primarily a webcomics review series, but I read a lot of them, and love most of the ones I read. So today it's Scary-Go-Round, which is one of my very favorites.

Scary-Go-Round is awesome because it is a lot of things at once. It's sort of an extended exercise in magical realism, with a dash of comedy of manners and a lot of people who have funny ways of talking. It's another one of those comics that you can't just drop into; it's been running for a few years and has a lot of back story, but the archives are totally worth it. Besides all the plot, you can watch John Allison's art style improve and morph and do things that are really weird. It's super cool.

The first couple of storylines notwithstanding, Scary-Go-Round mostly follows the adventures of Shelley Winters and a number of other complicated characters. For example, the current storyline is about The Boy, whose name was recently revealed to be Eustace. He is spending some time in France on student exchange, and is living with his friend Elodie, who hasn't quite gotten the hang of pronouncing his name and as a consequence refers to him as "Useless." The traditional French Easter bell, the one that brings the eggs, has just been replaced with a super-sketchy pink bunny with long sharp teeth. Havoc is ensuing.

Scary-Go-Round is a place where anything can happen. It is a place where the moon watches people getting undressed and sometimes there are demons. It is a place where occasionally the headmaster of the local school is a creepy Victorian warlock-type named Crowley. It is a place where you can have friends that are bats, although Ryan's friend Friend Bat died a while ago and was replaced with Comrade Bat. It is a place where people use very few contractions.

It's kind of hard to describe, actually. Mainly it's just bafflingly weird in a way that is at the same time really awesome. And of course, I live for things that are bafflingly weird. They make me do dances in my heart.