G is for Giant Days #AtoZChallenge #PandemicAlphabet

If you’re looking for a lighthearted series to take you through the pandemic, may I suggest Giant Days by John Allison?

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It’s a comic book series that has also been conveniently packaged into fourteen multi-issue volumes plus two bonus collections. (There are also three novelizations, but I haven’t read them so will not be discussing them.) I don’t know about you, but sometimes words words words on a page are too much so I like to turn to graphic novels because the pictures give me something else to look at and I still get to read. It’s win-win, especially when the illustrations are engaging, fun, and include sight gags. You know, like the ones in Giant Days (illustrated by Lissa Treiman and Max Sarin).

Giant Days follows three girls who have just started university and become fast friends and the two dudes they also hang out with sometimes. The three girls are Esther (a sexy goth who is also an English major, so clearly my favorite), Susan (a no-nonsense hardass with a soft side, so also my favorite), and Daisy (a naive rule follower and therefore my true favorite). (Daisy is also Black and a lesbian, if that is as relevant to your interests as it is to mine.) The two dude are Ed (lovable nerd with a crush on Esther) and McGraw (a mustachioed good-natured fella who likes working with his hands). Oh, and they’re British.

The series starts with them as first-year students and then follows their adventures as they make their way through school with all of the starts and fits that come with that. There are romances and roommates and quitting school and returning to school and trying to figure out where they fit with their friends from back home and trying to show their families that they are adults now, no really, who can make their own decisions. They go on trips, they get obsessed with TV, they attend festivals, and sometimes they even learn stuff at school.

This is slice of life storytelling at its finest, and I am really bummed that I just started volume 12 in the series and that means it’s almost over (especially since I have the last two volumes sitting there just waiting to be read). But I guess that’s the beauty of books: we can read them over and over as many times as we want/need.

Intrigued? There’s a free preview of the first issue up on the official website.

Spend some time in Sheffield with this trio of friends if you need to do some light traveling in the comfort of your living room while we wait out the rest of this pandemic.

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For this year’s A to Z Challenge, I have decided that I’m going to focus on comfort reads/watches as we enter our second (!) April in the pandemic. Tune in tomorrow to see what I choose for H!