Synopsis
Giant Days is an entertaining, slice-of-life look at three friends away at university, and is a series fans of things like Scott Pilgrim will not want to miss!
WHAT IT IS: Susan, Esther, and Daisy started at university three weeks ago and became fast friends. Now, away from home for the first time, all three want to reinvent themselves. But in the face of handwringing boys, ‘personal experimentation,’ influenza, mystery mold, nuchauvinism, and the willful, unwanted intrusion of ‘academia,’ they may be lucky just to make it to spring alive.
From: BOOM! Studios
Notes on This Title
This series features teen drug and alcohol use, including depictions of people being given drugs without their knowledge or consent. While not sexually explicit, Giant Days does include a number of sex jokes.
Giant Days was originally created as a webcomic before being picked up by BOOM! Studios, which published it as a monthly comic. It is related to, but can be read separately from, Allison’s previous comics, Bobbins, Scary Go Round, and Bad Machinery.
This series has been collected twice, once in softcover and once in hardcover.
Awards
2016 Eisner Award Nominee for Best Limited Series
2018 Eisner Award Nominee for Best Continuing Series
2019 Eisner Award Nominee for Best Continuing Series
2019 Eisner Award Nominee for Best Humor Publication
2016 Harvey Award Nominee for Best New Series
2016 Harvey Award Nominee for Best Original Graphic Publication for Younger Readers
2016 Harvey Award Nominee for Best Continuing or Limited Series
Reviews
Starred review: “Daisy, Susan, and Esther are best friends in their first year at university, and together they face down everything from ex-boyfriends to bad colds to Neanderthal bros who deserve a powerful education in the consequences of oafish male gaze. Though exaggerated facial expressions and cartoonish occurrences are frequent, the core of the story is the heartening friendship between the three girls, whose experiences are grounded in realism. Daisy has a comical run-in with her nana after a wild night out, but the story arc deals more with her burgeoning sexuality than appearing put-together for her elderly relative. Susan targets her erstwhile best friend in a misguided attempt at revenge, but she gradually realizes that forgiveness (however begrudging) makes for a powerful alliance. The overall tone is lighthearted, however, and Allison’s pitch-perfect teenage snark is the ideal match for Treiman and Cogar’s lush, candy-colored scenes full of rich, character-building detail and marvelous background action. With a masterful hand, they telegraph hilarious visual jokes with the subtlest of cues, like a raised eyebrow or flop of hair, and their figures are full of motion and vitality. A pairing of art and dialogue like this is uncommonly good, and with limitless potential for further stories, there’s happily plenty more down the road.” (Source: The Booklist)
“Few comics function as a conduit for happiness quite like Giant Days, the Boom! Box ongoing series about three British university students navigating the early throes of adulthood. Written by John Allison, who made a name for himself with his delightful webcomics Bobbins, Scary Go Round (which Giant Days is a spin-off of), and Bad Machinery, Giant Days tells deeply relatable, consistently hilarious stories about the trials and tribulations of growing up, realized through the wildly expressive artwork of Max Sarin, inker Liz Fleming, and colorist Whitney Cogar.
Allison’s background in webcomics is a major influence on the storytelling of Giant Days, with each page functioning as a standalone moment, usually ending with some sort of punchline. This structure makes the series doubly satisfying. You get a complete sequence on every page, but they all add up to form an engaging larger narrative for each issue. The structure also ensures that there’s never a break in the humor, and it forces Allison to come up with fun new situations for each page. This is still a book firmly grounded in reality, so these situations are always rooted in real issues, whether it’s the alienation of walking into a comic shop for the first time, the struggle of giving up smoking, or the disgust of living with messy roommates who leave food out overnight.” (Source: The AV Club)
Interviews
Comics Alliance: “Lissa Treiman Talks ‘Giant Days’ and Disney Animation”
Multiversity Comics: “John Allison Talks “Giant Days,” Shares an Exclusive Preview of #26“