Review: A STRANGE DAY

Originally posted at The Low Road April 25th, 2005.

A Strange Day
Written by Damon Hurd
Illustrated by Tatiana Gill
$3.95, Alternative Comics/Origin Comics

A Strange Day focuses on Miles and Anna, two teenagers who meet when they play hooky from their respective schools to buy the latest Cure album. They trade stories from their lives, make observations on the world around them, and connect in the way only adolescents seem to do. Boy meets girl, simple as that.

Where Hurd’s My Uncle Jeff succeeded through autobiography, A Strange Day works because it feels universal, the way the most memorable stories about high school do–there’s a reason why kids today can rent The Breakfast Club and empathize with the archetypal characters. Hurd concentrates on the awkwardness and unease of adolescence, and uses miscommunication in a way that doesn’t seem forced. The only dialogue that felt particularly clunky was when Anna explains mall-walking to Miles.

In a way, this story works better because it was illustrated by an artist with a loose, less formal style. Here, Gill takes Hurd’s grounded story and adds something that reminds you that this is a comic book–as much as I enjoyed My Uncle Jeff and A Sort of Homecoming, there was something in Camello’s art that would have been out of place here. Instead of just drawing Hurd’s story, Gill is drawing “adolescence” as a visual. This isn’t to say that there’s no sense of realism in the art. I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, but the depictions of both Miles and Anna oscillate between attractive and unattractive the way real people often do. Gill also handles the character’s body language well, drawing evocative gestures without making them “cartoony.”

I normally avoid discussing lettering, but the lettering of A Strange Day is worth noting. Throughout most of the book, the lettering is scratchy and unpolished, but that doesn’t take away from the story. There are a few points where a different lettering style is used to good effect–the cover and title pages capture the look of hidden teenage notebooks, for example. The most striking use of lettering, though, is demonstrated in the copious quoting of songs from the Cure. The lyrics are thicker, bolder and often larger than the speech balloons, and fill up panels the way music fills the space in which one listens to it.

A Strange Day isn’t a heavy work–it’s not dealing with the things Hurd often writes about. In the forward, Hurd asks the reader to “open this book as the sixteen year old that fell in love at first sight and took themselves all too seriously. You won’t regret it.” I didn’t go into A Strange Day in that frame of mind, but the book put me there–it’s a slight but charming comic that would probably appeal to readers of Tom Beland’s True Story, Swear To God.