Friends With Boys

Storyteller: Faith Erin Hicks
Publisher: First Second Books
Year of Publication: 2012
Page Count:  Approximately 211 pages

What I learned about Writing/Storytelling:
1.  Even in a story set in high school, you don’t need to overwhelm your reader with too many characters.  The main character, Maggie, has two friends at lunch that she sits with.  She also has three older brothers she occasionally hangs with.  There is one other character at school, a jock who is a jerk.

2.  You can do a high school story without a romance subplot.

3.  You can have quirky, somewhat geeky characters who are not picked on in a stereotypical bullied sort of way.  (Though to be fair the geekiest characters are girls, so the normal cliches may not apply, though oddly enough, there are no “mean girl” characters.)

4.  You don’t have to tie your sub-plots up in a neat fashion.  Maggie is unable to find a way to stop the ghost from haunting the town, or allow it to pass on to the next life. The ghost seems symbolically tied to her absent mother  (Thought her mother left the family, and is not dead.)  (Although I just read some Amazon reviews and some people were frustrated by the lack of resolution.)

5.  You can do the “getting the band back together” sort of thing in a non-pulp story.  In this case, Maggie needs the help of her three brothers to get something back the jock character stole.  Usually this sort of thing is used for pulp stories, I think…

6.  There’s teen angst, but its actually pretty light compared to what you see among the “decadent” comic crowd (or teen lit, I think), no sex, no heavy violence, no drug addiction. So.. that’s a storytelling option.

What I learned about Art/Storytelling:
Hicks is a writer/artist so has a good command of cartooning details. Here’s some random things I observed:
A silent reaction shot of a character watching something happening, I like that sort of imagery:
Image(17)
A budding friendship between two girls shown just through body language signals back and forth:
Image(18)
Shading to guide the reader’s eye to what’s important in each panel, and maybe provide three dimensionality to the art:
Image(19)
By making the third tier taller, you get a sort of mini Splash image of the boy (Zander) in profile:
Image(20)
But most importantly, Hicks’ female characters are just plain fun to look at as they show various expressions.

Recommendation: B

Notes/Reviews/Synopsis:
This is the plot: Maggie has been home schooled up to the age of 17.  Her only friends are her brothers.  As her mother has abandoned the family, she now has to go to high school for the first time.  Maggie makes friends with a brother and sister who are social outcasts. Maggie’s own brothers don’t trust her new friends, and she gradually learns about the past of her new friends and what sort of people they are. Maggie is also occasionally haunted by a nonverbal ghost.  In the climax, she asks for help from her new friends to put the ghost’s spirit to rest.

I don’t want to oversell this book, but it’s a decent story.  It’s not the sort of pulp thing I usually read.  It’s mostly realistic, except for the sub plot with the ghost.  With the depiction of the friends, brothers and sisters, it certainly has a point of view different from most comics I’ve read.

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