5 out of 5

I pretty much squealed with delight when this arrived.  I’m not sure exactly what it is about meanwhile… that’s so appealing, except that it truly seems like a completely curated experience, and one in which publisher John Anderson seems incredibly willing to take risks on all sorts of stories.  And issue 7 is the best yet.  So let’s get to it.

Daisy Blackwood by Ryan Howe, a classic adventure strip with a bit of Tom Strong cheekiness in which our eponymous heroine flies planes and punches guys.  This is the first purely “comic” strip in meanwhile…, and it’s a blast.  Howe’s art is really clean and well lain out, and we get a full sense of our lead and a satisfyingly complete story, compressed into about ten pages.

Gail Key’s Psychic Lost Item Helpline, by Ginny Skinner.  The art on this is a little indie rough, and it seems like an odd entryway for an ongoing, as it feels a bit simple at first, but there’s a pleasant, low-key charm to the premise: Gail Key is indeed a psychic item-seeker, and she also appears to be a janitor, treating her psychic helpline as something like a side job.  It’s a humorous scenario, and Skinner plays it out well, tying some pieces together to lead up to Gail getting involved with finding something that might put her in danger…

Strangehaven continues.  A lot of major business went down last issue, so this is sort of the fallout, but we get some nice character, erm, payoff, and the cold open of what I assume is a trance-state dream is really effectively weird, done up in an intriguingly squiggly take on Millidge’s usually uber-realistic style.

Giulia Spinicci’s The Sycamore Tree is a short poem-put-to-pictures affair, and that kind of stuff admittedly isn’t really my bag.  But I have to admit that the way Spinicci carries us from image to image is quite well done, and the words are well-tempered to not be conceptually all up in your business with MEANING; you can just read and appreciate, or take time to have it sink in – the choice is yours.

Simone Büchert’s relationship tale Cut Out is similarly not my thing – tracing a character’s hopeful escape from a subtly abusive relationship – however, Büchert (and by extension, Anderson) very bravely carries the tale to an unfortunately realistic conclusion.  The plot similarly ducks and dodges into surprising directions, which kept me intrigued to see what the eventual intention would be.  The final explanation of the strip’s title is a bit cheeky, but also a very concise way of approaching the situation depicted.  Anderson speaks in the backmatter about how he felt it was important to include this whole strip in one issue (at 42 pages, it’s longer than the others), and I definitely think it was the right decision.  It’s something to experience from start to finish.

Sarah Gordon’s The Collector offers up part 2.  I don’t think much of this strip, frankly; the writing simply isn’t convincing: the narration doesn’t feel like a real storyteller, it feels like a writer pushing things.  However, this entry was very short, and I’m interested enough to see where it goes.

Another wonderfully weird chapter of Hine and Stafford’s The Bad Bad Place.  All I can really say is that this strip has gone exactly nowhere I expected it to, and that’s been all sorts of great.  It’s a really awesome blend of juxtaposing emotions: it’s sort of funny, sort of gross, sort of sad, sort of an adventure.  I would have no problem with this tale being extended for a long, long time.