4 out of 5

Nighttime in Plus World; Plus Man and Basil are delivering some deliverables in their truck, and doing a late night drive when they run across a stranded woman in a field. They offer her a ride to a strange town, where their watches suddenly stop, and they get wrapped up in a pleasant but kinda… off town festival.

Sears has mastered his shading gradients, here in dark blue ink on off white paper: you get the nighttime vibe, and it allows for a purposeful layer of (pleasant) creepiness to the journey and happenstances, but it’s never at the sacrifice of seeing all the page details, and finding each panel’s focus. Sears’ storytelling and humor beats are also second-to-none here, slightly dodging some obvious moments for jokes to delay the laugh by a panel, to great effect. And the rollout of this Tall Tale-ish event is a ton of fun, giving Sears the opportunity to draw in a lot of strange characters populating the town.

It just… ends without much fanfare. It’s a mini-comic! I get that. But it has a fair amount of buildup and exploration in the middle, to just kind of running out of steam on the last pages. Maybe one extra page to nail the denouncement, and this would’ve been perfect.