Of all the strips of the turn-of-the-century webcomics boom (and there were a lot), one of the most enduring creations has been John Allison’s ever-branching Bobbins-Verse, a sprawling tapestry of associated, briefly connected minor masterworks of the medium.
Allison, who has written before about the pitfalls of overbearing continuity and his latter-career reversal of reliance upon it, might find this little bit of introduction a bit unruly in a review of The Great British Bump-Off #2. It would be best if unfamiliar readers went into this story blind or, at least, unconcerned with any lingering effect the brilliant Bad Machinery might have on the book’s protagonist, Shauna Wickle.
He’s right, of course – as with 2020’s Wicked Things, Allison has carefully constructed a free-standing mystery, highlighting his characters in unique moments without expecting the reader to know anything about what they got up to with their friends back in grammar school. There is no reliance on anything except what appears between its covers.
Bump-Off is inherently a sort of bottle episode; its murder has occurred in the bubble world of reality television. That the setting is a send-up of the notoriously kind British Bake-Off might, under lesser hands, be the whole gag unto itself. The creators, thankfully, have provided the book with a lot more than single-note “get it?” moments. Every single panel of Bump-Off is effortlessly charming, and while the big laughs are carefully paced, the constant barrage of small gags leaves the reader smiling stupidly to themselves throughout.
Allison – and the Bobbins-verse as a whole – couldn’t have found a better collaborator than continuing powerhouse, Max Sarin, an artist whose skills endow all of these panels with an effervescence. Since the first issue of Giant Days, Sarin has taken the pleasing aesthetic Allision developed with his own artwork and filled it with kinetic energy; there isn’t a single person in Bump-Off that doesn’t feel charged with life, in constant motion. Sarin’s take on this world feels downright fluid.
The chemistry between Allison and Sarin infuses the characters themselves with chemistry – with even the barest of dialogue between Shauna and any one of her diversely-stylized baking comrades, the book cements their relationships as instantly relatable. All of us have run into the icy chill of a barely verbal response, as with spooky Duncan, or have been taken in with the easy conspiratorial confidences of a Brandy. Even at their barest, these characters read as authentic.
Dark Horse Comics
For long-time fans, it’s a small delight to check back in with a cherished friend; for new readers, it’s a quick, tumbling descent into a world filled with innumerable, pleasant joys. There isn’t a single moment of The Great British Bump-Off that isn’t delightful, regardless of how far down that hole you’ve journeyed.
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