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Writer: Rick Remender, Brian Posehn
Artist: Brett Parson
Colorist: Moreno Dinisio
Letterer: Rus Wooton
Grommets is one of the best examples in a while regarding the power of a sense of place. Through the use of specificity, you feel a part of this world even if you never lived a day like it. Taking place in the California Suburbs of the 1980s, there are elements you are used to seeing, but the details separate it from similar tales. Small things like patches on bookbags you can barely see or a quick glimpse of a poster on a wall that identifies where we are and who we are looking at personality and all.
Credit needs to go to Brett Parson and Moreno Dionisio who are making Grommets into one of the best-looking books in comics today. Parson’s cartoonish style and Dionisio’s bright and bold colors mesh so well together. You do not see other books like this on the market with this style and this level of craftsmanship. Parson has a great talent for crafting character and emotion. This is a book filled with physical gags that a lesser artist would not be able to pull off. Making a character look high within the pages of a comic is not easy but he made it look easy. He even leans into some of the gross-out moments as well, like when Brian short on options figures out the quickest way to get high. I needed to brush my teeth quickly after looking at those panels.
Underneath those big moments, there are breaks where the brokenness of some of these characters peaks out. When you see Brian as the lost kid who can’t get out of his own way and feels like a disappointment to everyone. Yet you know he has a heart and just wants to be liked and accepted. Something pretty much anyone can relate to. At the same time, these are kids so why spend time focusing on that when you can just make even worse decisions? As has been the case this is not a comic that is greatly focused on the plot and that does not change much with this issue.
Here we get the skipping school part of the story as Brian and Rick make the call to go have fun and deal with the consequences later. Since these creators have confidence in these characters and stories there was not much more to than issue than that. The adventures they go on are very entertaining and a joy to read but
they are not extremely out of the ordinary. It’s just kids being kids in a way that feels authentically fresh. Including a multipage sequence of them trying to find a way to smoke the pot they just scored. Love that it takes time for moments like that to show something that is often not shown in these types of stories.
Oddly the word that comes to mind when thinking of this issue is pointless. I understand sounds bad but it speaks to how as a teenager you will do things you may not even fully understand they just feel good at the time. For example, spray painting a hearse as a way to stick it to dead people. Maybe it was just a desperate attempt to be funny or maybe it speaks to the abandonment someone feels when those people they love leave.
At first glance, these kids seem to be all surface from the way they dress to the life they are living. They are trying to play the part. Is it a part they want to play or is it a part they simply think the world expects of them? I do not know, because they probably do not know at this point. There is this level of solemnness that percolates throughout. Brian especially feels like a kid who has much more going on than most realize. Yet this is not the type of story where we will get this long soliloquy of Brian expressing his surprised emotions because rarely do people do things like that. They hide those feelings with vices like games, skateboards, drugs, and maybe even friends. Sometimes the smartest stories can appear dumb because of what they do not do, and I would say this falls into that category.
Grommets is John Hughes for the comic book generation. Where Hughes gave the world Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club this is Broke in Demin and Skater Dorks Who Can’t Get Out of Their Own Way. Comics are better with a book like this because you will look far and wide to find anything that tells a story like this in this way, and if you do find something I won’t be nearly as good.
Overall Score: 8.5 / 10
