Carolyn Nowak

This was a perfect read for the beginning of October because of the scary stories the girls told in the beginning! I was especially excited about Molly’s telling of the Tailypo legend since I heard about it on an episode of Spirits Podcast. It was so cool to see it illustrated. My favorite part of this volume was the amount of interaction between Molly and Mal. They are so super cute, to the max! At first I didn’t like the change in illustration style from the first two volumes to this one, but aspects of it grew on me. Separate from that, I really liked the way the styles changed when each girl was narrating their story and how the individual style fit with the tone of the story! Overall this was a great read… (meer)

Finally got around to this a year after I purchased it at SPX. My loss!

Two stories in particular are worth the price of admission. One is "Radishes," which I'd read before but is reprinted here in gorgeous full color. The color (and larger format, iirc) really heightened my reading experience and suited Nowak's lovely art. It's a coming-of-age story set in a fantasy world mall, so yes please.

Then there's "Diana's Electric Tongue," which is, wow, probably one of my favorite short comics of all time. It's a slightly surreal story about love, robots, and identity, i.e. my three favorite things. The structure is ingenious and the art is bold and inventive. In addition to the raw emotion of this story, I found myself appreciating small details, like the way Nowak draws backdrops as little isometric rooms with cutaway walls - visually pleasing, but also a neat trick to show time and space in a unique way.

The other stories weren't as memorable for me, but it's all good work. If you like accessible but weird comics by and about women, this one is recommended.… (meer)

With this third volume of the Lumberjanes series, I really enjoyed all the different illustration styles, but as far as the rest, it was just "ok" for me. I feel like the story in the first two volumes was much more connected to each other and made more of an overarching plot, while this one seemed kind of jumbled up and random.

There wasn't anything that I particularly found really funny like in the previous two volumes either, which was a big draw to this series for me. The dialogue is still quirky, but it seemed as though it hit a little bit too much above the mark of quirkiness where it doesn't fit together quite right. Furthermore, the bit at the beginning with the scary stories was pretty boring to me because they weren't remotely scary and yet the characters were getting scared and kept telling more of the same type of stories.

I really enjoyed the bond between the group as a whole in the first two volumes as well, so with this one splitting the group up, a lot of that was also missing. While I think Mal and Molly are cute together, I missed seeing the group work off of each other as a whole.

In a way it is difficult to describe what seemed so different overall with this volume that made me like it less than the ones before. Perhaps to best sum it up would be to say that the story felt more like pieces put together in a mismatched sort of way, as well as the humor seeming off. I was really enjoying the series thus far so was a bit disappointed with this addition, but I may still keep reading and see where it goes from here.… (meer)

I still don't have all the characters straight in my mind, which might partly be because the art changes for every story. Each character has her own individual look and, to some extent, personality, but they still kind of blend together for me. The stories in this volume are a little less supernatural than the previous offerings-- though some of the girls do run into the shape-shifting Bear Woman, and adventure and hilarity ensue. Meanwhile the rest of the gang just can't seem to earn any mundane badges (such as "absence makes the heart grow fondant"-- if only Girl Guides of Canada has badges with such creative and evocative names!). This volume also introduces a budding romance between two of the Janes-- kind of inevitable under the circumstances!… (meer)