I couldn’t resist when I heard Allison had started a new series. It was clever and weird, like all John Allison stuff, but it wasn’t as funny as his other series, and the two main arcs had kind of wobbly endings (although I liked the humor that went with the reversed roles at the end). I’m interested enough in the characters and the religious themes to read the next. ( )

Strange. ( )

99/2021. Steeple, by John Allison, is a comic about two young women in a small Cornish town filled with Allison's trademark wit and weirdness. Billie is a much-needed new curate in the Anglican parish, while Maggie is a trainee priestess at the Church of Satan down the road, and both of them are realising they might have taken a few wrong turnings on their paths through life.

This first book is a satisfyingly complete story arc, and Steeple 2 with new stories is due for publication at the end of August 2021. ( )

A young new apprentice chaplain arrives in the small village of Tredregyn, eager to spread the Good Word through community service, but what she finds there is a priest with a Moby Dick sized obsession with fighting sea monsters nightly and a church of Satan with a healthy congregation, which seems surprisingly not all that evil. She's got some mental adjustments to make as she settles into this strange new town.

Witty, weird, and adorable in turns, this first volume comic collection is an absolute hoot. I instantly wanted to be friends with every character in here, and that's quality writing, right there. Definitely recommended for fans of comics/graphic novels with smart and hilarious dialogue and folks who don't mind walking the borderline for the slightly heretical. ( )

A graphic novel about a priest who fights the demons of the sea, a new Anglican curate who has moved to his Welsh town, and a young woman in the town who belongs to the Church of Satan. It's *exactly* as bizarre as it sounds and fripping wonderful. John Allison is behind [Giant Days], and I say if you liked that series, you'd like this graphic novel. The characters are equally quirky and instantly relatable and delightful, and things go slightly sideways in the same sort of ways as things can in that series. Throughout the whole thing I never could decide if I thought the Church of Satan folks were genuinely scary or... just odd. And then I realized I felt the same way about the priest and the curate and their housekeeper. This is really a collection of the first five issues of a comic, and the end of the last issue says "The End?" I hope there will be more, but this volume stops at a stopping place of sorts. Recommended. ( )