Mechaboys by James Kochalka
I’ve said this before – multiple times – but a reading life goes through various odd turns and stages. Creators that you think of as being current favorites can have multiple books that you expect to get to “later,” are for different audiences, or that you just never see.
And suddenly you realize it’s been a decade since you read a James Kochalka graphic novel.
When my kids were younger, I read a bunch of his books for kids – with and to them, or passed on to them after – but that petered out when they were in their mid-teens; Kochalka’s books for younger readers tended (at least then; we’ve just established I’m thoroughly outdated on his current career) to the younger end. And I read his American Elf diary comics, until those ended. (In fact, the last Kochalka book I covered here was the collection of the earliest American Elf strips.)
So when I saw a Kochalka book in my library app – one for teens, mostly, rather than little kids – I decided a decade was already too long to go without Kochalka.
Mechaboys is tonally closer to Superf*ckers than to the kid books, though even his work for little kids gets a bit snotty and rude – Kochalka, I think, is an old-school punk, and his characters are brash and pushy and in-your-face no matter what the story. It’s the story of two high school seniors, Zachery (who wants to be called Zeus) and Jamie (who wants to be called James). They just built a mech suit in their garage – Zachery is living with Jamie and his widowed mom for not-entirely-specified problems-with-his-family reasons – out of what seems to mostly be an old lawnmower.
Because this is a Kochalka comic, the mech suit basically works – it makes the wearer bigger and stronger and tougher, though it does need to be started with a pullstring, because former lawnmower.
Our heroes are bullied in school – well, some jock-types pick on them for being weird and different, but it’s fairly low-key for bullying in a graphic novel for teens. The jocks are jerks rather than assholes, basically: just about as thoughtless and impulsive and destructive as our heroes, only in different ways. Still, it’s a huge pain for the guys, and they want to get even or win out or whatever – all those outsider “we’ll show them” ideas.
The mech suit has multiple outings: crashing into a car, visiting a keg party at Booger’s Hollow, and eventually disrupting the prom. But things don’t go quite the ways either Zachery – the more alienated and angry and violent of the two – or Jamie – who thinks a girl in their class might like him, and wants to figure that out – expect. There are fights, including a huge mostly joyful free-for-all at the prom at the end.
This is a quick, fun story that takes unexpected twists all the time, in Kochalka’s mature cartooning style, all rubber-hose characters with rounded organic black lines. It reminded me how much fun Kochalka’s work is, and how I really shouldn’t have gone without it for so long.
Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
