When last we left the Mystery Teens of Tackleford, at the end of The Case of the Missing Piece , they had mostly stopped solving mysteries, and two of the core girls, Lottie and Shauna, had just fallen out. That’s what the title refers to for this final collection: not the supernatural menace that threatens…
I have two theories about John Allison’s best stories, or maybe two versions of the same theory. One goes that his best works are organized around triumvirates – I should perhaps say triumfeminates – such as Bad Machinery and Giant Days , which allows the three main characters to bounce off each other in complicated ways….
I go on a lot here about endings: how important they are, that it’s not a story without an ending, and especially that comics have been allergic to endings for several decades now, much to their detriment. But that still doesn’t mean I’m happy to see a long-running story that I like come to its ending. I…
Bad Machinery by John Allison just might be our favorite graphic novel series. The 7th mystery: The Case of The Forked Road. This one has time travel, science, and a great story for the girls to solve. You don’t want to miss this book — or our discussion about it!
Maddy reviews the latest in her favorite graphic novel series, Bad Machinery by John Allison, as well as recommends some other Oni titles for tweens or teens (Space Battle Lunchtime & Invader Zim) if you are looking for some last minute Christmas gifts.
I will keep telling you to read John Allison’s comics until either you do so or you stop listening to me entirely. So take that part as read — like Scarygoround and Bad Machinery , Giant Days is a lovely mix of smart dialogue and real characters and quirky situations. Though Giant Days, being set…
This series does not necessarily have to be connected to Allison’s webcomics, if the reader doesn’t know of that connection. One of the three main characters — gothy center-of-all-drama Esther De Groot — was a major character in Allison’s strip Scarygoround, but Giant Days is a mildly alternate version of that Esther, who went off…
John Allison has spent most of the past twenty years chronicling an ever-proliferating series of strange events in and around the small British town of Tackleford, somewhere in darkest Yorkshire. More impressively, he’s done all of this in public, on the Internet, most days of the week, for free. And he’s done it in comics…
This week the Tweeks are giddy over the release of the third volume of John Allison’s Bad Machinery. In Bad Machinery: The Case of the Simple Soul, the kids from Tackleford, England attempt to solve some wacky mysteries (barn fires for the boys and a troll make-over for the girls). Already big fans of the…
The Tweeks love anything British, they love comics, and they love groups of kids solving mysteries so of course they were freaking out over John Allison’s Bad Machinery series where a group of 6 preteens in Tackleford, England not only solve cases, but spazz out over unicorns in video games. Watch our review of Volumes…
