Originally posted on Irish Comic News (23/Oct/2017)
The Girl and The Glim #1
Created and illustrated by India Swift.
Colour art by Michael Doig.
Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.
Consulting script writer JP Jordan.The story opens as Bridgette (the titular Girl) and her family are moving into their new home. This means that Bridgette is also starting a new school. Issue one is all about getting to know Bridgette as she gets to grips with the new school.
Bridgette is good-natured kid trying to make the best impression she can with her new peers. There are some fun visualizations of how she wished she reacted to a situation, which like many times in life isn’t how things actually play out. The writing really conveys the feeling of starting a new school. That initial optimism that things will be great only to be quashed when the bully decides Bridgette is their new project. The comic has an upbeat and fun tone throughout but there is one page where she has a particularly rough day. At that stage the reader is no Bridgettes side and it makes that page somewhat heartbreaking to read.
The line and colour art is great for this type of story. The line art does well emoting what Bridgette is feeling through the peaks and troughs of her story. I also liked the choice of making the colours more vibrant for those panels based in her imagination. There’s also a wonderful use of shadows to generate a very creative panel structure where Bridgette is locked inside a room. Equally there’s a great use of colour in the forest sequence. Initially the colours are calm only to change to a more aggressive colour palette to dial up the sense of terror. It was impressive how the art managed to convey what the Glim was feeling considering it’s a little ball of fur with eyes.
The lettering looks good and easy to read. It was a nice touch that the dialogue for each character had their own colour for their respective word balloons. Plenty of sound effects too, as you would expect with a comic concerning a weird little creature. The sequence of thumps was one that stands out. The reader is made aware that Bridgette is descending the stairs just on the differences between each thump.
The Girl and The Glim is a comic I’ve been looking forward ever since preview art started to appear on the interweb. I had a feeling it was going to be a good comic but it honestly surpassed what I was expecting. It’s really good comic that everyone needs to check out.
The Girl and The Glim is available via Bigcartel.