A Strange Day is the latest offering from Damon Hurd, whose particular brand of slice-of-life/ semi-autobiographical fiction has almost always struck a chord with me. A Strange Day is no exception, and although the experience of the two teens in this story is pretty far removed from my own, Hurd and Gill still managed to draw me into a sweet, romantic tale of serendipity revolving around a trip to buy the new Cure album. The two lead characters are quirky and believable, and their day out is low-key enough to be real and yet has the sort of magic that only comes when you meet someone special. Hurd and Gill present a story that is sweet and romantic without being saccharine, believable without being mundane and absolutely engaging from beginning to end.
If I had to nail down the tone of A Strange Day by way of comparison, the most obvious one I could make was to Chynna Clugston's Blue Monday. A Strange Day doesn't have the manic energy or crazier elements of Blue Monday, but it does draw strength from some of the same musical roots and presents characters who are just as outside the norm. Miles is the introspective loner kid whose love of The Cure represents a way to channel his darker feelings, but he's not a goth cliche, he's more sensitive and less misanthropic than many characters in this mold. Meanwhile, Anna is probably easiest to describe by comparing her to Kate Winslet's character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, not quite as crazy but still having a lively spirit, a sunny outlook and more than a little spontaneity. In a way, Hurd has written a bit of a love letter to The Cure here as much as anything else, using different songs from the band to show how such disparate personalities could both love the band so much.
That's one thing about A Strange Day that impresses me particularly, and it's the use of song lyrics. I usually hate this kind of thing in comics, as my brain just isn't wired to "hear" music when it's presented on the page. The same is true of this book, as I don't know the litany of The Cure backwards and forwards, so I only recognize a couple of songs, and I found myself skimming most of the pages that are just song lyrics. However, Hurd and Gill do an excellent job of conveying the mood of the piece rather than just expecting the lyrics to recall or create a mood, and so the song lyrics become a bonus for Cure fans rather than something you've got to get into to get everything out of the book.
While the story revolves around a chance encounter between two teens buying music, however, that's not really what it's about. Instead, it's about those perfect meetings, the ones that most of us don't encounter all that often. Sparks fly between the two, and suddenly two strangers become more like friends and maybe more. The flirtation and personal sharing between the two is a lot of fun to watch, and it serves as a good way to show the readers more about the characters without it seeming forced or unreal. The result is that as the two characters come to care for each other, the reader comes to care for both of them as well. There's a vicarious thrill at the blossoming relationship between the two of them. Hurd excels at this kind of thing, getting the reader to invest themselves in the characters whether their situation is something the reader themselves have gone through or not.
I've read a lot of Hurd's projects, but Gill's name is a fairly new one to me. I'm certain I've seen her work in some of the indy anthologies she's worked on, but this is the first time that her name has really jumped out at me. I'm sure I'll remember her in the future, however, as her work here is very strong. Though it's not quite as polished, her work reminds me of the flourish that Craig Thompson brings to his work, and though her style is more rounded and less angular, the body language and expressions of the character put me in mind of Christine Norrie's artwork. It's a style perfect for this kind of story, based on human emotions at the heightened teenage stage, and she captures the nervousness, the joy and the sorrow that the characters go through perfectly. 9/10
