Ah, Blue Monday is back, and I'm surprised to find how much it feels like visiting old friends again. Mean, slightly bitter, bickering old friends that I'm kind of glad to be only casually involved with, because their close friendships seem to involve physical violence and brutal tirades of insults. At any rate, Clugston-Major continues the storylines that she's been slowly weaving since the second miniseries, about the various attractions between the boys and the girls and the manipulations going on between some of them. Blue Monday is a poem of realistic teen angst blended with real pop culture from a certain era and style that is equal parts laughs and part nostalgic empathy for when we all had our own teen angst. This issue reads pretty well as a standalone, but it's even better if you've been reading Blue Monday for a while and know all the nuances of the relationships, all of which continue to develop here.
I still remember reading the first Blue Monday (which, prior to that time, I had assumed wouldn't be up my alley) and being surprised to find it a tribute to '80s music and fashion as much as it was a story of girls and boys. That's still true, but as time has gone on, Blue Monday has started to focus more on relationships between Bleu, Clover, Alan, Victor than on their relationships with beloved bands and other pop-cultural influences. The resulting stories are starting to feel like one big story broken into chunks (kind of like a lot of romance manga, actually, which Blue Monday resembles in some ways) rather than separate story arcs that don't really touch other than featuring the same characters. It's funny that although Clugston-Major includes a mocking note for the "continuity nerds," Blue Monday actually has tighter continuity than most superhero comics these days. Fortunately, a "what has gone before" text piece and cast roster make it easy to jump in, and even though I don't remember all the pertinent details (I don't remember which boy Erin had a crush on, or what her ultimate plan is), I remember enough of it to get her motivations throughout the issue.
The issue, by the way, is something of a repeat of what happened to poor Alan in the last Blue Monday series, as he tried to woo Bleu by means of fancy dinners and other favors, and found most of his gimmicks backfiring. The gag here is that the gimmicks don't backfire on Victor, who is taking his turn at wooing Bleu, but on Bleu herself, who finds herself seemingly besieged by more practical jokes from guys who have always showed a predilection for that kind of thing anyway. And since Bleu is still stinging from the fallout of the last practical joke, every thing Victor does just pisses her off and depresses her more. It's slapsticky, and yet elegant, because Clugston-Major uses a believable confluence of events to move a lot of character arcs forward at the same time. Bleu's difficulty getting over a crush on her high school teacher (begun way back in the first mini) mixes with her sublimated romantic interest in her friends and her self-esteem problems into a complicated (and yet not overly complex), believable set of emotional problems and conflicts for the character. And at the same time, the stories of Clover's difficult romance, Erin's revenge-driven manipulations and Victor and Alan's cool guy inability to just come out and admit their feelings are being advanced as well.
But for all that meaty dramatic stuff, the real fun of Blue Monday is, well, the fun. Whether it's Clover's deliciously snarky asides (I love how she's right there to make the shrimp joke, like some sort of sarcasm ninja), the sequence of Clover and Bleu looking for suitable dating material (with a terrific punchline at the end by an elderly guest star) or the various attempts of Victor to win over Bleu, the book is a feast of verbal and sight gags for the reader. The various attempts that Victor makes at winning Bleu's favor are particularly enjoyable, as Clugston-Major cuts loose with the visual frenzy of Victor throwing all of Bleu's books into a puddle, delivering a cola in a fashion that backfires or gathering flowers with a predictable (but still funny) surprise content to them.
Blue Monday is a book that's difficult to define. It is a romance book in some ways, but it's got an acidic sense of humor. It's got a touch of dark humor, but it's nowhere near as dark as Clugston-Major's Scooter Girl. And it's got lowbrow hijinks and slapstick comedy, but also a sophistication that can be seen in the unusual tastes of the characters and in the writing style of the book. In the end, I define it as I define so many undefinable books: It's great. Buy it.
