Scooter Girl is definitely a departure for Chynna Clugston-Major, because while it has the same mod culture, high school setting and elements of fantasy and slapstick humor, it's a lot darker than Blue Monday. Where Blue Monday can be compared to a more modern take on Archie or to John Hughes movies, Scooter Girl compares much easier to something like Heathers. While I enjoyed Clugston-Major's art as always, and she's definitely introduced an intriguing set of characters here, I have to confess that I found the last half of the book a little mean-spirited, and how much I enjoy the book will depend on where the book goes from here. If we're meant to agree that Ashton deserves having his life destroyed because he's shallow, then I might be in for some rough road ahead.
Clugston-Major has done a pretty good job in Blue Monday of making her entire cast of characters believably immature. The guys are horny pervs with redeeming qualities, and the girls have some weird personality quirks that often make them behave in erratic ways to the guys who don't know what they're thinking. In Scooter Girl, we're really presented with a story in which the lead guy is a jerk and the lead girl is smarter and better than him, and while there's certainly room for a little balance as we go on, in the first issue I thought that the titular Scooter Girl came off as unbelievably cruel. Sure, Ashton Archer is a jerk who needed to be taken down a few pegs, but this guy's life is utterly destroyed by the presence of this girl, and I didn't really think he deserved to be so cut off from everything for all of that.
In truth, while Ashton Archer is a dink, he's an interesting and charismatic character, which is part of the point Clugston-Major makes in this issue. The whole thing is from his point-of-view, so I suspect that at the end he'll wind up a sympathetic character, but for right now he's that guy that other guys tend to hate. He's got a way of succeeding with everything and being irresistible to the many women that he "dates," and it all comes easily to him. In fact, it's a family lineage thing, and probably my favorite sequence in this issue was seeing Clugston-Major explore the Archers throughout history, with some fun anachronistic dialogue helping to show off that arrogance and womanizing is a family trait.
I've always been a fan of Clugston-Major's artwork, but she seems to have tweaked her style a little for Scooter Girl, and it agrees with her. The cute manga asides and super-deformed characters aren't here, and instead she focuses more on her normal style, although it seems more detailed and realistic than in Blue Monday, which is part of what gives the book a more serious tone. Particularly impressive are the one-page splash of the scooter rally, the first shot of "Scooter Girl" Margaret Sheldon (Ashton thinks "she's gorgeous!" and I'm not inclined to disagree) and the flashbacks as Ashton explains his luck with women. Of course, there's still plenty of Clugston-Major's skill with slapstick humor, fashion and expressive characters to be found as well.
In some ways, I found Scooter Girl a little jarring, a different experience than I've come to expect from this creator. While Scooter Girl is funny, it's not a straight-on romantic comedy the way Blue Monday is, but rather a morality play with romantic and comedic elements to it, or at least that's how it appears at first. I'm curious to see where it goes from here, because the ending at this point does leave things pretty much completely open.
