Episode 57 - School for Extraterrestrial Girls by Jeremy Whitley

This week we are  have a review of School for Extraterrestrial Girls volumes 1- 3 by Jeremy Whitley.

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Hosted by Vic 

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Comic Books Beyond would like to thank:  The Crew of the Talking Comics Podcast, Brandon McNulty, Lisa and Brad from Comic Book Couples Counseling, Alex Jaffe, Jeremy Whitley, Jimmy Gaspero and John Klein III of Shadow and Flame with Magik Podcast and David Pepose. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey everybody, welcome to Comic Books Beyond. I'm your host, Vic, and I am here with just me today. So today, a little bit of show news, a couple of reviews we're going to take care of, and maybe just talk about the plan for July. So now that Pride Month's over, we're absolutely not talking about anything Pride ever related. Again, nope, not going to happen except for today and pretty much most episodes, because, you know, well, fuck homophobia. So we have a couple of reviews today by Mr. Jeremy Whitley. That'll probably be the episode title. So let's just do the bit of the show news. No one gets scared, nothing's changing. Just a couple things we're trying to work on here. So we are going to be trying to focus more on the uh review side of the new stuff coming out. Just whenever we don't have a big book group read planned, that's going to be kind of our group. That's just going to be kind of our thing for a little bit. I have a couple other ideas that I want to work on. Maybe some like Comics 101 stuff, which would be pretty cool, some famous runs. Uh point just whatever we can do to point you guys in a good direction to set you up for finding good books you're going to enjoy. Uh a little bit of uh personal news. Uh so I talk about mental health stuff on this show quite a bit. Um, you know, I've been pretty open that I've been dealing with some more mental health issues. Uh I am now seeing a uh psychiatrist for some med adjustments. So, you know, if my tone or demeanor sounds a little different than normal, that's probably why. They uh changed the layout of this program that I use. So I'm wondering if I'm actually recording. Oh, yeah, I'm definitely recording. Okay, good. Like I said, on a new uh it's called it's a mood stabilizer that I'm on. Probably gonna go on another one. Might be looking at some other forms of therapy, just it's important to take care of yourself. I got too much going on to, you know, just let the depression uh, you know, rule my life. And I just want to be open with you guys. Like, I don't think we're gonna miss any time because of it. And hopefully it should just make the show bigger and better as we go along. Uh so some plans for July. Uh, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do this month. I really like doing uh fun themes when we can. I honestly, I think we botched Pride Month a little bit. One of the uh episodes that we thought was gonna be more pride-related just didn't exactly have those themes. But when you're reading a book blind, unfortunately, it just it happens once in a while. And last week we had uh David Peppos on the show, who's absolutely a great dude. I'm sure he would be appreciative of all our pride efforts. Uh the themes just it didn't come up. So we are going to be talking about some of those themes in Jeremy's writing today. And I don't think we're um ever really gonna stop. You know, it's important to champion all people. If anyone has any recommendations that you would like us to review, talk about, or just uh, you know, just generally shoot the breeze with, you know, send it your way or send it our way. We're always looking for uh listener questions. So if you have something you want to write into the show for, if you have a review, comments, feedback, or just questions about comic books, questions about us, any, you know, me, the show, anything, send it in. We'll happily read it on the air as long as it's okay with you. And if it's not okay and you have a question for us, we'll write you back. Um, probably. And if you're a jerk, we're probably just gonna delete the email. So let's uh get into uh today's main book. So we are talking about uh really three books today, but I'm gonna try to talk about these holistically. We are not going to spoil much. Um, the example I always give to everyone, it's very hard for me to talk about something like Batman without saying Bruce Wayne is a dude who has too much money, likes to dress up as a bat, hangs out with a bunch of orphans, is also an orphan, has a butler, and really, really should go to therapy. It's really hard for me to not give you guys the bare bones here. So if you want to know absolutely nothing about School for Extraterrestrial Girls, volumes one through three, now's your chance to scroll away. And as I find my notes, I'm giving you ample time. All right, so I'm gonna go through my notes a little bit here, and I'm gonna go through my notes here and we'll do talk ratings and reviews at the very end. Uh, so School for Extraterrestrial Girls follows Tara Smith, a girl who believes she is destined for greatness. Her parents are overbearing and regiment her life. She has a lot of allergies and needs a lot of medication and food regimentation. Now, we learned this all in like the first like page and a half. So I don't think that's much of a spoiler. Uh, and this is all relevant to book one. Now, what I really liked here in the art, what it was doing, you see this very linear grid layout of the panels. And then eventually things get a little bit more chaotic as the story progresses. And I really liked how the art was kind of like working in with um the storytelling that really gave me the feeling of what the character was going through. So, again, we're we're gonna go into the only real spoiler I'm gonna give you. Now, the book is called School for Extraterrestrial Girls. It turns out Tara is an alien. Okay, and then she goes to a school for extraterrestrial girls. I'm not gonna give you the whole background of why she is there. What this book is really focusing on is interpersonal relationships, uh, self-realization, and how to be a person, how to come into your own. The second and third act are really heavily uh flipping the first act on its head, which is showing how regimented her life is. And this is kind of showing when you put a child in that case, it doesn't give them the freedom. Children need to screw up. There is no no two ways about that. I am not a father. I paid a doctor to make sure I will never be a father. Uh, but if I did have a kid, I would want them to make mistakes and learn from them. Uh, these this is exactly what this does. This is a story about, you know, I I think the characters' ages were around 14 to 16 through these. Uh, I don't know if they ever actually said them, but these are like teenagers, high school aged. Uh, I think in the final book they say something to the effect of this is like a college story. Uh now, this is all uh full. There's absolutely nothing NSFW type of things in here uh in in any directions. There's very little violence. There's uh, you know, anything here I would be comfortable with anyone under the age of 18 reading, anyone under the uh a lot of it there. I mean, there's a couple of like Rocco's modern life jokes that are gonna go over their head. Uh, like there's a cat character who has a shirt that says Jellico AF, which they're probably not gonna know. They're not gonna get the reference for one, because that's like a 40-year-old play at this point that I didn't even watch. Or, well, there was that movie with Taylor Swift, I think, and there was the butthole cut of that movie. So maybe that's still pop culture relevant. I don't know. The story in this one is heavily slice of life, and we meet a few other characters outside of our main character. Uh, we meet Misako, is uh, I think I'm pronouncing her name correctly. Um, I'm terrible at pronunciations, we all know this. Uh, she is our secondary character and uh high friendship interest of uh the main character. It turns out that maybe their people have some bad history together. Um well, I wouldn't exactly call this uh conflict in the form of like fist fighting or violence or anything like that. Uh, she is the secondary, she is she is the uh main conflict of the story or relevant to the main conflict of the story. Uh there is a bit of a twist that comes in, or it's more just like a just something to move forward, the plot, just the plot device. Uh, I did actually see this coming. I'm usually not uh the best at actually picking that up because I try not to, but I was watching or reading this with a critical eye. So that could be a part of it, but on the same token, this is also an all ages book. Uh, therefore, the writing might have been done in a way for uh, you know, younger readers to be able to pick that up. Uh, so that that's just I'm just trying to give you all my thoughts on all this stuff. Uh overall, this story is about learning to communicate, about being who you are, and not who someone else wants you to be, and not who your history wants you to be. Uh the these themes get reinforced later in the series, and we're gonna go through my thoughts on each one of them. Another of my bit of criticality here is that I felt the conflicts just resolved easily, uh, but not quickly. Now, I made a TikTok video to review this. Uh, I might actually post a link to that one because I think that one's probably gonna come out pretty good. Uh, it should be out the same day. I I don't know if we'll have other videos up between now and when I'm recording it. These conflicts they resolve rather easily because the way the conflicts are set up is they're generally arguments. The way arguments sometimes in a healthy way work in real life. If two people are having a conflict and they can separate, step away, learn from the conflicts, they come back together, they talk about it, and then they resolve their differences. It is pretty representation of real life, and I think it's a great, great lesson. Uh, it may not make the story seem like what you're used to. Uh, one thing I actually have always liked about what Jeremy does is he does a lot of either trope inversions or a lot of uh deep thinking, applying real logic to healthy situations and not conflict for the sake of conflict. That's true in a lot of his writing, and again, I haven't read everything. Um, he has a way of being heavy without being violent or gross. He has a way of being heavy and real without being over the top. So, overall, this is great storytelling. So, let's move on to book two. Immediately, I noticed how much quicker this moves than the first one. Uh, one, and I don't want to say this was an issue with the first one. Uh, it's a very easy read. It's not a very, very quick read. Jeremy does have a tendency to write a lot of words, but I think that's also indicative of a lot of the settings he puts people in. Uh, one thing, I mean, this book is these books are about communication, so talking is a huge part of that. And this is also a school. So you're gonna have people lecturing uh, you know, about different subjects, like some jackass on a podcast. You know, maybe we should have thrown in a game here. Every time I swear on an all ages episode, uh, I'll put a dollar in the swear jar. And if once we get a random uh dollar amount, I don't know, I'll donate a book to somebody. But since I didn't say that, we're probably not doing that. Uh, one other thing I noticed about this book, the art immediately gets way better. There is nothing wrong with the art in the first book. Uh, it's just very safe, it's very reined in. The art in the second one is nothing short of breathtaking. Like, there's really cool backgrounds. The the character design are mind-bending. The colors are in this are amazing. They do a lot of cool like reflection shots. Earlier on, we see a lot of different uh alien designs, and we get to see some cool dinosaur stuff. Which who doesn't love cool dinosaur stuff? Now, there are some heavier themes in this one. The themes from the first carryover, communication, self-realization, um, stuff like that. There is also talk of prejudice and racism in here, stereotypes. And while those themes again are present in the first one, it's dialed up here. It's more of a focus, uh, because that's an unfortunate part of conflict. They're actually pretty subtle, but a lot of this is dealing with personal bias. That is still a type of racism, it's still wrong, but uh everyone has personal biases on everything. I mean, I have personal biases against plenty of comic books. Like, uh, for example, if I see Scott Lobdal's name in a comic book, I'm not going to read it. It's pretty simple as that. Um, if I see any other piece of shit's name on a writing on a comic book, I'm not going to read it. Uh, if I see adjective something, if I see something colon something, I'm less likely to read it than I am something else, with notable exceptions of, and it's even getting to the point where I don't want to read Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men. I haven't read Uncanny X-Men in years. Uh, but basically all these like extra sidebooks, that's where my personal bias in comics come from. You know, I I try not to be uh having a bias against a type of people or a person, now that's kind of an issue, but uh where you grow up, you're gonna have all kinds of biases. Uh for me, a lot of the times it kind of comes to uh if I can tell you're a piece of shit just by some like racist dog whistle you're giving, oh yeah, I'm gonna have a bias and I'm not going to want to talk to you. Uh and we're talking about deep history. There is a lot of deep world building in this um world, in this story. Uh, with that, you tend to get things like xenophobia, racism, classism. And those things are all present here and they're handled pretty well. These are done kind of from the perspective of a teenager. When I was a teenager, I wasn't that cognizant of horrible racist history. Like you, of course, I knew, you know, the uh World War II. It it's I I think the reason we teach World War II is because the racism and the Civil War, the racism themes are so right there, so front and center, which regardless of what revisionist history and alt-right pieces of shit will tell you, those wars are about racism, xenophobia, and fucking genocide. We're also dealing with many forms of genocide right now. Okay, so enough about the racism. Um this is exceeds the first in practically every way. Uh the only exception that this book I think that you the only way I can see you enjoying the first book, or uh I shouldn't say that. The way uh if you wanted to enjoy if you enjoy slower paced stories that are more slice of life-y, you're probably going to enjoy the first book a little bit more. That is about the only uh way I could really say the second book does not exceed the first. Alright, so let's wrap up with uh issue three or b or book three. So the first thing I liked about book three, and I don't think we're gonna be doing many spoilers here, I might have to actually cut one or two of them. So if you guys heard a hard edit or anything here and there, uh apologies for that. That's just what I want. I just want to make sure we're good. Uh so this one does a great job of catching you up on the character motivations and the character backgrounds and just a little bit of a plot of kind of how we got here. It doesn't really spoil anything. I mean, it does tell you who the characters are, uh, but it doesn't give you their whole history. Uh Jeremy does a great job of compressing these characters into like one, two, like like two pages, I think you get everybody in the first one. So you could, in theory, pick up book three and just be good to go if this sounds appealing to you. Well, this one follows a similar pattern to the last two. I still think this is um are you? I'm sorry. While while this follows similar patterns to the last two, there's a jump in quality from book one to book two. Book two to three still has a decent jump in quality. It's just not leaps and bounds like it is from book one to book two. Uh now there was the general conceit of this book is kind of a culmination of all the events. Uh the character the main character's personal history, background, and why she is on Earth is the central plot of this book. And it's not going very well. Uh this is probably the most action-packed one I can say, or has the feeling of most action-packed. Again, we're still focused on character interaction, character, self-discovery, and a spoilers. One, two, three. There is a bit of a love story that really culminates in this one. Uh, very tasteful, no nudity, nothing like that. Teenagers fall in love, happens, and uh, this is an LGBTQIA plus relationship, so something we always want to support. Uh now there's more POV characters and some more sub-stories in this one. I'd say this is the most epic story in scale. So, like, we start out really slice of lifey in the second one, we get a little more action packing in the second two, then we get bigger and more not bombastic, but bigger broadness of the storytelling, more heavy stuff in the third. Now there now I do have to give a couple bits of feedback, or you know, it's it's I I don't believe in just because you say something good about something, you need means you have to say something critical. That's not true. There are things that don't need to be criticized. But I'm gonna try to say again from a place of personal bias, these are some things that I didn't particularly love and I did find noticeable. Uh so there was a plot point introduced with one of the supporting characters that I found to be immediately resolved. This is a trope I've seen before. It's something that adds weight to the world and more lore and background. I often find it distracting when we do things like this because it ate up almost an entire page to create a problem, then solve a problem. Where you could have done this in like a panel. Uh now there's all there's, I think, total of three or four POV characters in this one. One thing this book series does is we add our new POV character. We add a different color text box to the lettering for the thought text or the narration texts. Um, I'm colorblind, so some of those um shades were just a little hard for me to pick up on. There was like a um like a red and a blue, or like a beige and a blue, maybe, which I could clearly tell when two of the main characters were talking. There might have been, I'm sorry, there are a total of four POV characters now that I'm thinking about it. My brain just doesn't process colors very well, but uh even the writing style, I could actually tell it was different. So each of the characters do sound different, which is great when you have POV characters. I think one of my main criticisms of like Game of Thrones when I was reading that was that all the POV characters kind of sounded the same. Like they didn't do like they could have easily sounded different, they just didn't to me. I don't know, it's been like 14 years since I tried to read that. Uh, so one other bit of criticism I have in here. While some plots again did resolve rather quickly, there are some scene transitions that uh I'm not gonna say they didn't work for me, but it's just one scene goes right to the next without any breaks. Now, this could be the review copy I was given, just functioning like that. I don't know, I don't have a physical copy. Um, book two did use chapter breaks, but they didn't like have a page in between anything. There was very little time to breathe. The stories keep going very heavily. Uh, the last bit of feedback I have on um book three, one of the main characters, Masako. I feel like she lacked a little bit of agency in this story. Um, while I think she has agency, it's just not very much. She does solve a problem, but it's really not her problem. It's she solves someone, she solves a portion of someone else's problem. And then another of her problems are solved for her. These books are not perfect. They do have uh noticeable uh things with the writing that didn't take me out of it, but just made me really looking with a critical eye, I could find flaw. These books overall are very good. I said I haven't read X-Men in years. This really scratched my X-Men itch, and unfortunately, and uh shout out to John Klein, I might be picking up some X-Men stories because I just kind of want more at this point. I really like this world, I like the characters, they were fun. Uh, the main character, she is not a Mary Sue of any kind. None of the characters are like that. You have one character who's um uh they are a comedy relief character, but they get great character development later in the story. Uh, I'd say there's about four-ish main characters in this one with a couple supporting characters. And I think the fourth book really ties off or sets them up for future stories in the end. Um, now this trilogy of books is done. That being said, I really hope Jeremy returns to this world or allow someone else to. He's set a lot of groundwork. While this story does have a good final ending, I could just get more out of this. Like you could easily do another set of stories in this series. It's no problem. So if you are a parent looking for, you know, a good entry level comic book for their kids, absolutely would recommend this. If you just enjoy all age stories or teen dramas, this is right up your alley. Uh, if you're a fan of Jeremy's other writings, I would again, he doesn't really write a bad book. Um, I haven't read everything he's read. Like I really enjoy his Marvel work. I read Princeless a long time ago. I haven't read Dog Knight. That's one of the big ones that from him I haven't read. Uh this, I'm really, really glad I got to see this, got to read this one. Uh, I think he has another book coming out soonish. And if we get a review copy of that, absolutely we'll jump into this one. We're gonna leave a link to his uh bookshop. Uh, I think it's like called Book Org or something. Uh, I wasn't very familiar with the site, but it looks like uh writers actually can gain, can earn money directly from that. Like it's like an affiliate link, more or less. Uh, and I I believe strongly in trying to support the writer whenever we can. If you're looking for more from Jeremy Whitley, I really want to recommend two stories specifically. Uh Stranger Strange Tales, which uh we did an earlier episode, which is now lost to time and space. And also really want to recommend the uh Unbeliev or believe it's Unbeatable Wasp. Why am I drawing a blank on the name? Unstoppable Wasp. The Unstoppable Wasp. Yeah, that story made me feel a lot of feelings. I actually only read the first volume of it. I stopped because it got really, really heavy. Uh, it wasn't bad or anything. It's just like I didn't want to read something that was gonna bum me out on that day, and I just fell into a hole of reading other stuff and hadn't gone back to it. So, Jeremy, sorry. Uh, but really want to recommend those two. Um, any of his other books that come back in print, pretty much gonna be a safe bet. He also had a Kickstarter for uh Slay and the Girlfriend Survives, which uh recommend going back and listening to that interview if you want more from Jeremy Whitley. Uh, would love to have him on again if he's got the time. Uh that episode specifically is stalling for time, because I am so good at knowing my own show. Uh episode 32 of this show from February 9th of this year. If you'd like to hear more from the man himself, please check it out. All right, guys. Uh, so next week there's definitely not going to be any, you know, required reading. Well, as most of the time when we're on the show, we're gonna be trying to be spoiler-free as possible. We can't always do that. If we're gonna go nuclear on spoilers, we're gonna try to tell you in advance and tell you right up front in the episode. Uh, I have a few books I would like to really talk about this month. So this is going up July 1st. The next two weeks, I don't know exactly what we're gonna chat about, but we're gonna find something. If we get more review copies, we're gonna try to focus on them. Uh, if we don't have review copies, I don't know. We'll probably look at what I've been reading lately. I've been reading a lot of stuff, and I just don't want to say too much here, so we got something to come back for. But you know, as always, if you guys have questions, comments, concerns, reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to read your stuff on the show, as long as it's okay with you guys. All right, stick around for closing thoughts and credits. Have a good week, everybody.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Well, guys, thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get a hold of me through email, I'm at comicbooksbeyond at gmail.com, and I'm at comic books beyond on Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok, and we're also on YouTube. Some of the podcasts are going to go there, but we're also working on some extra content for YouTube as well. I'd like to give a thank you to the crew of the Talking Comic Books podcast, Brad and Leese of Comic Book Couples Counseling, Alex Jaffey, Jeremy Whitley, Bran McNulty, Jimmy Gasparo and the crew of Comic Book Yeti, and John Clay III of Shadowflame with Magic. Most importantly, I'd like to thank all of our listeners and supporters. Be good to each other out there and take care of your people. We'll see you next time.