(courtesy BOOM! STUDIOS)
SNAPSHOT
18-year-old Trini will do anything to compete in her favorite sport, Screaming Pain Ball, aspiring to the heights of her longtime hero Skull-Crusher! But she can’t do it alone, and a gaggle of misfits is just what she needs to cross the American wastes and battle in Queen Mob’s deadly tournament.With Trini’s dreams of being just like Skull-Crusher on the line, do she and her friends have what it takes to win a coveted spot on Skull-Crusher’s undefeated team? (courtesy BOOM! STUDIOS)
Dreams die at the end of the world, right? Well, not quite.
Not if you’re Trini Wastelander and not if your only dream since you were a child in a nothing town in the middle of the irradiated American wastelands, leftover from what appears to be a furious nuclear battle that destroyed almost everything, is to play the only game left for anyone to watch, the aptly-named Screaming Pain Ball.
In a world where water is the only currency worth a damn, and dog-eat-dog is the universally accepted default, Trini’s only acceptable version of the future involves getting into the main league, the one sanctioned by a gaudily cruel authoritarian leader known as Queen Mob, and to do it alongside her idol, the fabulously capable, 134-kills strong Skull-Crusher!
Everything may have gone to absolute sh*t in I Heart Skull-Crusher! Josie Campbell (writer), Alessio Zonno (artist) and Angel Del Santiago (colourist) by but Trini believes, with an almost insane level of trust and devotion, one egged on by her conversations with two skulls she believes (or pretends; your call) are her long-dead, not exactly loving parents, that if she can make it into Queen Mob’s tournament that her life, however long it lasts in a sport where you are absolutely allowed to kill your opponents, will be good.
Better than good, actually and that having escaped her podunk lil town out in the middle of sandy nowhere, that she carve something good out of something that, by any metric, is very NOT good.
Her dream, as one of the most inventive and creative graphic novels for some time, that makes brilliant and refreshingly creative use of a host of well-worn apocalyptic tropes, has been idling at the starting line for quite some time but just as she’s wavering, just a teeny-tint bit about whether she’ll realise her fevered goals, it’s announced that Queen Mob is holding a tournament and that the winner will, huzzah!, get to play with the hugely infamous Skull-Crusher!
Does Trini have the 50 gallons of water she needs as an entry fee? Nope. Does she have a team to enter with? Also, a big, fat, emphatic no. Does that even begin to stop her? It does not, and as I Heart Skull-Crusher! gets going in its own breathtakingly immersive and bat sh*t crazy, hyper-colourised, super-adrenalised way, Trini is off and running, ready to make her Laverne and Shirley-level dreams come bombastically true.
It’s the power of self-belief and rampantly desperate hope at work, even in the apocalypse and Trini isn’t going to stop, even with green gunky zombie-like nuclear mutants literally nipping at her heels out in the inhospitable desert (which is everywhere, really) and seemingly no hope of convincing a drunk coach to help her and players to join her no-nothing team.
(courtesy BOOM! STUDIOS)
There’s some pretty serious apocalyptic stuff going down in I Heart Skull-Crusher! but the graphic novel is also joyously, irreverently, bat-sh*itedly OTT, with a slew of characters who go way out there and never really come back which is fun for anyone reading because they absolutely up the strangely hilarious ante up to somewhere dementedly glorious.
While Trini is by and large a fairly serious figure who’s nursing a lot of grief and pain and who needs to be successful in the Screaming Pain Ball (SPB) or she doesn’t have anything left to live for, and she’s presented really sympathetically all the way through by Campbell who writes with beautiful empathetic restraint as much as she unleashes her fevered imagination, the cast of team mates around her are way off the scale including a drunken, washed-up coach (and former star player) a possible-about-to-be-a-mutant, twins who don’t seem to care about anything but crime and a would-be SPB star player who acts as if they have made the big league when, ahem, they have not.
But what really makes I Heart Skull-Crusher! sing, quite apart from its dazzlingly rich artwork which makes Campbell’s rich world-building and vibrant characterisation ZING, POP and BURST! (especially when mutants are involved), is the way these fantastically disparate folks, all trying to survive the apocalypse in their own twisted ways, come together to form first a tight friendship circle and then the found family Trini always wanted.
They are real y’all, and Trini, by the end of I Heart Skull-Crusher! cannot believe her good fortune; to the extent that when she realises her SPB dreams – quite how must be left to the reading but it’s a ton of fun to watch and quite moving in its own way too – it hits her that what actually matters most to her now are the people who have helped her make it happen.
She needs them more than her dream being fulfilled which creates a huge dilemma for her in the cliffhanger that finishes off the graphic novel and which will be played out in I Heart Skull-Crusher! Bubble City Blues, which comes out in October this year.
I Heart Skull-Crusher! has it all – bonkers fun characters, a riotously immersive story that is deadly serious and hilariously intense all at once and a protagonist who proves in ways OTT and deeply affecting that she needs all the success that SPB offers but may just new her newfound family even more.
I Heart Skull-Crusher! is out now from BOOM! STUDIOS