Grommets #3 // Review
It’s somewhere around December of 1985. A couple of kids from the suburbs of Sacramento are going to school. They don’t quite get there, though. There may be every intention of going to Junior High that day, but...they decide that maybe it might be more fun to hit the mall instead. They get high. Things get weird in Grommets #3. The writing team of Rick Remender are Brian Posehn once again joined by artist Brett Parson and colorist Moreno Dinisio for a trip to a fusion between the two writers’ Phoenix/Sacramento coming of age experiences growing-up in the skater culture of the mid-1980s.
So...Rick and Brian are going out to the mall. On their way in to school, they spot Mike: green mohawk. Black Flag t-shirt. Smoking a cigarette. He invites them to come and play Gauntlet at the arcade in the mall. Before they get there, though...there’s a little stop they have to make. Mike knows this guy who works the Spencer Gifts. He’s going to buy some weed from him. That’s when things get weird. There’s an arcade. There are some girls. Somewhere along the line someone is spray paining “Dead People Suck” on the side of a hearse...
The writers Rick and Brian continue to have a pretty good time apparently imagining what it might have been like for them to have grown-up and gone to junior high together. It’s a fun trip that is actually pretty precise with its overall feel for the pop culture and the tween dialogue of the era. There’s a solid sense of middle school punk about an issue that has the boys heading away from school to bum around the mall and then running into the Jennifers. (Which is still a remarkably clever joke this far into the series. Generation X has like...a million Jennifers, so it’s cute that some of the cooler girls in the periphery all share that name.)
Parson and Dinisio have a pretty firm grasp of fashion and attitude among pre-teens in 1985. The exaggerated facial expressions and overall vulgarity of the stylish crudeness of the art filters its way through the visual reality of Grommets. The video arcade is a bit strange, though. Parson and Dinisio had pulled cabinet art directly from games of the era. There’s an oddly disjointed to the visuals to have the GORGEOUS artwork that George Opperman’s studio came-up with for old Atari games like Centipede and Gauntlet and then contrasting that against Parson and Dinisio’s rendering of crude, dreary life of tweens in Southern California.
And then...so much of the story DOES take place in a video arcade in a mall in 1985 that’s so completely dominated by video games of the early 1980s, which just feels...weird. It wouldn’t be so much of a distraction were it not for the fact that there REALLY isn’t that much story going on in the foreground. There’s a kind of beauty to an issue that simply had a couple of kids skateboarding to the mall in 1985 to get high, but it would need to be executed just a BIT better in order to achieve what it’s going for.
