Over the Garden Wall Vol. 2 (Over the Garden Wall, #2)

by Jim Campbell

[nannah]

(4.5)

Oh, wow. I'm a little torn here. On one hand, the first half of this volume was so good (and frightening!), but on the other, I wasn't a huge fan of the second half, which was took a break from the main plot of finding the Hero Frog to just have fun with two short stories about Ms. Langtree's schoolhouse.

Book content warnings:
a really horrific scene in which a nightmarish horse actually eats Wirt, and Greg watches.

So here we have a bedraggled Wirt and Greg showing up at a tavern and both telling different versions of a same event. It's hilarious and gives insight to their characters. It's Wirt's version that has that truly horrific scene - where I literally stopped breathing for a few moments and just stared at the page, probably not comprehending it for a couple minutes. Like, was that real?? But then again, in this world, in these comics, we never really know what's real or not, and with this volume giving us even two different versions and presenting what's now unreliable narrators, we really don't know what's real or not! It's fascinating and will probably give me headaches if I think too hard about it, but it's also what I love about it.

The third part we encounter a new, mysterious character! In ... a bee mask ... hmmm? If Sara is going to be a character here I will die in the best way. I think it would be a fantastic move for the comics to include her. Especially since the show only had one episode that actually had her in it, and though I loved her, we only saw so little of her!

Anyway, so we had Wirt trying to catch up with Greg, who stumbled across a Very Fancy bird town and who accidentally became its judge for some Grand Social.

And then the rest is the little stories about Ms. Langtree's class. The art style is ... iffy, and the colors extremely garish. The first story is lovable, with a bullying story that made me teary-eyed at the end because the school adapted to the student, but I have to say it didn't really make up for the extremely strange art style and storyline that broke up the plot. It didn't seem to fit the rest of the graphic novel, and I ... guess I wasn't a huge fan. And I'm also not sure why there were two parts/short stories of Ms. Langtree's class. Put at the end like that, I felt so cut off and distant from the story. I wanted at least more of Greg and Wirt at the end!

At least there was the always-lovely cover gallery to make up for it.