Review by Ian Keogh
Bad Machinery is the web comic John Allison began before finding fame with Giant Days, and whereas most creators would have discarded the lesser known project, Allison continued the strip during and beyond Giant Days’ run. Anyone only familiar with Giant Days will know Allison is a writer of accomplished comedy, but may be surprised that he’s also a talented cartoonist with grumpy teenagers a speciality.
The matter at hand is two separate groups of young teenagers investigating mysteries in a Yorkshire town, although it might not seem that way at first as there’s a large cast to introduce. As the series develops two sets of investigators emerge, the boys and the girls having different concerns, but each led toward local football club Tackleford City. The Russian owner is an unprincipled man of enormous wealth, and Allison has fun with his gauche nature. He wants to move the club to a new stadium, and has bought all but one of the properties needing demolished to construct it. Lottie and Shauna decide to make that remaining resident, Mrs Biscuits, the focus of their school project.
There’s considerable enjoyment to be had with The Case of the Team Spirit, but focus isn’t a priority. Allison introduces six characters on the opening page, adds some adults, dots back and forth between them all and several ongoing plots, and tries to lead each strip to a punchline while maintaining a continuity. That’s a lot of balls to juggle, even before accounting for the humour veering from the observational to absurdism, and the occasional jab at social realism, meaning inevitable casualties as people drop out of sight. However, strip by strip tidy little interludes are told in limited space packed with funny insights and observations. The glossary at the back provided for American readers is hilarious as well, even if Allison is wrong about football (although he’s right about the banality of footballers being interviewed).
Only looking at the covers of Bad Machinery books online won’t prepare you for the size of the original printings, coming in at a formidable 9 x 12 inches in landscape format. The subsequent paperbacks with the uniform cover design are a more normal size. If you’d prefer the original web comics, as of writing Allison keeps them posted online. The Case of the Team Spirit can be found starting here, and you’ll come across a page or two excised from the collections. The Case of the Good Boy is next.
