Review by Frank Plowright

Barbara plays for her local football club’s under-19s women’s team, Rosigny Roses. They’re having a great season and are likely to qualify for the national championships, which is good news for Barbara who’s more invested in football than any other part of her life. However, times are tight, finances are hard and the decision is taken to prioritise the men’s youth team and forfeit the women’s team’s season.

Perhaps in the USA the term ‘cleats’ replaces studs, and the talk is of first in the standings rather than top of the league, but a fair amount of the football terminology is alien to the British reader. It’s unhelpful in drawing attention to dialogue that’s often banal, as does Chloé Wary via keeping the dialogue to a minimum.

Simplicity informs Season of the Roses’ every aspect. Were it not for the swearing and a sex scene this would seem aimed at the young adult market, with a “let’s do the show right here!” plot only ever straying from predictability when the initial bomb is dropped. There’s technique to Wary’s art, but it’s completely undermined by a wretched sense of lurid clashing colour, making the pages really difficult to look at, even during the football games. These are important to Wary, and she extends them for pages at a time, but without ever achieving the natural flow of sporting action.

It’s not only the games over-extended. Even allowing for big panels, there’s barely a scene not outliving its relevance. Moments introduced that could broaden the canvas such as the sour attitude Barbara’s mother has to her long gone father are mentioned and forgotten until dredged up for a melodramatic change of mind. With no small justification Fantagraphics have long publicised themselves as publishers of the world’s greatest cartoonists, and one really wonders what they saw in Season of the Roses.