Review by Frank Plowright

The comedy drama of a basketball team set-up for an art college continues in Volume Two with a greater exploration of the cast.

An opening surprise is Carly Usdin not immediately picking up with the shock ending dropped to finish Volume One. Instead we look in on the tall, taciturn and withdrawn Jay and the ebullient and demonstrative Ashley giving out flyers for an art show. They’re among the cast members given little space in the previous volume, and although it’s a short scene, it offers insights and perpetuates the tension until we reach the crisis point of the newly established basketball league collapsing due to a sponsor pulling out.

It seems an artificially devised crisis, and so it proves, but using an art show sets Noah Hayes an interesting challenge that he rises to wonderfully. The requirement is to step away from his character-rich cartooning to devise a selection of gallery pictures, and he comes up with an interesting set of images. Once again, colourist Rebecca Nalty is important. The basketball games are more generic, the movement indicated by slashed panel formations, but they’re minimised here as just the peg on which the character drama is hung.

More so than the first volume Usdin builds on the diverse cast, bolstering their personalities and ensuring the reasons for those personalities are transmitted, be that inherent insecurity or attempting to escape the shadows of others. The balance shifts with this volume, with the sports only really intruding as providing continuing organisational problems, with The Avant-Guards now more about how sport is a way of bringing together disparate personalities who don’t greatly fit elsewhere. Seeing that happen is an enjoyable experience, and the series continues with Down to the Wire.

All three volumes of The Avant-Guards are now combined in The Complete Collection.