By Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, Top Shelf Productions
Gingerbread Girl is a silly comic. In it Annah Billips, a young woman who is apparently a tease, goes on a date with be-afroed Chili Brandals doing those things trendy young women do in Portland Oregon on dates. Along the way we learn that Annah believes that as a child her father performed brain surgery on her to remove her Penfield Homunculus which he then grew into a clone sister called Ginger. It is also revealed that Annah is obsessed with finding Ginger. Of course this all might be a delusion on Annah’s part. Gingerbread Girl examines whether Annah is crazy or Ginger is real or whether it really even matters. There is a lot to like in this comic. Colleen Coover is an amazing artist, and just seeing her artwork is worth the price of admission. The way the story is told is also pretty nifty: a kind of picture storybook for adults with quirky narrators laying out the story directly to the reader. It’s pretty fun. Gingerbread girl does have some problems though. The lesser of the two is that a Penfield’s Homunculus isn’t what Tobin and Coover seem to think it is (full credit: they do acknowledge this kind of... but its still very distracting to me). The larger issue is that the story doesn’t really resolve itself in a very satisfying way. So, I’d say Gingerbread Girl is like its name: a sweet and delicious treat that isn’t all that fulfilling as a meal.
Word count: 248
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