Saturday and Sunday v2

Ah, spring! When flowers bloom and young lizards’ thoughts turn to those of fancy…

The island/atoll is still reacting to the events at the end of the first book, a political struggle erupts between the Olds and the Youngs, and romance is blossoming for our two title characters, threatening to tear them apart.

It’s drama, drama everywhere!

Also, a sneaky elephant…

Credits Above Ground

What’s Going On?

After Saturday and Sunday defeated the invisible, poetry-writing monster of the first “Saturday and Sunday” book, we now see the after effects: the people who lived underground in fear of the monster are starting to come out and see the world above ground once more.

Some are more reticent than others, though, and there’s an on-going debate on how fast to make this transition. It’s staged as “old folks afraid of change” versus “young punks who want to live their lives and feel invincible.” Even though the book was written in 2001, you can see some parallels to a post-COVID world.

At one of these debates, Saturday meets a cute girl in a red dress. He immediately falls for her, but that paralyzes him and makes it impossible to impress her. So begins a book-length search for love for Saturday, who only gets in his own way — repeatedly.

Meanwhile, a different lizard has fallen for Saturday, and he doesn’t know how to handle that gracefully, either.

Meanwhile (again), Sunday’s love life seems level-headed, but is a bit strained at the moment, too. Also, he’s the star of the island, with the pro-Above Ground kids treating everything he does as gospel to be excited by. No slight shrug or slow agreement can’t be magnified into a new world order. If he goes fishing, then fishing is the coolest thing in the world and everyone needs a rod and reel!

The whole book turns into a warped meditation on love and dating, as only Vehlmann and de Bonneval could manage. It’s at turns cute, funny, and surreal.

A Different Storytelling Structure

Where the first book felt like a series of comedy sketches loosely hung together by the framework of Saturday and Sunday looking for bigger truths, this book moves more in a straight line.

This is a book that’s not quite as manic or as “deep” as the first volume.

It starts off a little slow as we focus on setting up the different interests of Saturday and Sunday. The political events of the atoll provide a welcome wacky relief between scenes. Things grow more complicated until it all crashes together at the end, as it should. Any concerns I had as I was reading the book were answered by the ending.

Saturday’s manic inability to romance the girl of his dreams will strike a chord with many readers. His continued fight against his own doubts is the central conflict of the book, but other factors don’t help, either. For example, she has multiple other suitors, and he thinks that he can’t compete. Also, his pursuit of her threatens his friendship with Sunday.

Meanwhile, Sunday’s new idol status from the younger generation leads to plenty of sit-com-like moments with his unwanted followers tripping over themselves to be more like him, for reasons they don’t quite understand. (Hello, Cargo Cult!)

Saturday’s continued struggles serve as the slow burn of the book. Even when he does get this stuff together long enough to do something about it, cruel fate gets in his way.

And then an elephant pops out from behind the bushes to beat him up.

That might be my favorite part of this book. It’s part of the delightfully silly nature of this series that there is a running gag where an elephant keeps showing up out of nowhere to beat up Saturday. It cracked me up every time.

Cracks me up every time… That moment where the giddy elephant is hanging in mid-air is the perfect panel.

The Art of Gwen de Bonneval

It’s also the part where I realized how much this book feels like a funny Muppets story.

There are a variety of animals represented in the book. They have simple shapes and bright colors. Many have bulbous eyes. They are silly. There are political parallels in some of their actions. The younger generation that wants their outside freedom sounds and acts like hippies.

If they ever made a movie from this series, The Jim Henson Company is the only one who could do the characters justice.

de Bonneval’s art is what makes that so. His character designs are deceptively amorphous. At first glance, it almost looks like these characters are rounded and a bit squishy. It’s almost hard to figure out what they’d look like in CGI animated movie, for example. The lizards have heads that almost look like Jeff Smith’s Bone characters, but then the ink work outlining them is so even, making them look almost flat.

It feels like deBonneval’s style breaks a lot of what I’d consider to typically be the “rules” of art construction — and maybe that’s why it’s so attractive. It feels like a classic case of knowing the rules before you break them. He does know what he’s doing, and it works on the page well.

The background characters, in particular, get to have the crazier designs with all the eye bulges and wild hair and random clothes. Saturday and Sunday are so relatively simple that it helps to create that contrast.

The storytelling, though, is classic. de Bonneval follows “the rules” and can lead the reader along without any issues, even while creating some very busy pages with lots of little gags in the background.

I should also mention Walter and Yula on the coloring here. de Bonneval’s art is wide open, leaving them a lot of room to add something to the story with their colors, but they don’t go overboard with it. The colors are bright and they use a lot of them, but they don’t try to sculpt things or add shadows. Even gradients are rare. The line work does that job.

The flat colors are strong choices across the entire box of crayons, and that helps keep that cartoony look for the book.

Recommended?

I like this second book, but I think I prefer the almost nonsensical, non-stop series of vignettes from the first book more. I like that zaniness and silliness, which you don’t get in too many comics. I’m much more interested in the comedy and clever invention of the first book than the character-centric nature of the second.

This is a personal preference. I can’t fault the book for being an actual story. If that’s what the creators wanted to do with this book, then they should tell their best story and do their best album. I’m not sure what the history of the series is. I could see where the first book was a collection of short stories that were originally serialized in a magazine, while this book went straight-to-album. That publication difference would also explain the storytelling style difference, but I don’t know if it is so.

The only other structural problem I had with the book is that it felt like an awful lot of set-up to get to the best part in the final 15 pages or so. If you find your mind wandering while reading the first half, take comfort in knowing that it’s all the set-up to pull off the ending, which is strong.

It’s a good book and something I’d recommend for its crazy sense of humor. It’s not an easy style to pull off, but they held it together well.

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