It’s 1990’s Florida and the land of sunshine and baseball. But Everglade Angels #1 from Scout Comics gets dark pretty early!
Gemma Walsh, Grace Ibushi, Lacey, Portia, and the other girls are high school baseball players, hoping to impress the talent scouts sitting in the stands. There’s lots of chippy dialogue during the game, as the Everglade Angels prove that they’re, well, ‘no angels’. But the drama on the baseball diamond is nothing compared to what happens later, en route to game 7 in Miami!
Co-creators and writers Scott Lobdell (Red Hood and the Outlaws and Superman, etc) and Blake Northcott (Catwoman, The North Valley Grimoire, etc) bring us the sunlight and scenes of baseball, the scent of summer and the mighty screams of horror. Lobdell and Northcott start intensely, as we slog deep into the non-stop ‘play ball’ dialogue of the team. The bickering, the pestering, the posturing, the team dynamics. It’s a lot, and we need our seventh-inning stretch! But things get good and weird fast, in the way that suspenseful horror can.
Artist John (Roc) Upchurch (Rat Queens, Lucy Claire-Redemption) gives us muted colour and wonderfully rendered scenes of the hazy days and dark evenings of the Everglades. Upchurch’s skillful manner of showing expression and body movement serves us well here, the exaggerated action poses the teenage attitudes, the slouching gas station employees. It’s a wonderfully lush blend of subtlety and exaggeration: a hard balance to get just right!
The first issue dishes up the dirt takes us off the beaten path and sets things up nicely for a horrific second issue. Give this one a try, it might just be up your “Alligator Alley”!
Scout Comics, Everglade Angels #1, $3.99 for 30 pages of content, Assume Teen +
#evergladeangels @ScottyLobdell @BlakeNorthcott
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