BOOM! Studios bring you an extraordinary friendship between two puberty kids who brought together with some cat in Jo and Rus the graphic novel. 
So this comic will be much more different than the Bolivar the dinosaur comics. Except for the fact that the girl has met the dinosaur in New York, this comic brings you, cat lovers, along the way, really good for children readers. This comic is created by Audra Winslow, she’s a cartoonist from Orlando, and apparently, this is her first published book on Boom! Studios, from what I see her art, her portfolio is filled with short comics and some illustrations that she’s done in art school, and personally for her projects.
The front cover of the comic actually moved me, it shows two kids surrounded by some cats at the junkyard. Perhaps this is what most people are destined to meet each other for the first time when they have something in common. It’s cute and it shows a friendly interaction to the readers. The art style that she uses is what some children’s books are actually meant. And it makes it easier for the readers to follow, but that is to be told later.
The story starts with a girl named Jo Sumpter, she lives in a trailer park with her grandmother and it would seem that her family is in puberty right now. She’s being bullied at school all the time, which made her miserable to the fact that her family is poor right now. She’s very tired of it, until one day, she stumbled into a one-eyed cat who is trapped in a cage. After she freed that cat, she followed the cat right to the junkyard, where she kept the kittens there, waiting for the mother to return. In the junkyard, there’s a teenage boy named Rus Deleon whose family actually owns that junkyard, despite the fact that he’s young, he’s actually working to fix the car that he worked last night. His grandfather asked him to check something out because he just heard a crash in the junkyard, however, when he got there, the cats and the girl was there, and apparently the one-eyed cat who is also named Jo. I mean naming a cat after a human seemed to be normal from the fact that the cat was called by that name because she’s actually named for some friend’s mom.
The two formed a good friendship, even though Rus is helping her to open herself up, even if she’s a poor girl who lives in a trailer with her grandmother. She hates going to school because she’s being bullied a lot. After a few days, she’s been getting along with some people and Rus’ friends at some point because she actually needed help to open herself up. However, Rus can’t be with Jo forever, because he’s currently about to graduate high school and enroll in college soon. The problem is despite that his family owns a junkyard, how will he going to pay the tuition? Jo has fears that Rus is going to leave soon because he’s the first friend that she made, and felt selfish because she can’t do anything to help him because he’s stressed out about his tuition funds and college. At the end of the story, Rus got accepted to college, but he has to find a way to pay his tuition bills until his grandfather suggested him to look for some cash that was buried around the junkyard, but that is until Jo found some suitcase behind the garage. The whole suitcase with cash is meant for the future investments of Rus’ family. And after that, Rus has finally left the town in his car and said goodbye to his friends.
The story is very touching and really meaningful for the younger readers out there. This is just another one of those books that relate to destiny, in which two people are destined to meet each other and make friends with each other. I mean creating a story where two people are poor and are cat lovers which are more relatable to other stories that I’ve read. So the art style, there is so much to talk about. If I’m going to over to that, I’m going to start with the drawing process. The first thing that I get the notion about her art style is that her characters seemed to be friendly and likable, however, the drawing style that she developed is somewhat amateurish, but there is more to that. When I get to the anatomy of the characters, it seems that she came up after watching Adventure Time because the first few pages about that magic cat characters kind of look like that.
The human forms are more than just to take you to Regular Show, I guess my hypothesis is that she draws the whole scenery and makes it as Cartoon Network material. The coloring, I don’t know what to say, but she uses flat colors with some shading. This is not the first time that I get through the color theory from this comic but whenever I read The Lab from Boom!, the only thing that the story focused on was some stick figure who about to get injected with color. But this comic is more than choosing your best colors, I actually get that a lot whenever I get to the coloring. The character’s interactions and expressions are almost every other artist that I know would do something like that. I’ve been experimenting with some other comics in different art styles that contribute to the character’s persona. For example: in the first few scenes of Jo, she seemed to be miserable because she’s being bullied a lot, and a few pages later, Jo became more cheerful when she met a one-eyed cat with so many kittens and Rus, and sometimes when I get to the next few pages, the characters seemed to have more poker faces. The background and the details are normal than I can think of from other comics that I’ve read, but I don’t think that’s important.
So after getting through the story, I think it’s very comforting to have someone to open themselves up to, just to get along with people. No matter what kind of person Jo is, she just wants to have a normal life for herself, and not judging her the fact that her family lives in the trailer or people calling her garbage. And looking right past of it, she’s actually making friends with some teenagers and some people at a band club at school, hung out with them and by some miracle, Jo helped Rus out for tuition problems by digging out a suitcase of money right out in the junkyard. I think it’s a great story. If you ever want to experience what true friendship is like, then this is for you.
Newsdesk