[Phantom Stranger]

This thread needs more love.

Seconds, by Bryan Lee O'Malley. This was an absolutely lovely read. It's funny, cute, charming and a bit surreal at times. Like the Scott Pilgrim series, it has a large focus on admitting mistakes and living with them, but this also features the consequences of changing or avoiding them, due to the nature of the book.

The main protagonist is Katie, a young woman who once had the best restaurant in town, Seconds. But shes since stopped running the restaurant and looks to open up a new place. However, after a particularly bad day of being behind on renovations at the new location, seeing her ex she still has feelings for, and just a bunch of other awkwardness, she sees a mysterious being, who we later come to know as Lis. Katie is given a note book and a mushroom. Instructions within the book say to write down your mistake, take the mushroom, go to sleep, wake up with the problem solved. All of this must also happen within the house.(Though the problems need not necessarily take place within the home)

Lis says that only one mushroom is allowed. But Katie later discovers a heap of them under Seconds, and begins abusing them. Eventually things start to get bad, the world starts changing, people around her are completely different, shes less happy each time. The more she takes to try and fix the issues in each new scenario, the more problematic things become.


The writing it really good. The characters feel diverse. I think the humor is very well timed and paced(I'm particularly fond of the moments Katie breaks the fourth wall to argue with the narrator) and the book knows when to be a little creepy. If there is an issue it is that not everyone really gets a lot to them. Some of the characters are just there, but this is also just one book so I can understand only focusing background details on a select few, mainly those Katie knows the best.


Art wise, the book is great. I love, love, love the artstyle. Everyone has a great distinctive look about them. The manga influences can certainly be felt, not only in character reactions and style, but structure. What I mean by that is that there are pages where there is no dialog, everything is said with the art itself. This also isn't too different from certain comics like those by Steve Ditko or Jim Aparo. Granted that is a big statement, and Seconds isn't nearly as detailed, but the intent is largely the same with letting the art do the talking. The arts also gets a little abstract in certain parts, with a running theme being tree branches. Coloring is also very good, again, the abstract portions make very good use of that. Varying shades of red, hard white with black, etc, contrasting with the otherwise very colorful book.

I could go on about this, but it's 4:30, I stayed up reading this book and it was completely worth it. It's like $17.99 for the Hardcover on amazon(The pages are also nicely stitched together instead of glued) I highly recommend this, especially if you already like Scott Pilgrim like I do.