Never Ending Summer TP Allison Cole 1st print Alternative Comics

Description

Never Ending Summer Paperback
by Allison Cole (Illustrator)

Relationships break down between boyfriends, friends, and family, throughout which the author must discover how to maintain a sense of balance. Parties, excessive drinking, and financial instability add to the commotion. Drawn in a beautiful minimal style with delicate two-color printing.

Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Alternative Comics
ISBN 1-891867-66-0

Allison Cole’s “Never Ending Summer” marks her graphic novel debut. As is the DIY style, the author focuses on her own life and relationships, putting it onto paper with a beguiling simplicity. Set during a summer between semesters in Providence, Rhode Island, Allison works at a comic store and collects LPs. Asher, her boyfriend, has left for a two-week trip. Suddenly she gets a phone call. He wants to go back to Australia for the rest of the summer — where his old girlfriend lives. Uh oh. The rest of the book follows Allison’s melancholy struggles with an increasingly irrevocable breakup. She spends a lot time drinking with her other besotted friends and their twisty, early-twenties-style relationships. To make things more confusing a guy named Sam comes on the scene and takes an interest in Allison. But he’s still involved with his ex! Unlike Jeffrey Brown, however, Allison Cole comes up with an upbeat ending about relying on oneself to find happiness.

Cole’s artwork matches the unpretentious ambitions of the story. She draws her characters with an absolute minimum of detail. They are all essentially sexless blobs with singular attributes — glasses or animal ears — to distinguish between them. The polished grade-school style emphasizes the immaturity of the characters in a clever way. Everything is rendered as outlines, with no shading, like everyone is getting blasted with white light. Cole’s relaxed, confident pace develops “Never Ending Summer” into a neat little view on the vulnerabilities of human interrelations.

We follow Allison as she drifts through her summer, spending her days working at the comic book shop and nights at a random house or bar. In the strongest plot line, her boyfriend, Asher, leaves town and then reveals he’s decided not to return for the rest of the summer. Cole ably captures the misery of scattered late-night phone calls and occasional e-mails, as well as the sympathy of Allison’s equally aimless and confused friends.

Cole tells the everyday story of Allison during a season of cascading disappointments. She wakes with a huge sore on her lip, so her boyfriend, Asher, doesn’t kiss her before he goes away for two weeks. Later, he calls to tell her his two weeks are changing into the whole summer in Australia. When he finally calls from Down Under, he fesses up that he’s reconsidering his former girlfriend. Meanwhile, the comics shop where Allison works closes, a guy she starts getting interested in becomes evasive, and some of her girlfriends are breaking up with their men. At least, she finally cuts the cord to Asher, and the mix tape she was making for him opens a dance-club DJ gig for her. Cole’s minimalist drawing and subdued coloring paradoxically point up the strong emotions that regularly swirl to the surface of her absorbing, realistic narrative.

Near mint, 1st print.