Lumberjanes: Volume Three: A Terrible Plan

Lumberjanes: Volume Three: A Terrible Plan
Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Carolyn Nowak, Maarta Laiho, et. al., 2016

Premise: Follows Friendship to the Max. Collects Lumberjanes #9-12. The major mystery of the summer is solved, so the girls get down to the real business of camp: telling scary stories, earning merit badges, and...getting trapped in alternate dimensions?

This volume is plenty of fun, although it feels like a breather after the climax of issue #8. Regular series artist Brooke Allen must have had other projects, as 10-12 are drawn by a new team, and 9 has a whole passel of guest artists.

Issue 9 finds the girls telling scary stories. Each story is done in a different style, and both the story and the style each say something about the teller. I think the art for the framing panels is a smidge feminine for Lumberjanes, but this is a solid, enjoyable issue.

Issues 10-12 follow two plots over the course of one day: Jo, April and Ripley try to earn a bunch of merit badges now that they have a free day and no supernatural forces are after them, and Molly and Mal go on a private picnic. The merit badge plot is mostly humor, but fleshes out the camp at large much more than we’ve gotten to this point. The picnic naturally turns into a dangerous adventure involving dinosaurs, plant monsters, and dimensional travel. Molly and Mal do get a bit of time in between running and plotting to talk about their homes and how much they like each other, which is a-freaking-dorable.

This is another strong entry in the series, although I miss Allen’s art.

4 Stars - A Very Good Book