"I may not breed" - Talking to girls at parties with a little help from Neil Gaiman

Girls. I've met a few.

Parties. I've been to one.

Yeah, neither of those two things were my area of expertise when I was the same age as Enn from How To Talk To Girls At Parties. Enn's buddy Vic explains simply, "You just have to talk to them", a sentiment I heard from many "Vics" in my day. I could definitely identify with the worry and wonder of Enn's predicament, as he tries to work up the nerve to talk to what he thinks are ordinary teenage girls.

Being a Neil Gaiman comic, of course they aren't just ordinary dames. Gaiman provides the three sirens in this story with an otherworldly presence, and the art of Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon makes them seem even more fae and fragile. (Apparently, this is based on a short story by Neil I have not read.) This is a touching little number from one hell of a creative team.

It's a short one, hardly requiring the hardback treatment of the version I got from my public library, but it is a complete package. This done-in-one follows teenage horomoaners Enn and Vic as they try to get lucky at a party. Enn is the nervous, wallflower-y one, while Vic the swinging dick of the two. I saw a lot of my own past in the interactions between these two and some of the conversational bits between them felt like they'd been pulled from a diary I never kept.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Gaiman can spin a yarn, whether it's in novels like American Gods, long-form series like Sandman or smaller graphic novellas like this. He's a master of the craft and knows how to shift things into that cosmic gear without ever losing the humanity in his stories. I wouldn't mind seeing more one shots like this in the future.

The brothers Ba and Moon provide some of the best art of their careers here. When Enn and Vic arrive at the party, the way they animate the music flowing from panel to panel is so lucid you can almost hear the sounds of a high school mixer. Stella, Wain, and the other girls are rail thin, moving like blades of grass in the wind. They each seem fragile in one panel, then mysterious and sometimes evening unsettling in the next. Their story is a tragedy; alien entities peeking in on mortal mating rituals as part of a larger implied story that is never fully revealed and ultimately doesn't matter.

Sci-fi and fantasy trappings aside, this is a tale of "one crazy night" and an episode that nearly shook Enn and Vic's friendship to its core. The ending in uncomfortable, familiar, and goddamn brilliant.

This is also one of those comics you can hand to people who don't normally groove to this stuff. It's a short film of a book, easily digested but enriched with nutrients. Or something like that. It's really good. Check it out if you can.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter (@ChrisBComics) and check out my other stuff at Gotham Animated and Work/Shoot!