Bad Machinery: The Case of the Team Spirit
John Allison
Oni Press, 136pp, £14.99
This book has been a long time coming. The first collection of John Allison’s Bad Machinery webcomic, it is being released as the web version finishes its fifth story. That’s pretty far removed from the print collections of Allison’s previous strip, Scary Go Round, of which Bad Machinery is a loose sequel. Those were usually available shortly after the arc they collected was finished, in small self-published paperbacks.
But the delay is for a good reason. Where Scary Go Round was frequently meandering, with story lines and characters fading out of view as he got bored of them and moved on, Bad Machinery is laser-focused. It takes the classic archetype of mystery-solving-teens, throws them in situations that are half-way between Scooby-Do and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (monsters are real, but generally they’re more interested in being left alone than taking over the world), and polishes the whole thing off with Allison’s unique, and wonderful, authorial voice.
He’s been writing webcomics for fifteen years, starting with Bobbins until 2002, then relaunching the series as Scary Go Round, and then Bad Machinery four years ago. Each series has shared characters with the one before, but been a fresh beginning in story terms, and this is no different. But that still means fifteen straight years improving his craft, and it shows. Since an abrupt change in his artistic style in 2005 – moving from a heavily digital style to more traditional-looking cartooning – the focus was on refining the writing and art, until in 2009, Scary Go Round was put to bed and Bad Machinery was launched. As a third-generation webcomic, it skipped the false starts common to so many books with similar provenance, and launched straight into the strong story collected here.
That change – which, given it amounted to killing-off an eight-year-long serial with a devoted fanbase, was hardly minor – has resulted in a book which is perfect for people who don’t read comics. And more than that: it’s a book perfect for kids who don’t read comics. Starring relatable schoolchildren, in a series of stand-alone cases, it stands a chance of being the Hardy Boys or Famous Five of our generation.
And that’s precisely why the delay has happened. Because there’s no point in writing a book which could be loved by a generation of children and then hiding it on a website and in self-published books. This needs to be in schools, on reading club lists, and in libraries, and for that, it needs a real publisher backing it up.
But finding one which was prepared to take a book which was still available for free online was easier said than done. False starts with some publishers who were unhappy competing against the internet pushed the publication date further and further back, but Allison didn’t give up. At one point he was forced to launch subscriptions for the site – ranging from £2 a year, for which subscribers receive “nothing but my gratitude”, to £100 a year, for which subscribers receive “nothing but my gratitude” – to make ends meet, but eventually it paid off. Step up Oni Press, the publishers of the Scott Pilgrim series, who have worked with Allison to make a print version with production values to die for. A massive book – roughly the size of two standard-sized comics next to each other – it includes the first case, as well as a short prologue, a chunk of back-matter, and a fair few reworked pages to take advantage of the differences between print and online.
Getting this book into the hands of real-life kids is obviously Allison’s aim, but as with all the best children’s authors, he’s done that by writing a book which doesn’t talk down to them. Like Pixar’s films, an adult not reading Bad Machinery because it’s for kids is missing out – and missing the point. The jokes are sharp, the plot is twisting, and the mystery is engrossing. If the fact that the main characters are 11-year-olds spoils that for you, I don’t know what to say.
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