Giant Days

I don’t remember ever talking about these stories and it has been a little while since I read them. But the thing is, I was reminded of them recently and I feel a need to delve into the quagmire of my mind and maybe talk about something a bit different than normal. Yeah, I’m getting to the point. I swear I am. In an effort to avoid beating around the bush anymore, I will just jump right in and see where the blind rush takes us. I’m talking about a series I spent some time with a while back called Giant Days (Boom! – Boom Box 2015).

And where I step of into uncharted waters is where the storylines live. See, this series covers the life and times of three girls as they are going through the college experience. Yeah, it fascinates me. I am neither a girl nor was my college experience anything like what they went through. I mean, at the start, I had gone to college, the first time, from a bit before I turned 16 till I was almost 17. All after I had effectively quit high school. This is a long story that I might need more beers before I am ready to get too deep into it.

Add to that, I never really lived on campus. For me that bit of life experience is more akin to my time in the Marines. I spent four years living in dorms while traveling around the world. So much not the same thing.

So what this really comes back to is a life experience I now know second hand. It wasn’t nor would it ever be something I could live with my own life. This shows the real benefit of our human existence. There are ways we can gain experiences we never would have had on our own. But I digress…

Like I was saying the main draw of this for me is the different experiences. I enjoy seeing a bit of the world I never would have seen otherwise. And this comic actually falls within a category of other comics I have read in the past. Namely there is a college age comic I read from time to time about college kids and their experiences at school called Dumbing of Age. Of course, both of these storylines share one other thing in common. Neither one takes place in the US. The online comic is Canadian, and Giant Days takes place in the United Kingdom. Talk about foreign experiences.

Anyway, at this point I am sure you are wondering if I have a point to all of this. Join the club. I feel like this is more of a blather of the oddities I experience through different sources than it is anything of prominence. And you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. We spend so much of our time searching for meaning in the world around us that we forget about actually just living our lives.

One of the experiences that tends to be universal is that moment in time when we are trying to figure out where and how we fit into the world. It doesn’t really matter what is going on around any of that. The underlying moments remain the same. We have ups and downs and even moments in our lives when things feel so much like they will crash around us. And yet we manage to survive into adulthood. There is never really this profound moment where knowledge and experience find us. Not in a way we feel it. What we might feel instead is a moment when the world suddenly makes sense. Usually only for a brief moment before it slips away again. It’s one of those universal things that hits all of us at one point or another.

For me, that really is where I find myself reading comics like these. I see experiences I may never have on my own, and I learn a bit more to gain that much more understanding of how the world works. Of course, the more I learn, the more I realize I really don’t know anything. The universe always finds a way to surprise me with how chaotic and strange it can be.

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If you enjoy these stories, consider leaving some coffee money in the jar or you could buy a book or two. Either way helps keep the stories flowing.