I had confused the plots of Strangers in Paradise, Love and Rockets, and A Distant Soil, probably by reading single issues late in each series. This betrays a tin eye on my part, though I still think there's one character in each pair of stories who could be transplanted.
I would have liked this even if I didn't know it turned into a longer story - the High School! tale of adolescent trauma (one funny, one very serious) and friendship is plain and good. Also, I like the drawing, which really enjoys looking at women but doesn't objectify them. By what criterion? My criterion, that non-realist emotion is a cue for subjective identification with the drawing. In this book (no page numbers), Francine after the motorcycle blows by; Katchoo not so often, but probably in the Food Mart scene.
The bonus story is a truly silly Xena hommage - I haven't seen any Xena yet, it might also be true to the letter - and Kachoo in it is more often subjectively distorted. She isn't an actual tragic heroine in this one, which must have something to do with it (or maybe the whole first story is in Francine's memory, so of course Kachoo looks impossibly perfect and brave).
For straight comedy, "Hoagies!" at the beginning of the second story made my day.
ISBN: 1-892597-07-1
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