Still off the grid, and I have a solid concern that I’ll end up repeating myself. I suppose it’s always possible I’ll end up re-writing the whole thing, and nobody will ever know of these thoughts flitting through my head as I prepare my review of the penultimate graphic novel in the Girls series, Survival. As I type this, I’m sitting in a small town about 40 miles northwest of the point where I-35 crosses into Oklahoma, a town not much larger than Pennystown in our story. And it’s pretty easy to feel cut off from the rest of the world here, even though I’m clearly not. Far more easy to feel that way if I was trapped behind an impenetrable sphere with a disturbingly familiar death monster in the middle and dozens of naked girls running around trying to kill any women they see and reproduce with any men. Probably even the arrival of military forces wouldn’t ease my concern overmuch.

But if I have to be trapped like that, I think I’d rather face all that stuff alone. Because as bad as bizarre sci-fi monsters and as horrible as all that sex would be (and, okay, once they started being daughters and granddaughters, it would be kind of horrible), my trapped fellows would be far worse. Refusing to work together, insisting on assigning blame and punishment in the midst of the crisis, putting together dangerous half-baked schemes without any real discussion or foresight… by this point in the series, there are only a handful of people that I want to see walk away alive. That is, I care whether the rest of the people live or die, it’s just that I’d prefer them dead.

On the bright side, there’s still a pretty good chance of that outcome.