The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt #1: Fraught Canal Journeys

This month sees the return of The Great British Bump-Off, a comedy-mystery series by writer John Allison, artist Max Sarin, colorist Sammy Borras, and letterer Jim Campbell. The original Great British Bump-Off saw intrepid amateur sleuth Shauna solve an attempted murder while competing on a Great British Bake-Off-esque reality show. The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt follows Shauna as she explores Yorkshire’s canals and cozy towns in a borrowed narrowboat. Inevitably, things take a turn for the worse. 

As with book one, Allison’s script is quite humorous and amps up the setting’s twee Englishness. (I’ll note some references to British culture, per Fanny Craddock in the last series, may be unfamiliar to American readers.) Kill or Be Quilt suffers a bit if only because the original series’ choice to mash up GBBO and Agatha Christie felt divinely inspired. And while this cozy mystery delivers on cozy, the mystery is introduced very late in the issue. It also takes a while for the new punny subtitle to make contextual sense. Nonetheless, the comic is a delight to read. This is in large part due to its protagonist, Shauna, whose naïveté, optimism, and gung-ho attitude have a way of getting her into messy situations. In truth, Kill or Be Quilt #1 reads much better when approached as a sitcom (sitcomic?) about Shauna than it does when approached as a mystery. 

Sarin’s artwork is energetic, confident, and always a breath of fresh air. Some of Kill or Be Quilt’s best moments come from the choice to show Shauna’s vivid imagination visually. When Shauna feels like melting into a puddle, Sarin simply depicts her melting into a puddle of blue watery goo. In a comics landscape dominated by semi-realism, Sarin’s unapologetically exaggerated and unrealistic cartooning feels classic yet modern. Borras’ colors are vibrant and, as in the puddle scene, similarly not too constrained by realism.