Pluralistic: Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's "Youth Group" (16 Jul 2024)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris’s “Youth Group” (16 Jul 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



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The Firstsecond cover for Youth Group by Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris.

Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's "Youth Group" (permalink)

Youth Group is Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's new and delightful graphic novel from Firstsecond. It's a charming tale of 1990s ennui, cringe Sunday School – and demon hunting.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250789235/youthgroup

Kay is a bitter, cynical teenager who's doing her best to help her mother cope with an ugly divorce that has seen her dad check out on his former family. Mom is going back to church, and she talks Kay into coming along with her to attend the church youth group.

This is set in the 1990s, and the word "cringe" hasn't yet entered our lexicon as an adjective, but boy is the youth group cringe. The pastor is a guitar-strumming bearded dad who demonstrates how down he is with the kids by singing top 40 songs rewritten with evangelical lyrics (think Weird Al meets the 700 Club). Kay gamely struggles through a session and even makes a friend or two, and agrees to keep attending in deference to her mother's pleas.

But this is no ordinary youth group. Kay's ultra-boring suburban hometown is actually infested with demons who routinely possess the townspeople, and that baseline of demonic activity has suddenly gone critical, with a new wave of possessions. Suddenly, the possessed are everywhere – even Kay's shitty dad ends up with a demon inside of him.

That's when Kay discovers that the youth group and its corny pastor are also demon hunters par excellence. Their rec-rooms sport secret cubbies filled with holy weapons, and the words of exorcism come as readily to them as any embarrassing rewritten devotional pop song. Kay's discovery of this secret world convinces her that youth group isn't so bad after all, and soon she is initiated into its mysteries, including the existence of rival demon-hunting kids from the local synagogue, Catholic church, and Wiccan coven.

As the nature of the new demonic incursion becomes clearer, it falls on Kay and her pals to overcome these sectarian divisions over the protests of their guitar-strumming, magic-wielding leader. That takes on a special urgency when Kay learns why the demons are interested in her, personally, and a handful of other kids in town who all share a secret trait.

I confess that as someone who lived through the 1990s as a young man, there is something disorienting about experiencing the decade of my young adulthood through the kind of retro lens I associate with the 1950s or 1960s. But while the experience is disorienting, it's not unpleasant. McCurdy's artwork and Morris's snappy dialog conjure up that bygone decade in a way that is simultaneously affectionate and critical, exposing the hollowness of its performative ennui and the brave face that performance represented even as the world was being swept up in corporate gigantism.

McCurdy and Morris are really onto something here, implicitly asking us why the 1990s gave us Buffy and Sabrina (and The Coven, etc etc) – what was it about that decade in which Reaganomics and globalism consolidated the gains of the 1980s, where the climate emergency took on its undeniable urgency, where media monopolies mastered the art of commodifying counterculture faster than it could mutate into new forms?

Morris's writing really shines here. If you enjoyed Bubble, his earlier outing based on the post-apocalyptic comedy podcast of the same name, you will love this one:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr

Morris is also half of Jordan, Jesse Go!, the long-running podcast where he and Jesse Thorn do a weekly ha-ha-only-serious goofball schtick that never fails to smuggle in really clever and insightful ideas amidst the poop jokes.

https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/jordan-jesse-go/

John Hodgman calls nostalgia a "toxic impulse." Church Group deftly avoid's nostalgia's trap, managing to be a period piece without falling prey to the Happy Days pathology of ignoring the many flaws and problems of its era. And of course, it's a hoot and a blast.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Britain will subject everyone who works with kids to multiple, repeated police-checkshttps://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/false_positives.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/false_positives.html

#10yrsago Australian bill will put journos in prison for 10 years for reporting leaks https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/16/journalists-face-jail-leaks-security-laws

#10yrsago NY DA says he won’t prosecute minor drug possession; NYPD officers ordered to go on arresting https://www.techdirt.com/2014/07/16/nypd-tells-brooklyn-officers-to-continue-making-low-level-drug-arrests-da-has-stated-he-wont-prosecute/

#10yrsago Fake TSA screener infiltrates SFO checkpoint, gropes women https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Fake-screener-probes-passengers-at-SFO-5626732.php

#10yrsago Google Plus drops “Real Names” policy https://web.archive.org/web/20140717024719/https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy

#10yrsago New Mexico threatens inmate with 90 days’ solitary because his family made him a Facebook page https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/new-mexico-inmate-faces-90-days-solitary-over-facebook-profile

#10yrsago Yet another TSA screener doesn’t know that DC is part of America https://web.archive.org/web/20140715200126/https://www.wftv.com/news/news/local/orlando-tsa-agents-getting-geography-refresher/ngfmH/

#5yrsago How F Scott Fitzgerald conjugated the verb “To cocktail” https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/f-scott-fitzgerald-conjugates-to-cocktail.html

#5yrsago When Trump’s #TaxScam meant that affluent people no longer had to use the paid version of Turbotax, Turbotax started charging poor people, disabled people, students and elderly people https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-tax-law-threatened-turbotax-profits-started-charging-disabled-unemployed-and-students#164493

#5yrsago Tennessee police to drug users: don’t flush your dope or you’ll create “meth gators” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

#5yrsago Read: Trump’s grandfather’s letter, in which he begs not to be deported https://harpers.org/archive/2017/03/the-emigrants/

#5yrsago Lessons from testing decades of forgotten rape kits: serial rapists are common, they don’t follow a pattern, they’re not very bright, and they’re often the same men who commit acquaintance rape https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/an-epidemic-of-disbelief/592807/

#5yrsago In 1943, the chairman of the NY Fed backed Modern Monetary Theory: “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete” https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/16/in-1943-the-chairman-of-the-ny-fed-backed-modern-monetary-theory-taxes-for-revenue-are-obsolete/

#5yrsago How To: play Vlad Taltos in an RPG https://annarchive.com/files/Drmg220.pdf#[{"num"%3A197%2C"gen"%3A0}%2C{"name"%3A"Fit"}]

#5yrsago Podcast: Occupy Gotham https://ia903008.us.archive.org/30/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_303/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_303_-_Occupy_Gotham.mp3

#5yrsago Many of the key Googler Uprising organizers have quit, citing retaliation from senior management https://googlewalkout.medium.com/onward-another-googlewalkout-goodbye-b733fa134a7d

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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 766 words (21648 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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Maybe if Young Life had been this kind of youth group when I was a participant in the '60s, I would have stuck with the religion thing a bit longer…

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