Review: The Great British Bump Off by John Allison, Max Sarin, Sammy Borras, and Jim Campbell

I don't really watch television. And I don't really read graphic novels. Somehow I still thought it would be fun to read a graphic novel send-up of The Great British Bake Off where one of the contestants is poisoned. I do suspect that fans of the show who regularly read graphic novels will find this entertaining. I think I missed too much of what I imagine to be good natured satire because I don't have the background to catch it and I found the plot line without that background knowledge to be very thin.

Shauna Wickle is a contestant on the newest season of UK Bakery Tent. She's young and enthusiastic and quirky. When the story opens, Shauna is meeting and befriending two other contestants, an older grandmotherly white woman and a cool, gay man of color. The three new friends then witness a confrontation in the test kitchen. Neal, the classically handsome and impossibly insufferable contestant, clashes with the other bakers over the right to be in the test kitchen. When Shauna and her friends return to the tent later to try and befriend Neal, they discover him face down in a bowl of battered, poisoned. Rather than cancel the show, the producers allow Shauna to take over investigating who the poisoner is as the contest continues to play out.

Shauna is a completely bumbling investigator and is so distracted by trying to decide which of her fellow contestants is a poisoner that she performs terribly on each baking challenge. The trails she follows as she suspects several of her fellow bakers are thin at best and abruptly discarded without any evidence other than her deciding without cause that they are deadends. The characters here are all pretty intentionally cliched, which probably allows readers who are fans of GBBO a nice feeling of being in on the joke. One of the judges is the famous tv cook, the late Fanny Cradock who is a characature portrayed as rude, condescending, and as fearsome as the real critic was based on her very public late career downfall. This is probably the only joke that I, as a non-GBBO watcher, got. For some reason, there is a talking cat who is one of the co-hosts of the fictional show, a strange touch of magical whimsy in an otherwise goofy but straightforward whodunit. Sarin's artwork is exaggerated and over the top, with an almost anime feel to it, which is well done, playing into the cliches written by Allison.

Apparently this is the first in a series but it missed the mark for me so I won't be continuing with it. I am, however, sending it to a friend who is a huge GBBO fan and will be curious to hear her take on it.