Stray Bullets: Sunshine & Roses vol. 4 — The Salad Days

The series that ranked as my “Best of 2018” comes around for its latest volume and things couldn’t be better, right?  Not quite. Things start off promisingly enough with a flashback to better, but still very murderous, days for Kretchmeyer back home and in Baltimore before segueing into the team-up from hell.  That’d be the one between him and Beth’s mother, Annie. Sure, both of them could’ve used another month in the hospital to recover from her stroke and nerve damage to his left arm, but revenge and suitcases filled with cash and cocaine wait for no person.  Especially when the people in possession of these items are blazing a trail of crime and debauchery through the midwest. That might sound like fun but the fractures are starting to show in the relationship between Beth, Nina, and Derek… I mean Orson. About that:  Orson is still maintaining his ex-porn-star alter ego and while it’s giving him the confidence to do some crazy and disgusting things, the question remains as to whether these crazy and disgusting things are actually worth doing.

What this volume made me realize is that the three previous volumes of “Sunshine & Roses” all benefited from a strong sense of focus on the plot at hand.  Whether it was reintroducing the world and characters, robbing the Cock’s Crow, or hiding out in Palm Court, the focus on these things kept the narrative focused while the craziness nipped around at its fringes.  Here, it feels like creator David Lapham let things get away from him as Kretch and Annie’s adventures tackle a lot of different things and only tangentially intersect with everyone else’s. Meanwhile, Beth, Nina, and Orson feel like they’re spinning their wheels as they realize that stealing all this money and drugs hasn’t given them the freedom they’d hoped.  What’s here isn’t truly bad and a lot of the individual issues, like the one involving Orson’s return to Baltimore, are quite good. I’m just left wishing that Lapham had picked one particular plot thread to focus on and stuck to that. Had he done that this would’ve been a worthy follow-up to the previous three instead of the very readable speed bump that it is.