Steeple vol. 2: The Silvery Moon

The original “Steeple” miniseries from creator John Allison was delightful.  It wasn’t just the fact that it was enjoyably quirky in a deeply English way, it was also very funny with two winning leads in curate-turned-satanic-priestess Billie, and satanic-priestess-turned-curate Maggie.  I wasn’t expecting a sequel, so the appearance of “The Silvery Moon” in the solicitations several months back was a wonderful surprise.

Vol. 2 does have some significant structural changes compared to the first volume and its new status as an original graphic novel.  Where the first volume had five self-contained yet interconnected stories, this one only has two longer-than-usual ones.  The first sees Billie and Maggie continuing to adjust to their positions in their new churches, and while the latter only faces mundane challenges from the church staff, the former has to deal with the fact that one of her new friends is concealing a terrible disease:  Lycanthropy.  After those issues are sorted, Billie gets the idea to organize a Saturnalia truce between the churches.  This idea runs into a problem when an expedition between the youth group she set up, Godsplann, and Maggie unearths (of all things) a Super Sentai in a nearby cave.

Both stories are great fun as Allison’s talent for effortlessly whimsical comedy is very much on point here.  I laughed plenty of times at bits involving the comments made on a rampage through town, the annual Mother Goose play involving the release of a kraken, and Reverend Tom’s plans for punching his way out of a sea monster.  The humor and storytelling of this pair of stories is very much what I wanted more of after reading the first volume.  This is in spite of the fact that the overall experience feels slighter compared to vol. 1.  Still, the quality of “Steeple” is such that I’d still pay the same amount for a third volume of stories about Billie, Maggie, and the weirdly enjoyable goings-on of the town of Tredregyn.