Like Charlie Brown’s zig zag shirt, you grow attached to seeing characters wearing certain outfits all of the time.įour issues isn’t a lot of the time, though. Her backwards red baseball cap was such a staple of her wardrobe in volume one as well and while she does wear it sometimes in volume two, it’s not as regular. After nine months, a person has a right to change their hairstyle but because it’s such a small change, too, it’s almost more disruptive then if she had done something more drastic, like dye her hair green. What does take some getting used to are some changes in Chris’ character design, like in volume one she always tucked her hair behind one ear on one side.

Irene Flores with Lea Caballero inked Vakueva’s pencils and you wouldn’t necessarily realize Natalia Nesterenko had taken over for Rebecca Nalty as colorist. They know Blaze is up to something with digital music but don’t know what. That’s where volume two comes in and artist, Nina Vakueva draws some great spreads where you see them practicing as a band and also as a female fight club specializing in musical justice. When chapter four ended, Chris and her new friends/co-workers at Vinyl Destination were about to enter Blaze’s battle of the bands competition. It’s important to bring up music producer, Rick Blaze, for example, because he’s still the bad guy, but the fact that D and Chris didn’t get along initially could’ve been something new readers found out later. “Some” is key however and chapter five spends way too much time going over what happened already. Since some time has passed (both within the story and since Heavy Vinyl was published) it also makes sense that our main character, Chris, would do some recapping with Jim Campbell returning as the series’ letterer. Given this story is a continuation, the first chapter is “Chapter Five,” which makes sense. While the first arc came out in single issues (under the name Hi-Fi Fight Club), before being collected, volume two is getting released all at once as a graphic novel (though a graphic novel that’s still divided into four chapters). Boom! Studios is releasing the series differently this time.

Y2K-0 begins about nine months after the events of volume one. The “K-0” is a cute touch circling back to what this series is all about. Y2K was the tech disaster people feared would occur at the start of the new millennium (New Year’s Day, 2000). Carly Usdin has written a story that couldn’t be set any-time else and while the first volume was the same way, with entrenching its plot in the 90’s, volume two dates itself in the title: Y2K-0. While, with some stories, if it weren’t for the fashions, you wouldn’t think about when they took place, the 90’s and Heavy Vinyl are a package deal. Records may have made a comeback in the last few years, but computers changed the music industry.

Heavy Vinyl, Vol. 1 by Nina Vakueva