'The town of Southborough used to be a major tourism destination, drawing folks from all over in the hopes they’d spot the famous Sasquatch, reportedly seen in the town many times over the years. But it’s been ages since anyone’s spotted the ‘squatch, and tourism is starting to dry up. A tech company called Start-up.com (a start-up that helps people start their own start-ups) decides to begin buying up places all over town in order to build their techie headquarters, driving out all the local townspeople. Luckily, Southborough is also home to Louie O’Connor, firm believer in the Sasquatch’s existence and all-around, mega ’squatch fan.
'When Louie’s dads’ restaurant, Squatch Burger, starts to go under and fall prey to the techie start-up, Louie and her best friend Felix decide they’ll do whatever it takes to save the town from losing all the people and places that make it special. In hopes that convincing people the Sasquatch is real and to drive back tourism, Louie and Felix plan an elaborate hoax in hopes of saving the town from the dot-com takeover. But when Felix starts talking about leaving their hometown for college in LA, Louie will have to face some tough questions about herself, her future career, and her place in her beloved hometown.'
Martian Ghost Centaur tells the story of Louie, a seventeen-year-old living in the small town of Southborough, a once popular tourist destination that has fallen on hard times. The town had a boom decades before following the sighting of the famous cryptid Sasquatch, and the subsequent tourist attention that it generates. However, with fewer and fewer sightings of the mythical creature the tourism has all but dried up, and many of those who live and work in Southborough are struggling to get by, especially when a tech billionaire comes to town and starts buying up all the properties so that they can convert the place into their new corporate headquarters.
Louie convinces herself that if she gets a popular web monster hunter, Para-Norma, to come to town and capture evidence of Sasquatch it'll bring tourists back to Southborough. Unfortunately, instead of proving to the world that the monster is real it's revealed that her parents were behind the original sighting. Now angry at her parents for lying to her, and facing the end of Southborough Louie comes up with an even riskier gambit, convincing people that a new, real, monster has arrived in town; the Martian Ghost Centaur.
You can probably tell from the title of the book alone, but Martian Ghost Centaur isn't a story that takes itself too seriously, it's full of ridiculous situations, over the top jokes, and crazy characters; and it's all the better for it. The book embraces a sense of whimsy that informs every plot point, every character, and much of the art too, with silly little references and Easter eggs hidden in the backgrounds of scenes. It's not a parody by any means, instead walking a fine line between good humour and pure silliness.
The book is pretty well paced, with quite a lot of the story actually taking place before Louie makes the decision to make her own fake monster, something that I was expecting to come up a lot earlier in the plot. Instead, the book takes its time getting to that point, focusing instead on Louie and her family, their relationships, and the people of Southborough. Because of spending this time getting to know the characters I found myself caring about them more than I was expecting, and would have enjoyed several volumes of just following these people around and seeing the weird little things they got up to on a day to day basis.
I also really enjoyed the amount of time given over to Louie's relationships with her parents, and the fact that she has two fathers in a loving relationship and it's never once made a thing of. No one even points out that two men are married to each other with a teenage daughter as being out of the ordinary in any way, and I feel this is something a lot of other books fail to do. Good representation doesn't just mean including queer characters like this, but treating it as normal too, it means not sensationalising things or going 'look at our progressive characters'. The gender of either of Louie's parents wouldn't have changed a single part of the book, any of the plot or the way a single character reacted to them, and that's great.
I had a great time with this book, I found it to be a lot of fun and it really got me invested in the characters and the world. The artwork is pretty simple, but it has a lot of details in the backgrounds of scenes, small jokes and gags that you'll miss if you're not looking out for them. The whole thing was a delight to read.
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