Steeple

Steeple #1-5

by John Allison, Sarah Stern (Illustrations), Jim Campbell (Illustrations)

A supernatural tale of friendship, the devil, and moral gray areas.

Two women with wildly different worldviews become unlikely friends as they navigate the supernatural happenings in a sleepy coastal parish--and soon find themselves forced to choose sides in the war between good and evil, facing demons, curses, and a miniature Rapture!

The latest graphic novel from John Allison, author of Giant Days!

Collects issues #1-#5 of Dark Horse Comics series Steeple.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Paranormal

136 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2020

About the author

John Allison is the author and artist of the British webcomics Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See other authors with similar names.

Reviews

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

Billie Baker is the chirpy new curate in the small Cornish town of Tredregyn - but little does she realise she is stepping into THE hotbed of the fight between good, evil and sea monsters! While her colleague, the hawt older man Reverend Penrose, battles things that climb up the cliffs at night, Billie meets the local Church of Satan, a rapturous company trying to develop a local wind farm, and gets stuck in with a witch’s convention. But who is Billie - really?

I’m a huge fan of John Allison’s dearly departed Giant Days but, strangely, I don’t really like much else he’s written (besides the little-known Expecting to Fly) - and so it goes with Steeple, unfortunately.

The setup is promising - local, picturesque seaside town, typically-witty Allison dialogue/characters - but nowt much seems to happen and the religious-themed stories didn’t do anything for me. A lot of things feel underdeveloped. Why are there monsters attacking the town at night? Why is there just one guy fighting them back? What’s the purpose of the Church of Satan - why is Tredregyn such a magnet for all this magical stuff?

The wind farm/rapture thing was confusing, the witches’ convention was a lead balloon - they just show up and that’s it. Billie and her friend Maggie of the Church of Satan feel like weaker versions of Daisy and Esther from Giant Days. And the book closes very abruptly in a flurry of arbitrary, rushed pseudo-endings which were plain unsatisfying - you can tell Allison didn’t expect to shutter the series so early on. I guess IDW cancelled it due to poor sales?

Steeple is like a lot of John Allison’s Scary Go Round comics in that it mixes his usual lightly comedic tone/characters with typical horror genre elements, which is something that does appeal to me so I wish I liked them more than I do but I don’t because they’re just not a good fit. Steeple is a bunch of half-baked ideas, go-nowhere stories and underwritten characters - a disappointingly dull read.

[Artemy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update: John Allison continues Steeple as a web series! You can start reading it on his website.

Steeple is yet another John Allison masterpiece. The guy truly can do no wrong and is one of the all-time best cartoonists as far as I'm concerned.

Steeple follows Billie, a young priestess in training, who moves to a small town called Tredregyn to join the local church. Tredredgyn is a town overcome by monsters and various supernatural happenings, and it suspiciously sounds exactly like the place where I live...



(only, y'know, my city is an ugly, soulless industrial shithole inhabited by over a million people with dead eyes and cold hearts, and Tredregyn still seems to be a lovely enough small town in England).

Anyway, when she arrives, Billie finds a very unlikely friend in Maggie, an acolyte of the local church of Satan.



A lot of shenanigans ensue as Billie and Maggie navigate their respective religious institutions and try to handle all sorts of stuff from local politics and NIMBYs to actual demons, monsters and even Satan himself.



Steeple was an absolute joy as you can tell, and I really hope John Allison will give us more stories starring these brilliant characters.

Oh, and if you've been reading this series in singles like me, make sure to check out an extra epilogue that John Allison posted on his blog here.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a Hell of a lot of fun! Steeple tells the story of a new curate sent to a Cornish seaside village where a battle is raging (quietly) between the forces of good and evil! Can she sway the tide? Immediately making best friends with a member of the local Church of Satan would seem like a step in the wrong direction...

I didn’t love it quite as much as my dearly departed ‘Giant Days’ but I’d definitely like to see it get renewed as an ongoing series.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Allison tries to recreate his Giant Days magic with this new series about a not-so-good female priest and a not-so-bad female Satanist who become besties. Hijinks sort of ensue around the small English seaside town they both now reside in as they fight mermen and host Witch Festivals. For whatever reason, this never really comes together for me the way Giant Days did. A lot of the humor didn't land for me this time around I guess.

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why does John Allison's quirky and charming scripting work so amazingly well for Giant Days but just falls short in his fantasy titles like this one and By Night?

I want to like Steeple but it simply pokes around the corners of a twee little English village with its competing Anglican and Satanist houses of worship without ever finding a direction. Is it Buffy the Vampire Slayer with tea and crumpets or Pilgrim's Progress with T&A? I sorta wanna find out . . . maybe?

Oh, wait, I just now found that Allison is posting a webcomic follow-up that starts at https://steeple.church/comic/2020-02-17/. I'm intrigued enough to give it a go.


UPDATE 10/22/2020 - Review of Steeple: The Silvery Moon webcomic:

(Two stars)

Well, between the first Steeple collection and this webcomic, the characters are starting to grow on me. It's basically a friendship tale between two women in the midst of reassessing their faiths. Some inconsequential, supernatural frivolity fills out the pages. It still hasn't charmed me the way it should, but I'm willing to try the next webcomic chapter as soon as it wraps up at the end of this month.

The Silvery Moon arc is available here: https://steeple.church/comic/2020-02-17/


UPDATE 11/4/2020 - Review of Steeple: Secret Sentai webcomic:

(Two stars)

Nothin' but noodlin' here as Allison plays around with his Steeple characters, generating a few minor chuckles, rolling out yet another sea monster, and calling it a day without anything of consequence occurring.

This adventure is available free online: https://steeple.church/comic/secret-s...

The next one begins serialization online Nov. 9th and wraps up at Christmas: https://steeple.church/comic/christma...


UPDATE 1/21/2021 - Review of Steeple #10: Christmas with Clovis webcomic:

(Two stars)

Maggie and Billie spend Christmas drinking and hanging out with Mrs. Clovis. There is also a small tussle with a minor supernatural being, but that is secondary to the imbibing and bonding.

The web series is going on hiatus for a while, but I'm not sure I'll be coming back when it resumes. It's just too low-key to care about even if the characters are somewhat likable.

Read it free online: https://steeple.church/comic/hes-such...

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just a bunch of nonsense, and worse - bad storytelling.

Stories are short, and problems are fixed much too quickly and much too easily, so there is no sense of peril.

Oh no, monsters from the sea! Next issue - oh wait, here's a truce with the monsters lol. Last issue - oh no, the truce wasn't really a thing, the monsters are back! Oh wait, they're instantly defeated again lol!! Etc.

Characters are clichéd caricatures.

Characters make uncharacteristically stupid decisions because the plot needs them to.

It tries really hard to be whimsical and funny, and (for me at least) fails almost every time.

And look, I'm not religious, you do you, but even I feel the way religion is handled here is cackhanded and simplistic.

Loved Giant Days, but this is a clunker.

(Read as five single issues)

[Lost in Book Land · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello!

I feel like it was a very busy weekend for me but I also think I accomplished a lot! I have been reading a ton still this month (I definitely think my reading for this month tops the last two months)! I will definitely be finished with at least one more book before the end of the month, I may even finish it today. A little, earlier this month, however, I decided to pick up some graphic novels, I love reading graphic novels and manga and I feel like it had been a little bit since I had read any of these. So I started by reading Check Please book one and I loved it so much (you can read my gushing review on here or Goodreads)! Then I went over to Hoopla, to see what else I might be interested in picking up. I ended up grabbing a bunch of issues of graphic novel series that I am in the middle of and hope the start the next one of but I also picked up Steeple. This is a new series ( I believe after some research it’s going to be a series) by John Allison, this is the same author who wrote Giant Days. One of my absolute favorite graphic novel series of all time (I still have not read that last volume after college because it’s going to be like saying goodbye to best friends and the final volume of the actual series was already incredibly hard)! So I decided I wanted to try some new John Allison!

SPOILERS AHEAD

Billie is headed to her new job! She is going to be working in a small seaside town as the new curate, however, what Billie doesn’t know is that she will make a new best friend but also that she will not be taking on a normal curate job. The town Billie is headed to has lots of mystical goings-on and she will be helping the church keep things safe and under wraps. On her way into town, her car blows up, and a girl with wild purple hair and a motorcycle gives her a ride into town. This girl soon becomes Billie’s best and only friend in town, but she soon learns that her new bestie is part of the Church of Satan. Billie definitely has her hands full with this new job, but if anyone is up for the challenge she is!

Sometime in 2019, I tried to read one of John Allison’s other graphic novel series, I actually reviewed what I read on here and it just did not feel the same as Giant Days (which at this point I was deep into alongside Saga). I may go back to that series at some point because I would love to read all of John Allison’s work someday but for now, I have to say I really enjoyed Steeple and I am looking forward to volume 2! I did some digging when I finished reading and found that John Allison is still making Steeple and you can read it now on his site but the bind-up will be sometime this year hopefully! Some of the highlights of this book for me include the colors and art style, the characters (I absolutely adore Billie and her new best friend), as well as the setting and the plot of the mini-stories that take place in each issue! I think some of my favorite plot lines are the witches convention and the Church of Satan plot line! I will definitely be picking up the next one as soon as it comes out!

Goodreads Rating: 5 Stars

[Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most delightful, weirdly wholesome things I have ever read. I hope there will be more.




Side note: props for understanding the difference between TST and the Church of Satan.

[Chris Lemmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Allison, he of Scary Go Round and Giant Days fame, strikes out again with Steeple, a story set in a small English town in which the forces of good and evil are at war. Their chosen warriors? Billie Baker, trainee priest, and Margaret Warren, kind of lazy Satanist. Yes, really.

I just love Allison's humour. It's so quintessentially English; it's what made Giant Days ring so true for me, and it's especially true here too. We've all been on holiday to a town like the one in Steeple, and we've all met people like Billie and Margaret (well, maybe not Margaret). It's all so relatable, and then the dial is tweaked just a little bit closer to insanity and then the Cthulhu monsters turn up. Perfection.

The only complaint I have is that this series ends kind of abruptly; the story's clearly not over, and I've been informed that it's continuing as a webseries on Allison's website, but it does mean that this feels very incomplete as a result. Hopefully Dark Horse do what Boom! did with the old Scary Go Round Giant Days comics and collects these later on down the line too.

Allison goodness at its finest.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steeple is a fun series about a not-too-good vicar and a not-too-evil Satanist who become friends in the moral grey area between them. They might be on polar opposite ends of divinity but hey they're both pretty cool with each other. There are also some deep sea monsters and community service and all that fun stuff. It's short, it's fun, it probably could have been longer (and is, considering the webcomic) but for now it's just a nice little book.

[Rachel (Kalanadi) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another 3.5 stars that I'm rounding up, since I loved the characters, but the conclusion seemed iffy. Definitely checking out the continuation on the author's website for more!

[Kyle Dinges · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm always excited for new John Allison. Steeple is the latest series from the Giant Days co-creator. The series is both written and drawn by Allison. Coming off of Giant Days (which is now one of my favorite comics series), I found By Night to be a bit of a come-down. It was funny at times, and a fairly good idea, but it just never hit me in the same way that Giant Days did.

Steeple feels like a return to form for Allison. It's reliably funny. There's at least one laugh-out-loud gag per issue, which is at least somewhat rare for me when reading a comic. It's also a fresher idea and well-executed story. A friendship between a young vicar and a satanist leads to plenty of Odd Couple like shenanigans. The dynamic also lets Allison poke fun at all forms of religion for some extra laughs and sprinkle in some supernatural elements. Steeple is also very British, even moreso than his previous works. That always adds to the charm for me.

Giant Days didn't end that long ago, but it was nice to see that Allison can still get close to those heights again.

[Clint · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
As I assume many Steeple readers do, I started this with high hopes after loving Allison’s previous series Giant Days. This is a promising start that will apparently continue as a webcomic instead of an ongoing printed series; the plot so far seems more urgently serial and supernatural than Giant Days more meandering slice-of-life. Billie and Maggie are a fun, humorously mismatched pair that has more in common than it first appears, though I’m not yet sure how they compare to the trio in Giant Days that I built up appreciation for over tens of issues. Allison’s art is perfectly fine in his usual sharp, characterful style, but after seeing the variant covers in the back from his Giant Days artists Lissa Tremaine and Max Sarin I found myself wishing he’d mostly just alternate working with those two on everything else he writes.

But yeah, promising enough to check out the webcomic this continues on as, if not immediately quite as sold as I was early on Giant Days.

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steeple is a lot of fun and really damn funny. A graphic novel about a Satanist and a priest who are close friends? Too good to pass up. This volume felt kind of like vignettes of the Steeple world, rather than an overarching story, but the end of the volume leaves room for more that I desperately want!

Also, either the creators are Satanists, know Satanists, or did their research, because their portrayal of Church of Satan followers is honestly spot on. It's hilarious.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been been reading John Allison since college. He was one of the early "webcomic" writers back in late 90's early 00's. He has never stopped working and I think I've read everything he's done as I like his humor and he posts almost all of it for free on the internet eventually.

This one is about a small town on the coast of England that God and the Devil fight over. There is a curate from the Anglican church and a priestess from the church of satan who become friends and eventually switch places. As one does.

Its not his best or most well known, Eisner Award winning Giant Days gets that plum, but it has a specific tone and humor I enjoy.

[Joanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlikely friends make for an unlikely setting for a comic series: seaside English coastal burg where off-season, the townies grapple with dueling parishes, apocalyptic visions, and mermen. While the stories didn’t blow my socks off, I read every word. Peculiar but fun world-building. Lots left dangling to build on and make me add the next one to my TBR.

[Jenn Estepp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm in board for pretty much anything John Allison does, including this mini-series about a young Anglican curate and her friendship with the members of the local Church of Satan and just general supernatural shenanigans in a Cornish town.

[Dax · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious, kick butt, and just what I needed. This irreverent beauty is sure to please!

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this! I love this! I love everything about this! There has been a GIANT INFINITE blackhole where my heart should be since Giant Days finished and I dare might say this is even better.

[Andréa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn’t resist when I heard Allison had started a new series. It was clever and weird, like all John Allison stuff, but it wasn’t as funny as his other series, and the two main arcs had kind of wobbly endings (although I liked the humor that went with the reversed roles at the end). I’m interested enough in the characters and the religious themes to read the next.

[Bill Coffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a sleepy town in Cornwall, an ongoing war against creatures from the sea as well as a rivalry between dueling Churches of God and Satan set the stage for a young assistant vicar's deep dive into good, evil, temptation, vise and virtue in a story that reminds us that good and evil sometimes aren't as clear cut as they seem. This one's really fun and more lighthearted than one might expect.

[RG · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just wasnt for me.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to try this graphic novel, Steeple by John Allison after I enjoyed The Great British Bump-Off, a fun murder mystery cum baking show. Steeple covers Issues #1 - 5 of the comic series.

Unlike Bump-off, this collection follows a more supernatural bent. The story is set in the small town of Tredregyn, in North Cornwall. There be supernatural things going on in Tredregyn and Reverend Penrose is at the end of his endurance as he fights demons from the sea. But young curate-in-training, Billie Baker has been sent to help the Vicar. Her trip starts off badly as just as she crosses into Cornwall, her car explodes.

She gets a lift from Maggie Warren on her motorbike. It will turn out that Maggie is a member of a Satanist cult in town. There roles will change over the course of the various chapters in this graphic. There are various incidents / episodes. Are the creatures that Rev Penrose fights really that bad? Billie has thoughts. What about the couple that are trying to establish a wind farm in Tredregyn? Do they have ulterior motives? And what about the end of season witches conclave?

Everything is kind of light and fluffy and fun. The artwork is so bright and colorful. The characters are drawn so clearly and with lovely personality. There is darkness but at the same time the light of hope. Don't expect to delve too deeply into the supernatural genre but expect to enjoy the stories and wonderful characters. I've now got Vols 2 and 3 on order. I want to keep having a bit of fun. (3.0 stars)

[Amber Scaife · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young new apprentice chaplain arrives in the small village of Tredregyn, eager to spread the Good Word through community service, but what she finds there is a priest with a Moby Dick sized obsession with fighting sea monsters nightly and a church of Satan with a healthy congregation, which seems surprisingly not all that evil. She's got some mental adjustments to make as she settles into this strange new town.

Witty, weird, and adorable in turns, this first volume comic collection is an absolute hoot. I instantly wanted to be friends with every character in here, and that's quality writing, right there. Definitely recommended for fans of comics/graphic novels with smart and hilarious dialogue and folks who don't mind walking the borderline for the slightly heretical.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an absolutely wild book! I love John Allison so much. Never thought I’d be rooting so hard for a curate in the Anglican Church, but that’s exactly the kind of thing he’ll get you to do.

I didn’t realize this would be episodic/sort of monster-of-the-week-y, but there are enough throughlines that it isn’t too jarring, and there’s a fun little hint at the end of each issue about what next time’s wacky magical/demonic hijinks will be. I will definitely be buying/somehow getting the next volumes (thank god there are more).

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the exploration of morality from the perspective of the two main women. There is a lot packed into these issues, which can leave the pacing feeling a little sporadic at times, but I think the characters, the humor, and the all around zaniness of the story makes it a delightful read. And though I would prefer to see it in collected form, it is cool that the story is being continued via the web.

[Isabel Hinen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Age: 18+
Genre: graphic novel, religion
Content: sexual references and satanistic practices
Language: mild if any

Review: This is a super interesting story with a plotline I've never really read before. I have super mixed feelings about it but I will definitely be reading the next one! I like the Christian undertones for sure, even though it's mixed with satanism, lol.

[Colleen Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love John Allison from Giant Days, and this book was just as delightful. While I didn't love the character switch at the end, there were several lines that made me laugh out loud. "Can't they just leave our poor Savior alone?" made me snort.

I'll definitely continue the story; John Allison is currently my favorite graphic novel writer.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued by this, but yeah, it seemed like too much packed into one volume. Like... I knew what was coming, but I would have preferred if Billie's descent into the Satanic church was more gradual questioning and not caused by a vacuum cleaner.