FOREWORD -- A decidedly non-superhero "team
book," Cellies is the fun and briskly paced story of six employees
of a mobile phone retail store. Led by their gung-ho but slightly dim manager,
Christian, the Jog Mobile crew attempt to manage their personal lives alongside
their work commitments, which include dealing with difficult customers and
managing the midnight launch of a new phone. Cellies collects the first
five issues of Lion Forge's comic book series, whose central characters
represent a variety of ethnicities, backgrounds, and personalities, providing
fertile ground for story development. In a minor but inspired ongoing feature,
the book offers short vignettes inspired by true-life retail experiences. In
total, Cellies feels like a successful ensemble TV sitcom, and the book
ends with a cliffhanger of sorts, as Reyhaab, a teenager from a strict religious
family, faces punishment from her parents for lying to them, and Christian
suffers from the effects of an overlong tanning session. Flood's clean,
confident art style and practiced narrative abilities balance propelling the
plot and delivering humor, while also choosing appropriate moments to hint at
what's underneath the sometimes shallow exteriors of his characters; one gets
the impression that there are plenty of stories left for Flood to tell in
Cellies: Volume Two and beyond.
