A talented guitarist, Melody Li arrives in Cassette City with her walls up and her headphones firmly on\u2014but this analog town has other plans. A mushroom named Taki and a green raccoon called Snackwich will need help if they want to win the Battle of the Bands. Though Melody\u2019s a loner, she\u2019s eager to bring down the insufferable ginger cat Styles, who fronts Taki and Snackwich\u2019s rival act, and she agrees to lend a hand. The eventual addition of Atikus, a robot, provides the band its final missing piece. Sitter\u2019s art is masterful. A palette of burnt orange, teal, and muted gold channels peak-era alternative comics, while confident linework gives every character vivid, distinct personality. Panel variation is deployed with skill and wit; a bravura double-page spread arranges failed auditions as a cascading collage of snapshots, each musician dismissed with a deadpan speech bubble, and on another spread, a tape unspools across the page, connecting the scattered bandmates in their separate worlds. Clever dialogue crackles throughout, but beneath the laughs, real emotional stakes thrum: Melody nursing the wound of a mother who walked out on the family; Snackwich paralyzed by the memory of dropping his drumsticks onstage and failing Taki; Atikus simply trying to be his true self. Melody is cued East Asian.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A talented guitarist, Melody Li arrives in Cassette City with her walls up and her headphones firmly on\u2014but this analog town has other plans. A mushroom named Taki and a green raccoon called Snackwich will need help if they want to win the Battle of the Bands. Though Melody\u2019s a loner, she\u2019s eager to bring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}