Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II (review)

It’s been nearly a decade since Koertge introduced Ben Bancroft, dubbed Spaz for his cerebral palsy symptoms, and Colleen Minou, the druggie who appreciates Ben as a full-functioning (yep, in every possible way) guy who isn’t about to get a scrap of her sympathy (see Stoner and Spaz, BCCB 3/02). Their story picks up just days after Ben’s triumphant gallery showing of a documentary on high-school life, at which event Colleen abandoned him to go partying with a passing badboy acquaintance. Colleen’s as repentant as she’s ever going to get, and Ben is still reliant on her support, but he now has a new female interest in the wings—A.J., another student filmmaker from the well-to-do kind of family of which Ben’s grandmother would approve. Suddenly Ben is starting to look normal, even to himself: following news of his film success, kids at school talk to him, he’s having coffee with A.J., he’s watching movies at night with her friends, and he’s starting to stand up to Grandma, who has always sheltered and stifled him. But Colleen’s trying hard to get her act together, and it’s she who truly understands Ben’s need to find out about the mother who left him on Grandma’s doorstep. Again Koertge keeps his cast small and his plotting tidy, making the search for and discovery of Ben’s mother more an occasion for reflection on family roles and responsibilities than an epic quest. There’s an implied finality to this volume (could it be the full circle return to the Rialto where the teens met, or the emphatic “The End”?), and that’s perfectly okay. Ben’s going to be just fine, and although Colleen still flirts with the edges of the Wild Side, she now has a solid support network and a sense that what she has is better than what she had. Let it be.