Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout by Doug Savage

First up: I know I missed one. In between the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy and this book, there was Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Disco Fever, which is unavailable from any library near me, digitally or physically. (In fact, none of the nearby libraries seem to have any of the Laser Moose books in dead-tree form, which shocks and annoys me.) I may have to read it in a bookstore at some point, assuming I remember.

But I'm pretty sure there weren't any shocking revelations or major change in Disco Fever: this is a middle-grade graphic novel series about a moose who shoots lasers out of his eyes and his best friend the slightly more reasonable rabbit, and that's going to be the whole point. Oh, and they fight crime. Well, maybe not crime as such, since they're out in the woods - but they help nice people and foil miscreants, so basically the same thing.

OK, so maybe Laser Moose gets a little wild with his eye-lasers, and cuts off the deer Frank's leg once in a while. These kinds of things will happen when you're defending the forest. And, anyway, Doc the raccoon can sew Frank's leg back on. Again.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout is just what the title implies: another adventure of Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, in which they meet and help out a time-traveling fish. A time-traveler from the polluted far future came back to their bucolic wilderness and dropped his time gizmo, which the fish immediately ate. (Because "I thought it might be a grasshopper. I tend to eat anything in the river, just in case it's a tasty grasshopper. You don't want to find out that it was a grasshopper later, when it's already gone," which makes just as much sense as anyone's motivation in this series.) 

This makes the fish travel semi-randomly in time: a big purple vortex appears repeatedly to pull him off when he thinks about past events and then again to return him to the present day. Our heroes - plus the evil Aquabear from the first book - get caught up in the shenanigans, with the usual time-travel complications, including changing the past and seeing how current-day things actually got that way. Oh, and dinosaurs. Time-travel stories are required to have dinosaurs.

In the end, Moose and Rabbit put (nearly) everyone back in their proper times, get the time gizmo back to the traveler, and watch the fish follow the traveler off to the future in search of adventure.

It is aimed at middle-graders, which may be a detriment for some readers. I love the goofy tone, and the plot's zippiness, and creator Doug Savage's clean cartoony lines, all of which make it a lot of fun and solidly land it in that genre. Graphic novels for pre-teens can often be substantially less serious than those for older readers, and I appreciate that a lot. Savage is particularly good at that kind of thing.