The Bakers: Babies and Kittens by Kyle Baker

I don't review comics things here as much as I used to, since I do have the ComicMix gig. But this book is short, I don't have much to say about it, and it's by someone who seems to be a personal friend of much of the ComicMix team, so I'll just say something random about it here.

I'd thought this was a collection of previously published work, but it isn't; it's a brand-new, 92-page story about Kyle Baker's terribly cute kids (and his wife and himself, along the way), including the probably-mostly-true story of how they came to get a couple of cats.

It's presented in Baker's full-color style, which is very animation-influenced (and which I think is done by drawing in a computer program). I'm not as fond of it as I am of Baker's traditional pen-work; his panels tend to be boxier and more rigid in the animation style, and some of his pages end up very reminiscent of storyboards. There's also an awful lot of using many panels with similar backgrounds to indicate motion -- again, very much like a storyboard.

The story is cute, the characters are well-defined in their personalities, and Baker is an excellent caricaturist. But I got the feeling that this story was meant to be an animated cartoon, not a graphic novel, and would have worked better in that other form.

Oh, and the story? Kyle is allergic to cats, but the kids want a kitten. And there's a rat in the house, which scares the kids and their mother. So, while Kyle is out (trying to sell a comics story about a giant killer rat), they sort-of accidentally get two kittens. (And then there's a long chase sequence with one of the kittens and the rat near the end.)

As I said, it's cute but a bit slim. And, while reading it, I kept thinking about this Spleenal strip about getting a cat, which is both shorter and funnier. So, for my money, the shorter, b&w "Bakers" strips are better. (Oh, and the end of the back-cover copy, which talks about an "all-out war between the jealous baby and the fuzzy kitten," doesn't have anything to do with this story -- maybe that's the sequel?)