Attack of the Stuff by Jim Benton

I haven't decided how far I'm going to go down the Jim Benton well. I discovered him through his gag cartoons for adults - Dog Butts and Love. And Stuff Like That. And Cats. and Man, I Hate Cursive; see also GoComics for the ongoing feed - and I'm solidly on board for one-off graphic novels for middle-graders. (There are days I feel like a middle-grader myself, still.)

But I don't know if I'm going to dive into the clear middle-grade illustrated-novel series, like "Franny K. Stein" - those seem a bit more like product, and might turn into diminishing returns for a middle-aged man pretty quickly. So far, I'm finding everything Benton does to be a hoot, and I don't want to break that streak. My aim is to check out all of the things I would find awesome, and quietly avoid the stuff that really is just for the ankle-biters.

So I liked Clyde (a standalone) a couple of months ago, and came back for Attack of the Stuff, also a standalone, right now, and thought both of them were great. But I'm looking at the rest of the Benton catalog and trying to figure out what would be next.

What I like about both Clyde and Stuff is how wacky and random they are from the jump: Benton works in weird ideas like Seurat works in paint, providing a surface that looks conventional at a glance but gets quirkier the closer you look.

Stuff is about Bill Waddler - he's the duck on the cover. This is the kind of world where everyone's an anthropomorphic something, ducks or pigs or bears or dogs or things that really aren't clear. Bill hears things talk: all kinds of things, all the time. His toilet LaToyat Toiletstein wants to be a movie star. His peanut butter and jelly complain they're allergic to each other. His clock radio complains that he snores when he sleeps. All his stuff whines and kibitzes at him all the time, and he's sick of it.

Even his job - he runs a small street-corner stand called Hey Man, where he sells hay for cash - isn't particularly rewarding. So, after a couple of bad days of filthy old guys ranting about nature and moderately-helpful orange-juice-store workers and pig customers who can't quite decide if they want hay, Bill gives up and runs off to "live in nature."

There, he is almost immediately attacked by a large number of snakes. It is not entirely clear if they are farting snakes, which he dreamed about previously.

Meanwhile, back in civilization, the Internet collapses three days later, and everything goes to chaos immediately. And the orange-juice-store guy, Kris, remembers that Bill can talk to things, and figures he might be able to talk to the Internet and find out what's wrong.

Kris finds Bill, who is no longer being attacked by snakes for reasons I will not spoil.

And of course Bill can talk to the Internet. And of course the Internet wants something - a hat.

In the end, the Internet gets a hat, Bill and Kris get a whole lot of stuff from the government for fixing the Internet, and everyone is happy.

Benton's line is loose and open, his pages flow quickly, and his dialogue is always zippy, amusing and at right angles to what the reader expects. Yes, it's all pitched at a level that will work for ten-year-olds - that might be a deal-breaker for some people - but unless that's a problem for you, Benton's cartooning is wonderfully specific, funny, and quick-moving. Hornswoggler says check it out.