Criminy by Roger Langridge and Ryan Ferrier

Roger Langridge has an almost uniquely quirky comics career, and I sometimes forget that. He has some projects where he does everything, writing and drawing. (I think he even does the coloring and lettering, at least sometimes - this book right in front of me now doesn't credit anyone else with those tasks.) Sometimes, though, he just writes - as in The Baker Street Peculiars, which I saw recently.

And sometimes he just does the art, as in today's book, Criminy, which was written by Ryan Ferrier. This is from 2018, as I'm still poking around the odder corners of my library book-reading app and finding unexpected things by creators that I follow, more or less. Ferrier also writes this in what I think of as a very Langridge kind of way, so it reads  not all that differently from all-Langridge works.

Criminy was originally a four-issue comics series, and then collected in this more durable form immediately afterward. It's a classic-animation-inspired - Langridge mentions the Fleischer studio several times in the sketchbook section at the end - in both look and story, as the Criminy family goes through various travails, as narrated in rhyme.

Daggum Criminy and his family - wife Ditto, older son Nadda and the baby twins Bitt & Bobb - live on the bucolic Isle of Burnswick, and are very happy there...until the pirates led by Baron Bugaboo attack and capture all of the locals. The Criminys sneak away, and set sail on a raft at the end of the first issue.

Each subsequent issue sees them finding another place, where there's more trouble. First they're sucked up into a gigantic "floaty-boat" run by a robot-squid-whatever Kapitan, where they join a vast horde of other folks similarly captured and waiting decades to be freed, until the Criminys inadvertently spark a squabble and wreck the ship. Then they're swallowed by a living island and forced to work ceaselessly in its bowels for the benefit of the leisured aristocrats who live on top - until everything goes wrong there as well, though this time there's a happier outcome.

The Criminy family's third destination is Slinkle Reef, a supposed paradise run by skeletons in zoot suits, an eternal carnival full of free food, entertainment, games, and frivolity. There is, of course, a dark side, and the Criminys find it and use it to overthrow the Slinkles and free a gigantic new friend.

With the aid of that friend, they can return to Burnswick, save their neighbors, kick out the pirates, and live forever afterward in peace and harmony, protected, we think, from any subsequent pirates or similar miscreants.

This is an all-ages book, which means the dangers are all cartoony - reasonably threatening on that level, and full of excitement, but characters can get eaten without a drop of blood (and, maybe, even get out later some of the time). There's a lot of talk of family, as the Criminys stick together - well, most of the time, since Nadda gets a moment or two of rebellion in, as required - through thick and thin to win out in the end. Langridge makes it all look like a cartoon from the '30s, and Ferrier's often-rhyming captions and similar dialogue (not rhyming, but just a bit off from colloquial, to sound a bit more serious or formal or just quirky) also work well for the story. This is a fun book - not just for the kids, but probably more for them than for older people.