Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania by Doug Savage

First of all: I checked multiple times, because I keep expecting that title to have an exclamation point. But it does not, and that slightly disappoints me.

That might be the only criticism I have of this book, so I'm putting it up front.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania is the fifth and most recent book in this middle-grade graphic-novel series, written and drawn by Doug Savage, who more adult readers might know from his online comic Savage Chickens.

Laser Moose is, yes, a moose who shoots lasers from his eyes (when he wants to) and Rabbit Boy is his best friend, a happy and slightly more reality-based fellow without any superpowers. They've previously appeared in the books Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, Disco Fever, Time Trout, and As the Deer Flies.

They have adventures, generally of the kind involving animal supervillains - well, animals with strange and unusual powers, but not necessarily bwah-ha-ha evil except for the villainous Cyborgupine - in their forest home. They have a supporting cast with a few named characters - Frank the deer, Doc the raccoon, Gus the wolf - and many more squirrels and eagles and other folks who fill out the crowd scenes. The tone is just a couple of clicks towards goofy: the danger is treated as actual danger, but these are the kind of books where we know everything will turn out right in the end. And our heroes have a somewhat different perspective on everything, being North American forest animals, than their readers do.

(There has been some light ecological content, especially in the end-of-book educational exercises Savage includes - mostly along the lines of "the McGuffin here is a weirdly polluting thing from those humans, who are always causing trouble.")

So this time out we start with Cyborgupine being chased by an ominous spider, and then crashing a party at Doc's house, to celebrate Frank getting the casts off his legs this time. (A running joke is that Laser Moose keeps cutting off Frank's legs or otherwise injuring him, and Doc has to keep stitching him up.) Laser Moose is a bit sad, because he doesn't like parties: he'd prefer to be a "lone wolf," which concept Rabbit Boy has been quizzing him about.

Cyborgupine arrives, with an important piece of paper and saying the usual vague and portentous things, before his eyes turn purple, he starts spitting spider webs, and will only say "We are spider." In best zombie-movie fashion, he starts biting party-goers, who in turn also get purple eyes and declare themselves to be spider.

Our heroes flee, grabbing the paper, and head to Cyborgupine's VW microbus HQ. There, they learn that one of Cy's "father's" (a human scientist who had a lot of weird experiments, one of which produced Cyborgupine and several of which caused the plots of the previous books) notebooks details a plan to create a hive-mind among various animals. That's what happened: there's one spider who was mind-enhanced, and now can control anyone she bites, or who they bite.

The paper is a map to the spider's lair, and so they head there, hoping to figure out a way to stop the ever-increasing spider hordes. They do, in the end, without killing the spider or squishing the eggs she thinks she's protecting. And everyone, of course, goes back to normal.

At the end, there's a short piece with Savage-as-himself talking about his fear of spiders, and how, during the creation of this book, he went through a desensitization process to lessen that fear, culminating in an encounter with a giant tarantula.

Again: these are silly, irreverent adventure stories with zippy dialogue and crisp cartooning for an audience of pre-teens. I find that kind of book a lot of fun when done well, and Savage does them very well. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

Mickey Mouse Versus the Mouseton Society of Evil by Nicolas Pothier & Johan Pilet

I am no expert on Euro Disney comics. Fantagraphics has been reprinting what they say are the best of that large universe - and I have no reason to doubt them; publishing programs always try to get the best of whatever - for a decade or more, and I've dipped into that sequence here and there.

So I know enough to say that the Disney Euro universe is not unlike a kid-friendly version of a Big Two superhero universe, especially if you keep the dream/hoax/imaginary story stream in mind as well. They're generally about some permutation of the characters Disney fans call The Fab Five: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto. (Poor Daisy! Only room for one girl in that sausage-fest.) The villains are also always the same, just as you can be sure a year of Batman comics will have the Joker turning up at least once.

But they can be set "now" - in Duckburg (like Donald's Happiest Adventures) or Mouseton (like Trapped in the Shadow Dimension), or trotting the globe - or in some strange world (like Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean). Or in what seems to be the Marvel 2099 equivalent - a future world of 2128 and the fabulous city of New Mouseton!

That's the setting for Mickey Mouse Versus the Mouseton Society of Evil - the SoE doesn't have "New" in their name to modify Mouseton, possibly because they are the first SoE formed in any Mouseton, possibly due to translation glitches, possibly because no one thought it was important. (The original French name of the fiendish team seems to be "L'Alliance Malefique," which I like much better, but I'm just the kind of person who would.)

Anyway, this book is by Belgian creators Nicolas Pothier (writing) and Johan Pilet (art), and it features The Revenant Blot (future version of The Phantom Blot) getting himself sent to the fabulous space-jail of @lc@trz to break out a bunch of other villains, similarly future-versions of the Beagle Boys and so on. They form the title society, and have a wicked plan to...wreak havoc with giant robot crabs, and then use one member's mind-influencing power to take over the feed in everyone's "Egophone," influence the public to love them all, and then, eventually, run for office and seize political power!

(It seems that giant robot crabs might not be entirely necessary for a plot like that - it sounds like the kind of thing that could be done entirely within the law, which would leave Space Ranger Mickey no reason to come beat them up - but if they did things the smart, sensible way I suppose they wouldn't be villains, would they?)

But that is their plan, and they insist that it requires a giant robot crab, and, like all fiendish plans hatched by secret societies of multiple villains, it works pretty well for a while. But Mickey gathers his friends - you know them; I mentioned them in Paragraph One - and, despite a few setbacks and a long unexpected space journey, they are victorious in the end.

Either Pothier or his translator (David Gerstein) has some fun language Easter Eggs, particularly in the overwrought villain dialogue. The bank robbed in the early pages of the book is also named Zeerust, a deep cut I particularly appreciated. This is a book explicitly OK for kids, but has that old Looney Tunes or Jay Ward-style mix of high and low-culture jokes to keep the parents from being bored, too.

Pilet has an energetic, distinctive art style - he gives Mickey a beetle brow to make him look more serious - and gives his coloring the vague sense of being made up of Ben-Day dots. It all gestures in the direction of classic mid-century Disney comics while not specifically copying any of them.

This is a book made to be accessible for kids, part of a giant hegemonic global entertainment corporation looking to maximize the return on its long-running IP. Within that context, it's a fun adventure story.

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs by Ben Sears

I'm still not sure if Ben Sears intends his comics to be all-ages (or, more specifically, most-ages, for tweens and up), or if it's a by-product of the stories that he tells. Either way, I'd say his books are OK for tweens, mostly, if that's something you care about.

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs is Sears' new book this year; it follows 2021's Young Shadow and can be considered a sequel to that book. I say "can be considered," because it doesn't reference the plot of the first book in any way, and Spiral Scratch isn't in this book - so maybe it's a prequel, instead. Or just another book in the same world, with no clear time sequence.

In the first book, Young Shadow was an urban vigilante, of the kind renowned in comics since the 1930s, though he was somewhat more lefty - mostly beating up polluters and corrupt cops - than the typical Big Two character. And he's still doing some of that here: the story starts with Shadow and a group of kids - a distributed group of sidekicks, I suppose, or something like the Shadow's organization, or a anarcho-syndicalist collective, if we think he's leaning more heavily into the lefty thing - follow a truck with two bearded guys, stop them from dumping large barrels of something toxic in a place they shouldn't, and turn them those bearded guys to the authorities of Soil & Water.

So we think "Young Shadow & the Watchdogs" is this vigilante group, probably. The title at first made me think it was a band, but sadly it's definitely not that. But it's not exactly a superteam, either: The Watchdogs are actually a baseball team, and Shadow is their coach. There's only eight of them other than Shadow, which means, including him, they only just barely have enough players to field a team, and can never change pitchers - but it's comics, and I suppose Sears wants to avoid having a too-large cast.

Anyway, the Shadows have a game coming up, with the requisite snooty rich kids - the term of art used in the book is "prep school jerks" - in two days. So the day after the vigilante action, they're going to have a big practice to make sure they're ready.

Parenthetically, these seem to be school-age kids - maybe middle school, maybe late elementary - but no one even mentions school. They're out late at night stopping polluters who threaten them with guns, and parents don't seem to bat an eye. And they spend the whole next day playing baseball. I assume that Bolt City has public schools and that these kids are enrolled, but the book itself provides no evidence to support that.

The reader thinks that the book will be about that big game with the snooty rich kids, and this old Meatballs fan was up for that. Or, possibly, that the polluters would come back and interfere with the game: some kind of intersection of the vigilante plot and the baseball plot. Neither of those two things are true.

Instead, Watchdogs takes a turn into the supernatural - signposted by a cold-open sequence about a nasty pro baseball player, in some earlier time and place - and the Watchdogs instead play a very different baseball game, against an unexpected opposing team. I don't want to be coy about it; you can see them on the cover: the Watchdogs need to battle a team of skeletons because of the usual haunted-artifact-makes-them reasons. If they lose, they all die.

To immediately defuse all tension, they do not get eaten by the eels at this time. Sears works in a combination of the traditions of the superhero comic and the It-was-Old-Man-Jenkins! kid-friendly mystery, both of which require that the hero win in the end and everything be put right with the world. So they play fair, they play well, and they win in the end. The haunted artifact is returned to its proper custodian, and even the grumpy old  supernatural baseball player has a change of heart, maybe, we think.

Sears tells all of this in a fun cartoony line, softly rounded and full of amusing visual interest in every panel. He tells it all straight, but his art subtly tells the reader not to worry; nothing too scary will happen from these skeletons and other monsters. That's another reason I think his books are OK for younger readers: they fit well in that tradition, and tell stories in ways that audience will both enjoy and be familiar with.

I'd still like to see a proper sequel to Young Shadow, to see what happens next and what's the deal with Bolt City, but this was an amusing diversion from that plot, with an appealing cast and a lot of pages with great bits on them.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death by Stan Sakai

This tenth collection of the long-running Usagi Yojimbo series gathers eight full issues - the last two of the short Mirage second volume and the first six of the much longer Dark Horse run - along with one last backup story from an earlier Mirage issue. It originally appeared in 1998, soon after the stories were in floppy form, and was updated somehow or somewhat for the current 2010 edition. (The book doesn't say what changed - it doesn't list the 1998 date anywhere but in the byline of Kurt Busiek's introduction - but I suspect it was only a new cover and trade dress.)

If you didn't know these stories were published in that way, you wouldn't be able to tell, although creator Stan Sakai did make a four-page all-splash-page story for the first DH issue, which comes first in this book. (But that's the kind of thing a reader might assume is first in every book - and, frankly, something like it probably should be, especially in a series that now runs more than forty volumes.)

It's called Usagi Yojimbo, Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death - that's not the title of any of the individual stories here, so I think it's just a general "hey! find the hot samurai action you love here!" signpost.

As before, I enjoy these stories a lot - Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a precise clean line, compelling but unfussy layouts, naturalistic dialogue and a knack for ringing small changes on genre furniture to tell stories that work well and seem familiar - while finding the whole package just a bit lesser than I was hoping for. One part of that, which I've written about for previous books, is the all-ages nature of Sakai's stories: he's writing for tweens and up, which means sex is all offstage (and not a driver of plots) and violence is the usual stylized flashing swords and falling bodies.

But another piece of it, which just came into focus for me with this book, is Usagi's role in the story. I won't say that he never changes, since I'm only a quarter of the way into a four-decade series. But the whole thing is like an '80s TV show - think The Hulk or The A-Team - where a well-defined character comes into town, fixes something wrong, and moves on as the theme music plays at the end of the episode. Usagi is important, but he's unstoppable in battle, unflappable in conversation, and unerring in his judgement. He's more of an icon than a person: the perfect ronin, always friendly to peasants and children, always ready to fight bandits or help out a friend, always able to escape any danger.

That's pleasant, but it's not really a person.

That figure runs through the nine stories here, meeting some new people and some old friends, having some vaguely tragic things happen to other people which he can help mitigate later or just nod grimly in his perfect-samurai manner. But, most of the time, he's able to stop the vaguely tragic things from happening, for those peasants and children and friends, and then walk on towards the next story.

I can wish for more, but that's what Usagi Yojimbo is. And there's a word for doing the same thing repeatedly - e.g. reading Usagi Yojimbo stories - and expecting something different. What's here is just fine, especially if you want to share them with smaller, shorter, younger people infesting your home.

Just Friends by Ana Oncina

I'm trying to figure out if this sweet teen semi-romance about two girls at summer camp was actually published in an Asian country, to explain why it reads right-to-left. The author's site is less help than it could be, since she's Spanish and so is the site. (Weird how that works!) But that site seems to say that this book was only published in Spain and the USA, but also that it won the Japanese International Manga Award, and that at least the title of the book was also in Japanese on the Spanish-language edition.

How much of that is actually-for-Japanese-people and how much is looking-like-manga-for-a-Western-audience I can't say. But it was created in Spanish, it was translated into English by Nanette Cooper-McGuiness for this 2023 TOKYOPOP American edition, and creator Ana Oncina created the pages, as far as I can tell, with that right-to-left flow from the beginning.

Oncina is best known in Europe for her Croquette & Empanada series, which is also romance-adjacent but more heteronormative. (Not that croquettes are necessarily male-coded, but the one in her books is.) That series has run to several books in Europe - including, notably, one about a trip to Japan - but only the first one has been translated for American publication.

Just Friends tells its story in two timelines: in the framing story, it's around twenty years later, and Erika and Emi are meeting for the first time in a while. The bulk of the story is told in flashback, with Erika the central character, first being forced by her mother to go to this week-long sleep-away camp - against her wishes - and then her time there, meeting and being befriended by the more outgoing Emi immediately on the bus out.

The details are general or universal enough that it doesn't read as "foreign" to an American audience - maybe that same element helped it in Japan as well, assuming it did make it to Japan. Teens go to camps all over the world, to do outdoor activities under the guidance of counselors, to make friends and spend time with people they "like," to do some light making out when they get the chance, to drink furtively in tents or around campfires deep in the night, to talk deeply and seriously with people they might never see again, or might only see "next year."

Erika is quiet, introverted, an artist. Her mother thinks this week would be a good time for Erika to become better friends with Celia, who is in her class. Erika denies they're friends - this is true, but we learn more complicated details of their relationship later in the book. Erika thinks she's going to spend the whole week quietly by herself, and is resigned to that.

But Emi - another first-timer - gloms onto Erika on that bus, and they partner up, in the way of camp, for the rest of the week. Their relationship deepens over those days, though mostly driven by Emi. They both hang out with boys that they talk about "liking," but they have a stronger connection to each other, which comes out as the week goes on.

Meanwhile, in the frame story, we learn how Emi has bounced back into Erika's life every few years since then, for a quick fling, only to disappear for years again. This doesn't entirely connect to what we see of her at camp, but it does provide a larger structure to their relationship and gives Oncina some momentum in the frame-story to close out her book solidly.

Just Friends read like a genre exercise to me, like Oncina was doing her version of a yuri story - down to some details of phrasing that felt more like translated-from-Japanese than translated-from-Spanish. (Though those could be from Cooper-McGuiness, the translator, enforcing a TOKYOPOP house style.) It's a nice, resonant genre exercise, but still sits comfortably within the boundaries of a standard genre and doesn't try to push those boundaries or do anything particularly new or exciting with it.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: As the Deer Flies by Doug Savage

This is the fourth in this middle-grade graphic-novel series; it follows the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, a book I haven't been able to find, and Time Trout. And, yes, the series is about a moose who shoots lasers from his eyes and his friend/sidekick, a slightly more reasonable and grounded rabbit without notable fantastic powers.

Well, so far. We've also got cyborg porcupines, time-traveling fish, and a racoon doctor in this series, so it's not impossible that Rabbit Boy will develop his latent mutant powers at some point.

As the Deer Flies continues in the same goofy-but-reasonable tone that creator Doug Savage has established in the earlier books. Strange things happen in the Laser Moose books, but Savage presents it all with a matter-of-fact tone; he's got a crisper, more understated kind of humor than, for example, someone like Dav Pilkey. [1]

This time out, LM and RB are out in the woods, going to visit the Old Oak, which apparently RB has never seen before. It is old and huge and impressive, and it will figure in the amazing action sequence at the end of the book. But, more immediately, when they head over to a nearby marsh to find some water lilies for lunch, they see their friend Frank the deer leap off a cliff.

Frank is seriously injured hitting rocks on the way down, but LM manages to laser-cut a bunch of branches so Frank survives the big bump at the bottom. LM and RB take an unconscious Frank to see Doc (the aforementioned racoon), where they insist Frank's injuries are not their fault this time.

Frank has a lot of broken bones, which Doc can handle. But he's also screeching instead of talking, and acting like a bird, so the three assume he bumped his head in the fall. The doc is going to try to do something about Frank's brain, while LM and RB go off to investigate the site of the fall - LM is sure that some villain pushed Frank off the cliff. (Because why would he just jump?)

There's no sign of a struggle at the top of the cliff, though - just clear prints showing Frank leaping off. 

Luckily, some new characters show up to explain: Gus the wolf and a talking eagle. It turns out that Gus is a tinkerer, and wanted to be able to talk to birds. (Birds and animals both are sapient in this world, but their languages are mutually unintelligible.)  So Gus tried to make a machine to translate from animal to bird, and got it almost working.

Stuck, he went to the other tinkering expert in the forest: Cyborgupine. (Who, yes, is an evil villain.) Cyborgupine was really helpful for a while, and the two got the machine working...as an upgraded mind-transfer device, which Cyborgupine used, in his sudden but inevitable betrayal, to swap the brains of Frank and an eagle.

Hence Frank shrieking like a bird and thinking he can fly. Hence an eagle who can talk and saying he's Frank.

LM and RB of course decide they need to confront Cyborgupine, get the mind-transfer device, and put the eagle and Frank back in their correct bodies. It does not go quite that smoothly, with one more mind-transfer and an extended chase sequence near the end of the book, with a lot of laser eye-beams lancing about and cutting things indiscriminately. In the end, of course, good prevails and everyone is put back into their correct bodies.

As usual, Savage ends the book with a short additional educational section - this time about tree rings.

These books are aimed at middle-schoolers. If you can't get past that, I suppose that's unfortunate. Savage has an accessible cartoony style and a dryer wit than usually seen in books for tweens, plus the expected wacky hijinks the form requires. Frankly, I don't see how anyone can miss a series called Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy once they know it exists, but it takes all kinds to make a world, I suppose.

[1] Example: when Rabbit Boy asks Laser Moose if he meditates, the Moose says "Meditate? I don't meditate. I just come here to sit quietly and focus my mind until I feel a peaceful sense of inner calm."

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 1 by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

First of all: I'm surprised to see the "Vol. 1" after reading the book; this walks and talks like a standalone. But I suppose it was successful, because it got two sequels. 

I believe Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 1 was the first time Lewis Trondheim (here the writer) collaborated with Manu Larcenet (here the artist) - this was originally published in France by Dargaud way back in 2000. They later (along with Joan Sfar) did a few volumes in the Dungeon series, under the Parade subseries, but I think that's been it - according to Wikipedia, they haven't done a project together in two decades.

I think Cosmonauts was aimed at kids, but I could be wrong: it's fairly sophisticated, and the kids at the center of the story are weird kids. On the other hand, it is French, where the ecosystem for comics of all types is deeper and more complex than in North America.

Martina and Gildas are elementary-schoolers, in some fairly urban place somewhere. This is French, so we could call it Paris and probably be right, or close enough. Gildas is new to the class; we see him join on his first day. Martina is already there, and Gildas is given the seat next to her.

Martina thinks everyone else but her is a robot, designed to pretend they're real and make it seem like she's living on normal Earth. Gildas thinks she's wrong: everyone but him is an alien pretending they're real and making it seem like they're living on normal Earth. Despite their differences of opinion, they become friends, tentatively each accepting that the other is real and not a robot or alien.

They then go about trying to prove their slightly competing theses, as a preparation to exterminating the aliens/robots to save Earth. This is in the humorous mode, so their attempts to confound or cause violent harm to people to reveal their robot or alien nature are played for laughs - mostly.

Martina and Gildas do learn the truth, and this is the kind of book where the truth isn't "they're just very imaginative kids, and will grow out of it." It does all work out amusingly, and the kids get to be the ones driving the plot the whole way. Larcenet's cartoony style makes the occasional violence funny, and works well with Trondheim's script, which has quite a lot of long speeches, since these are the kind of kids who don't shut up about about their crazy theories.

As usual with Trondheim, the humor gets a bit dark and existential, but he keeps the kids central and important: this really is their story, and, in the end, it's about how they were right. As I started off by saying, I'm not quite sure where Trondheim and Larcenet could go from here, so I suppose I need to read the sequels and find out. And any book that leaves the reader with a thought like that is clearly a success.

Usasgi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho by Stan Sakai

As I've warned before, my posts about series tend to get shorter and more perfunctory as I have less and less to say. I may end up rambling below, but I doubt I'll have anything particularly profound this time.

I'm still reading my way through Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series, a mildly fantasy-tinged adventure series set in a dramatically heightened version of Edo-period Japan, pitched at a level appropriate for middle-grade readers...oh, and all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, because Sakai started this series in the '80s for the Critters anthology. Anthropomorphic characters also suit his art style quite well, though there are all the usual questions of how multi-animal worlds work - are all these races interfertile? If a rabbit and a fox have children, are they hybrids, or are the boys rabbits and the girls foxes, or what? Do the races code specific positions in society, or geographic origins, or something like that?

In this series, they're mostly just animals because Sakai wanted them to be animals. Individual characters are kinds of animals that make sense for them specifically; I haven't made a study to see how families connect. Usagi himself clearly gets the hots for babes who are not themselves rabbits, for one data-point.

The ninth collection of that series is Daisho, collecting some stories from issues 7 and 8 of the 2nd series that weren't in vol. 8 (Shades of Death) and the full issues 9-14; it reaches almost to the end of the Mirage series (Usagi started with Fantagraphics, had a short run with Mirage, and then settled in at Dark Horse for twenty years and 160-ish issues); the current edition came out in 2010 but seems to be an only very slightly updated version of the original book 9 from about 1995.

The stories here mostly flow into a continuous narrative, though those two lead-off stories are both closing off loose plot threads from earlier volumes. Most of the book sees Usagi caught up in helping out a town taken over by slavers, and then chasing their leader after "General Fujii" steals Usagi's swords. After that, we get a flashback to another great lost love of Usagi's life - we're only up to Lost Love #2 at this point, but we're also only twenty-some issues in, with a hundred and sixty to go, so Usagi could have a hot anthropomorphic babe in every town by the end of the series if I'm counting correctly.

This particular Lost Love is the We Could Never Be Together type - she's the daughter of a major lord, he's the bodyguard delivering her to the arranged marriage, and they're on the run from the forces trying to murder her before that can happen. You've read that story before, but Sakai does a solid version of it here.

That's generally my take on Usagi, this volume and this previous ones - Sakai is professional and solid, telling stories well in a clean style, with solid dialogue and engaging plotting. There's nothing groundbreaking or surprising here, and it is all pitched so you could hand it to a ten-year-old. Is that enough? Every reader has to decide that - so far, I'm enjoying the stories, while finding them inherently limited.

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.

Loki by George O'Connor

The surviving corpus of Norse mythology is very thin - the two Eddas, Prose and Poetic, from an era after most of the Norse peoples stopped believing these gods were real and started thinking of them more as stories or metaphors. So retellings often have notes to say "this background character is named, and it looks like he was a major god of something-or-other, but this is the only surviving reference to him" or "from the way it's told, this seems to be one of a long cycle of similar stories, but it's the only one we have." 

But the stories we do have are compelling, full of interesting characters, complex mythology, and great stories - or maybe, in some cases, fragments or pieces of stories. So modern storytellers keep trying to put those two Eddas into modern language, to frame what we do know in ways that attract and thrill present-day audiences.

George O'Connor is in the middle of a four-book series, which I think will retell most, if not roughly all, of the existing Norse stories in comics form, under the overall title Asgardians. Like his previous twelve-book series about the Greek gods, Olympians, so far the books have been titled after, and focused on, specific gods: first Odin and then Thor.

The third book is this one, Loki. The fourth, teased at the end here, will of course be Ragnarok. (If you do a four-book series retelling Norse mythology, you're pretty much required to make the fourth one Ragnarok. Same with a two- or three- book series; you might be able to avoid that title if you do just one.)

Since I've written about all fourteen of O'Connor's previous mythological books, I don't know if I have a lot to add here. This is just as good - compelling, well-told, strongly organized, drawn in an style influenced by classic adventure comics and colored in moody tones by SJ Miller.

In Loki, we do see again O'Connor's skill at weaving what were separate myths - how this happened, how Loki tricked that guy, and so on - into a fuller, linked story. It's still clearly a bunch of tales, but O'Connor organizes them, and narrates them, and foreshadows later events, to make this, like his other books, not just a collection of pieces, but a single integrated tale.

And, not to give it away, but he notes in his extensive backmatter that the story here is Loki's "heel turn" - how he went from an annoying but usually helpful (in the end, mostly, while having fun along the way) trickster god who was loosely allied with the Aesir to the guy who sparked that previously mentioned - and, in so much Norse mythology, foreshadowed repeatedly - apocalypse that will destroy most of the Nine Worlds and its peoples.

The stories here see him shifting in that direction - we start with the creation of Asgard's walls, by a mysterious stranger, and how Loki got the Aesir out of their agreement with that stranger when it looked like the stranger actually could live up to his outrageous promise and claim his even more outrageous prize. Then we see the story of Idunn's golden apples, which shows Loki's random, cruel, chaos-for-chaos's-sake style. In between, though, there are scenes of Baldr, and of his mother Frigg - who, O'Connor repeatedly notes "knows the fates of all, but makes no prophesies" - extracting promises from nearly all of the animals and plants and objects in the world not to harm him.

If we know anything of Norse mythology, we know the one item she will not get a promise from. And we know what will happen. That's the last story page of this book.

There are other Loki tales in the middle as well, particularly those about his children. We see a slimy worm, thoughtlessly thrown into a river that leads to the sea by Thor. We see a small wolf that grows very large, and how he is chained. We see a little girl, dead on one side and alive on the other side, and learn where she goes and what name she takes.

Before those, we see an eight-legged horse, and O'Connor does not tell us that horse's parentage - one of the few obvious nods in this book to its young-readers audience - but he hints as obviously and clearly as he can, so only the very most cossetted and innocent and dim young readers will fail to realize just how Loki saved Asgard from having to pay for its walls.

Most of O'Connor's mythological books stand alone; this one less so. It's partially "here's some stories about Loki, the great trickster," but also partially "here's how Loki helped to bring about The End of All Things, which we will see in the next and final book." But if you're reading a four-book retelling of Norse myth, you're expecting Ragnarok - it's not going to be a surprise.

And Ragnarok will be coming. The George O'Connor book, I mean, not the actual end of all the nine worlds. With luck, it will hit next fall. I'm looking forward to it, and wondering what myth sequence (The Kalevala? The Irish "cycles"? The Mahabharata? Something Egyptian?) he might be thinking about next.

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.

ArkhaManiacs by Art Baltazar & Franco

Art Baltazar and Franco have been making a very particular kind of comics for twenty years or so - kid-friendly versions of popular superhero and superhero-adjacent properties, bright and happy and light-hearted, colorful and zippy, full of rubber-hose cartooning and vibrant colors, with usually a cluster of short related stories with minimal plots but a lot of (mostly goofy) character work.

It's been a durable model, and it's worked quite well, from what I've seen. I think they started with Tiny Titans, which ran for a long time and seemed to be a major success from my chair. The only comic of theirs I've covered on this blog was Itty Bitty Hellboy a decade ago; I got their books for my kids when my kids were young, but my kids are in their mid-twenties now. So I haven't read a Baltazar/Franco [1] book in quite some time, but I had a lot of fond memories.

ArkhaManiacs is exactly the same kind of thing they do so well: it collects a short series from 2020 about a kid Bruce Wayne in a somewhat sunnier, happier Gotham City and his encounters with the inhabitants of the Arkham Apartments.

And...it just struck me as a bit odd, subtly off in ways that made me uneasy. Centrally, the problem is that it's reminiscent of, or seems to reference, the classic creepy Grant Morrison/Dave McKean Arkham Asylum. In both cases, Bruce comes to this mysterious place, is led around by the Joker, meets a whole bunch of weird people, and is told repeatedly he needs to lighten up.

I don't think Baltazar and Franco meant to make this rhyme with Arkham Asylum. But it does. So the subtext is that a whole bunch of colorful characters - whom we, the adult reader, knows as insane murderers - are urging a kid Bruce, pre-trauma, that he needs to become more like them by using his imagination.

In a kid context, we can just take it all as straightforward, as it's presented: these colorful characters are harmless. They're not inhabitants of an asylum, just goofy people living in an apartment building, and they have a lot of fun, and do clearly have great imaginations. And Bruce is a bit of a serious, quiet kid, who could use some loosening up - which is what happens here. In the book itself, it's all sunny and kid-friendly, Killer Croc and Bane and Harley Quinn and the Penguin all just having fun and playing pretend around a pool.

But...that inevitably makes me think of this Morrison moment, which I don't want to be reminded of during a book for kids set before Bruce's parents are murdered:

You may be able to read ArkhaManiacs and not think about Arkham Asylum. Your kids, if you have any, will almost certainly be able to, and that's probably even more important. But if you know Arkham Asylum, this book will hit more uncomfortably than you expect.

[1] Franco's last name is Aureliani, which isn't hidden, but he uses the single name professionally, like Ms. Sarkisian.

The Baker Street Peculiars by Roger Langridge and Andy Hirsch

Sometimes I wonder if Roger Langridge secretly yearns to make comics about the normal modern world, but is foiled at every turn. I mean, his work is mostly either pseudo-vaudeville in comics form (in his creator-owned work) or updates and modernizations of old properties in similar categories, like Betty Boop and Popeye and The Muppets. But what if, my imp of the perverse asks, what he really wants is to tell a techy thriller or sweet rom-com with utterly up-to-the-moment main characters?

It's probably not true. But I find it amusing to contemplate: so now it's in your mind too, to do with what you will.

This came to mind after reading The Baker Street Peculiars, a 2016 four-issue comics series Langridge wrote for Andy Hirsh to draw for Kaboom!, the kids' imprint of the Boom comics empire. It is not precisely a modernization of an older piece of IP, though it is a 1920s-set story related to the Sherlock Holmes mythos, as the title implies. Unlike a lot of Langridge, there's nothing theatrical about it - well, the very first page takes place in the theatrical district, with an audience on their way to shows that evening, but none of the characters are actors or comedians, and the action never goes into a theater.

Instead, a lion statue comes to life and terrorizes those passers-by. Three plucky young people - Molly, a Jewish orphan raised by her grandfather; Rajani, a Bengali orphan raised by a street thief; and Humphrey, a schoolboy from a wealthy family dumped at a posh public school and accompanied by his valet/dog Wellington - happen to be there, and chase the statue trying to stop it.

They don't exactly succeed, but they do help, and meet each other along the way. They also run into a figure that claims to be Sherlock Holmes - we the readers quickly learn this is not precisely true, but it's as true as is possible in this world - who ends up hiring them as assistants in this investigation. Fake-Holmes firmly believes the statues are not actually coming to life; that this is all a trick by some miscreant for an as-yet-unknown purpose. But this Holmes wants the kids to dig around and learn more.

Meanwhile, reporter Hetty Jones is investigating for her newspaper and local bobby Constable Plank is whats-all-this-then-ing about as well - the latter chasing our heroes for a few pages, since they're out at night after curfew, hem hem hem.

Also meanwhile, we readers see the actual villain and learn his nefarious scheme: Chippy Kipper, a golem made by local Brick Lane merchants to protect them from the ganglord Dickie Kipper. Unfortunately, Dickie knew how golems work, and added some additional instructions to Chippy's shem, the scroll that gives him life. Also unfortunately - for Dickie - his instructions were insufficiently specific, and the golem murdered Dickie and took over his business. Chippy is now diligently using shems to animate the statues of London, gathering them in a warehouse for an upcoming huge spree of crime and mayhem.

It takes a while, but the kids do learn this, and do foil the plan. Chippy loses his shem, and all of the purloined statues are eventually returned to their proper positions. Fake-Holmes's secret is learned by the kids, who agree to continue assisting in further cases (of which, I think, there haven't yet been any).

Hirsh draws this all in an energetic, slightly cartoony style, right in the mainstream of adventure stories for younger readers. Fred Stresing does the color, including some nice work on the glowing-golem eyes throughout.

Like a lot of Langridge projects, I liked it while still wondering how he managed to pitch it in a way that made it happen. I don't think a young-readers audience was champing at the bit for a Sherlock Holmes story, even a decade ago, and even less for for one set thirty years after Holmes's heyday. And adult Holmes fans might be put off by the fake-Holmes here. So, like most Langridge projects, it's quirky. Luckily, I enjoy quirky a lot. If you do, too, check out this book, and especially look for more of Langridge's work.

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean by Denis-Pierre Filippi and Silvio Camboni

I don't know that I'm actually looking to seriously read the "Disney Masters" series - see my post on Trapped in the Shadow Dimension for more background, if you want it - but I suppose I'm going to read at least some of them, here and there, as I feel in the mood.

This one - the title is the jaw-breaking Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean - popped out at me from its gorgeous art. (I thought it might be painted, but the book credits a colorist.) As with all of the books in this series, as far as I know, it reprints a big story from the European Disney publishing operations - this one seems to have been an original album from Éditions Glénat in France in 2018, translated into English (by Jonathan H. Gray) for a 2025 publication over here.

As usual with Euro Disney stuff, the creators are people I'm not familiar with - bande dessinée is a huge field, with hundreds of creators working in their specific niches, and only bits and pieces of that ever make their way across the Atlantic. It was written by Denis-Pierre Filippi, drawn by Silvio Camboni, and colored by Gaspard Yvan (assisted by Jessica Bodart - possibly just for touch-up or similar on this US edition).

It's a steampunky near-future setting - one major peg-legged character is named Steampunk Pete here, to underscore that - which has had some sort of minor or not entirely equally distributed apocalypse. There are, of course, large airships, as well as boats, some computer tech and just a bit of mysterious super-science. Our heroes - Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy - work as scavengers, searching out underwater wrecks from before the apocalypse and mostly retrieving their valuable corallite fuel. Their great rival is the already mentioned Steampunk Pete, who is at least a sharp-elbowed competitor given to jumping his rivals' claims, if not actually a pure villain here as he usually is.

One discovery leads inventor Goofy to improve a telepresence suit he's been working on, getting to the point where Mickey can pilot it to do jobs deep underwater. They use that to win a contest to salvage supposedly inaccessible treasure, which leads them to be hired by Dr. Einmug, the standard Disney super-scientist.

Einmug's team brings in Mickey's team to do a dive, supposedly to find and disable a superweapon from that old apocalypse. But, actually, Einmug was seeking a massive deposit of corallite on the ocean floor there, and planned to secretly have Steampunk Pete take over the telepresence suit to release a Polarity Inversion Gas - "an Einmug invention that causes water to lose its gravity!"

(Are you buying this? That is one of the goofiest macguffins I've ever seen, and I edited SFF for more than a decade.)

The gas works better than expected, turning all of the water on earth into floating, storm-wracked oceans in the sky. Meanwhile, Einmug's assistant Prof. Portis, who is the actual villain, pushed out his boss, took over what seems like the whole world using his new massive energy source, and created an army of robo-drones to do his bidding.

Oh, and Mickey gets knocked out during the turmoil. He wakes up five years later after a chapter transition, to learn all of the above. Pete is now on their team - he's been loyal and helpful for the past five years - and they're almost ready to fight back against Portis, using an antidote to the gas that will put the oceans back on the ground where they belong. (I can't now find any reason why this group would be able to do that, but it's the story, so just go with it.)

Mickey and team sneak around, battle Portis's drones with their own tech, and send the telepresence suit on one last mission to the deepest depths of the sky-ocean, in a desperate bid to put the world back the way it was. Do they succeed? Well, it's a Disney story, which is a big hint.

The art is absolutely spectacular here. I think the print version is oversized - I read it digitally - and it's probably better read on those big pieces of paper. The story has a lot of "can you believe this happened?" and "no, really, this is how it works" elements that I didn't quite believe, and it's got a lurching rhythm - I think because Filippi organized his story into chapters and is trying to keep them distinct, like an old-time serial. On the other hand, any Mickey Mouse story requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief anyway, and Filippi does good character work here and keeps the goofy super-science explanations on this side of plausibility.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 8: Shades of Death by Stan Sakai

This one was a professional transition - it collects the first six issues (plus stories from issues seven and eight) of the second series of Usagi Yojimbo, from Mirage - but, within the story, there's no indication of that. Creator Stan Sakai didn't reboot the series, drop into long explanatory flashback stories for the relaunch, or even make much of an apparent effort to attract any new readers. Well, it was 1993, when "long-running" was a selling point for a comic, unlike today.

As it was, the Mirage series only lasted sixteen issues, and they didn't manage to publish any collections - this eighth book, and all of the subsequent book-format Usagi materials (I think; there's been a lot of them and I might be missing some odd item) came out from Dark Horse, which started the third Usagi series in 1996 and published 165 issues over the next twenty years.

That's the background of Usagi Yojimbo Book 8: Shades of Death, which was originally published in 1997. The current edition, which I read digitally, is from 2010; it doesn't say what was different but my guess is that it was mostly trade dress - there's no sign that Sakai changed any of the stories fifteen years later.

Shades includes seven stories, all of which stand alone and don't directly connect to each other. (When your main character is a wandering adventurer who's solo most of the time, you can just make stories as you feel like it, and they line up just fine.) Two of them, "Shades of Green" and "Shi," are long three-parters, sixty-some pages each. Two more - the wordless "The Lizards' Tale" and the flashback "Battlefield" - are about the length of a single issue, in the low twenty-page range. The last three, "Jizo," "Usagi's Garden," and "Autumn," are eight-pagers that presumably were backup stories.

Three of those stories feature Usagi as a young rabbit - a kit, I suppose - learning Important Life Lessons from his sensei, Katsuichi. Usagi has never been officially a book for young readers, but it's always been young-reader-adjacent, with any sex kept implied and the violence stylized enough to pass, and these three pieces show that side of the series strongly: as always, Usagi Yojimbo was a comic told in a register suitable for tweens.

The jump to Mirage also meant another crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Usagi had met one of them (Leo, maybe?) a few times before, but now all four of the TMNT are summoned to this cod-Edo-Japan world by the traditional old guy (who, unsubtly, Sakai draws to look just like their leader, Splinter) to battle side-by-side with Usagi and defeat the evil ninja, in the first story of the book, "Shades of Green."

There are other evil ninja in other stories, too: that's how cod-Edo-Japan stories work: noble samurai battle fiendish ninja, and of course prevail in the end. This isn't "the end" - Sakai had another four thousand-plus story pages still to come (and I'm not sure that he isn't still adding more on, even now) - but you know what I mean.

Usagi stories are dependable and fairly predictable, but, luckily, the American comics audience for the past eighty years has craved monthly doses of exactly the same thing, only with slightly different covers so they know to buy it again. So Usagi has been successful commercially, and it's pretty successful artistically - as long as you like this sort of thing and are comfortable with the moral lessons inherent in any stories about violence experts.

Yeah! by Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez

I never want to discourage creators from stretching, from trying new things and talking to new audiences. But, sometimes, it just doesn't really click.

In the late '90s, Peter Bagge had been making sarcastic comics about grumpy twenty-something slackers in Hate for more than a decade; his work was really closely associated with not just a particular adult audience, but a very specific tone and style. It's no surprise that he wanted to do something different.

What he did was surprising, though: he wrote the all-ages, Comics Code-approved girl-band comic Yeah! for DC Comics, collaborating with Gilbert Hernandez. (Hernandez's career has taken a lot of odd turns, and he's worked with a number of writers over the years, so this was not quite as much of a departure for him - I've always gotten the sense that Hernandez just has the desire or need to generate a lot of work, to keep himself engaged and happy, and the more different the better.)

Bagge's introduction in this 2011 collection of Yeah! - notably from Fantagraphics, longtime publisher of both Bagge and Hernandez, not DC, which is a big signpost to the fortunes of the series for those who can read tea-leaves - notes that he had an eight-year-old daughter at the time, and had gotten happily into "girl culture," which reignited his love of pop music. There always are reasons and explanations for specific projects; they always make sense to the creators at the time, and enough sense to the publishers that they make it out into the market. The question, always, is how that market responds.

Yeah! was not a success in the market. It ran nine issues, and was only collected a decade later by a different publisher. (And here I should also note that the collection is in black-and-white, but I think the original comics were in color, since characters make comments about the colors of things pretty regularly, and 1999 was awfully late for a book for tween girls without color.)

And the comics are...OK, I suppose. Bagge is a wordy writer, and this reads not too differently from his better-known work, to the point that the regular Bagge reader starts wondering if these characters are actually being honest and straightforward, or if Bagge has just unlocked a previously inaccessible level of sarcasm. There's one backup strip at the end that Bagge draws himself, and it's really hard not to read it like a Hate story - Bagge clearly intends for it to be taken straight, but regular readers will assume spleen and bile in his phrases.

Yeah! is the name of the band: Honey, Woo-Woo and Krazy, three best friends not quite out of their teens, a few years into a music career. They are struggling on Earth but the biggest act in the galaxy, beloved by millions across dozens of alien worlds. (But this was a contemporary Earth that hadn't had a first contact yet, so there's no commerce with those alien worlds, so the vast loot Yeah! brings in is useless. They don't seem to even bank it on an alien world so it's available for tours or such, like the old Soviet Union; they just give it away or ignore it.) They also have an old, nutty guy as their manager: Crusty; his inventions got them out into the galaxy but his general incompetence can't get them any good gigs on Earth.

The nine issues are each basically standalone, with goofy adventures either on Earth or in space - including the inevitable flashbacks to reveal Who They Are and How They Got Here - as Yeah! chases fame and fortune here (with little success) and gets involved in odd alien things out there. On Earth, they have a rival, Miss Hellraiser, and a band of boys, The Snobs, who always beat them in battle-of-the-bands situations and one of whom has a crush on Woo-Woo. In space, the characters are all one-offs - there's the driver of their space limo who shows up a couple of times without actually getting a personality or anything to do. The stories are all wordy, and all full of the cultural assumptions and ideas of a guy Bagge's age (early 40s around this time), including a bunch of hippie jokes.

This is all fine: it's amusing and entertaining, and the gestalt of Bagge's writing and Hernandez's art works well together. It is too wordy, in that old-fashioned comics style, full of long captions and long dialogue balloons that say a lot of the same things over and over again. And it all comes across as something like a generation-later version of Bob Hope: goofy, sui generis comics that are meant to appeal to a younger audience but are full of the ideas and plot devices of old people.

Yeah! is basically forgotten, for good and sufficient reasons. It might not quite deserve that, but most things get forgotten twenty-five years later. If you really loved Josie and the Pussycats (the movie, the concept or the comics) and wish there was something else sorta like that, you might be in luck.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy by Doug Savage

When a creator you like turns to creating works for younger readers, you have two choices: follow him along, and check out the new stuff, trying to have an open mind, or to avoid the new stuff and grump about how creators should keep doing the things you discovered them for, grumble grumble.

OR - and this is what I seem to do most of the time - you could not even notice the creator has material in a different genre for about a decade, and then stumble on it randomly when the "new thing" has a fifth book published, and wonder where the time has gone, alas, where are the green fields of our youth?

Doug Savage is a funny, inventive cartoonist. I discovered him with the Savage Chickens project, which I think was either his first big thing or his breakout. Adults don't buy books of funny drawings very consistently these days - this is sad, because in my youth, the small funny book of cartoons by the cash-register was a dependable publishing category, with big successes every year, but the Internet ruined that like it has ruined so many things - but, and here's the trick, kids still do. So a lot of funny, inventive cartoonists have found that, if they can tune their sensibility to middle-schoolers or grade-schoolers, they could have a really awesome career making fun things, visiting a very appreciative (though often massively rambunctious) audience, and enjoying a mostly supportive community of peers.

I don't know if any of that went into Savage's decision to make Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy in 2016 - many cartoonists fall into making books for younger readers because they have younger readers roaming around their houses - I'm talking about their own children, usually, not semi-feral bands of tweens - and there can be other reasons as well. But Savage made a graphic novel for middle-schoolers, got it published by Andrews McMeel, which also handled his "Savage Chickens" books, and has gone on to do four more books about these characters in the decade since then.

This first book has three mostly separate stories, all set in this same forest and focused on the main characters. They're superheroes, I guess. They fight evil, or try to, or intend to. Laser Moose is a moose who can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs for unspecified reasons, and who takes his responsibilities as a laser-shooting moose very, very seriously, probably too much so. Rabbit Boy is his sidekick, a sunny and positive rabbit with no visible superpowers but a somewhat more grounded view of reality that is desperately needed to keep Laser Moose from just cutting everything within sight in half.

In this book, they "battle" aliens who don't seem to really be invading at all. They discover a hideous Aquabear, transformed into a monstrous chimera by toxic waste, and, after some setbacks, return the monster to the human facility that created him, making him the humans' problem. And they foil a new plot by Laser Moose's arch-enemy, Cyborgupine - yes, a cyborg porcupine - who has created a fiendish minion, Mechasquirrel.

It's all fun and zippy, in an appealing kid-friendly cartooning style, mostly thin lines and flat colors. It's the kind of style that looks like an evolved version of the drawings those kids themselves are making - accessible, immediate, quickly readable. And Savage is as funny here with delusional moose and sunny bunnies as he was with wage-slave chickens. You don't need to be ten to enjoy Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, though, if you can access your inner ten-year-old at will, that definitely helps.

Who Is AC? by Hope Larson & Tintin Pantoja

If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn't get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn't. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren't completely explained or fleshed out here - but of course there would be, if it were going to be a series. Those are hooks for later stories, for further details to come later, room for the story to grow.

But, for whatever reason, it didn't. Who Is AC? is a decade-old standalone now; I suppose it's just possible that writer Hope Larson and artist Tintin Pantoja could get back together and tell us what happened next, but this was a Sailor Moon-inspired, manga-styled graphic novel about superheroes and social media aimed at tweens. That audience is now in college; the phones they used in 2013 are four generations out of date; and the ways all of us interact online has shifted and altered. Any follow-up would either be a period piece or a full reboot.

But, if you can ignore the fact that the main character gets her superpowers from a candybar phone, the likes of which were I think solidly out of date even in 2013, AC is a fast-moving, if somewhat superficial, adventure story about one girl who gets superpowers and discovers there are Trolls lurking out in the world.

Lin just moved with her family to the small college town of Barnhurst - location deliberately left unspecified, but  notably small and far away from everything. On the flight over, her phone rang while in airplane mode, and something happened that transformed her. She can use that phone contact, in a way the book doesn't over-explain, to turn into a costumed superheroine with what looks like a big spear and some vaguely computer-esque powers.

Trace is a young man, about the same age, who lives in Barnhurst. He works in a copy shop, where he meets Lin making her zine. He's got a crush on Mel, who works next door at the get-your-photos-taken-in-old-timey-garb shop (which is sustainable as a business in a small college town? Barnhurst must get substantially more tourist traffic than it seems to). Mel is a bit self-centered, the stereotypical pretty girl, but seems like a basically nice, normal person, not an airhead or a spoiled brat. The two have a date, which does not go well, largely because Trace is even more self-centered and full of unwarranted assumptions about every last thing in the world than we expected. (He's also about sixteen or so, which means it comes across as young and unformed and needing some life experience rather than completely horrible. But he is clearly reminiscent of That Internet Guy, who was a loathed type even in 2013.)

The same night as that date, Lin witnesses a hold-up at the copy shop. She transforms into her alter ego, saves the day, and captures the crook (who is a sad-sack guy trying to get money to pay for dental work). But she also transforms again on the way home, to see how it works, and causes an accident for an already-mad Trace and his bike.

Trace posts an angry rant online about the superheroine after he learns about the holdup, calling her Anonymous Coward. (Presumably, if there had been a series, AC would have stood for other things - but that's the source of the name here.) At about the same time, a shadowy figure in a repurposed Pizza Hut somewhere nearby - clearly the Big Villain of the series, but not completely identified in this book - tempts Mel into becoming what I suppose I have to call an Evil Minion.

Mel and Trace are going to meet someone isolated the next night, where Mel will presumably use the power of the Negative Internet to change Trace into another Evil Minion like herself. But Lin shows up, and there is a battle with lots of 1s and 0s in it, and the hold of the Troll (I guess we can call the big villain that - he's called a troll in the book, which implies he may not be alone) is broken.

Lin's secret identity is still, we think, safe, though her costume doesn't cover her face all that much. Mel and Trace are back to being friends, we think, and maybe, if there were a Book Two, might move on to more. But AC doesn't have a real superhero name, the origin of her powers and the Troll are still mysterious, and it's not clear what the significance of the plot of the book was.

So: very much an introductory first volume, mostly set up and mysteries. All things that will now never be cleared up; this is all we have. Pantoja gives it an energetic, mildly manga style, and Larson, as always, is good with the big personalities of young people. It's not quite a complete story, but it's fine as long as you think of it as a pilot episode getting burned off one random night in the summer.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen's Story by Stan Sakai

This one collects seven more issues of the early Usagi Yojimbo comic, plus a story from Critters, though the dates in the book are a little confusing. The book itself claims a first edition in September 1991, but says the stories included are copyright no earlier than 1992. Now, Stan Sakai is a fantastic creator, but I do think he's bound by linear time, so issues 32-38 of Usagi, which were published from February 1992 through March of 1993, could not be collected in late 1991. Given that it has a 1996 Sergio Aragones introduction, and the second edition is said to be December 1997...I'm wondering if that first edition is a typo or just a mistake inserted onto the copyright page so long ago everyone has forgotten about it.

This book is also the end of the initial Fantagraphics run of Usagi. A second edition started up - checks notes - what looks like the very same month from Mirage. That one only lasted sixteen issues, but then Dark Horse picked it up and ran for another twenty-plus years for over a hundred and fifty issues.

So I'll look to see if the beginning of the eighth volume seems to be more of an attempt to onboard new readers; this seventh volume, Gen's Story, is much like the books immediately preceding it. There's one long story that gives the book its title, this time featuring the return of the irascible rhino bounty hunter Gen, and featuring some historical backstory for him, alongside a cluster of shorter, relatively standalone stories.

We meet a female thief, Kitsune, who may be a love interest for Usagi, and then she returns in a later story. We've got a ghost story, in which Usagi is able to lay the spirit of a general he served under. We've got two shorter stories, one mostly humorous about young Usagi with his sensei and one where he's narrating an encounter with an evil witch-like character to Noriyuki, the young panda lord who has showed up in this series a few times. And there's "The Last Ino Story," in which Gen and Usagi find that blind swordspig and nurse him back to health, learning what's happened to him after their last meeting. (With about a hundred and eighty issues of later Usagi, I'm vaguely dubious anything of this era is "the last" anything, but it's possible he never shows up again.)

As always, Usagi is upstanding and righteous, closely following the code of bushido and not particularly suffering because of it - this is a lightly moralistic series for younger readers, so the character with the rigid moral framework will be correct in every situation and events will arrange themselves so that he succeeds in his endeavors. Gen in particular exists to show an alternative to Usagi - not quite villainous, but clearly Not Right, like a young man bandying a girl's name in a Wodehouse novel. The fact that this entire social setup was exploitative and corrupt, enabling a vicious caste of violence experts who were able to terrorize peasants basically at will...well, that's just the way of the samurai, isn't it?

Thor by George O'Connor

When I wrote about the first of George O'Connor's Asgardian books, Odin, I said confidently that it would be a four-book series. This time, I tried to see if I could figure out where I saw that, and what the last two would be. (Number three is Loki, unsurprisingly - I got that from his publisher's website.) Perhaps my Google-fu is weak today, or the tide of AI slop is drowning out useful search results, but I can't now confirm that this will be a four-book series, or find any indications of what the last book will be.

I still think that is true, and that the fourth book will be about one specific Norse god - rather than being called Ragnarok, for example. My guesses are that it will either go to Frigg or Freyja, despite the few myths about either of them, so there can be at least one woman in this very boyish mythos, or that it will be basically the Ragnarok book under a different title, probably Balder or Tyr. On the other hand, O'Connor could throw us a curveball and do Frey. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Thor is the second book in the series: it was the obvious choice, as Odin was the obvious first choice. (Let's face it: if you do a four-book series about Norse gods, three of them have to be Thor, Odin, and Loki, period. The only thing to decide is that fourth one.)

Thor is a fun character, so this is an energetic, amusing book. O'Connor takes pains, especially in his back matter, to make it clear that his Thor - the mythic Thor - is not quite the came as '60s Donald Blake or the MCU Thor, but you can see their common aspects. Thor is big and straightforward and strong and driven by strong emotion and not exactly dumb, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer and pretty easily led. The cover is a great indication of that: O'Connor's Thor is the kind of guy with a huge grin on his face, doing something he loves - in this case, smashing things with a magical hammer, but you know how gods are.

As in O'Connor's other mythological books (Odin, obviously, and his epic earlier Olympians series about the Greek gods), he weaves myths together into a single narrative, keeping the sense of multiple overlapping stories while still making the book a single overall thing. This time out, Thor is on his way back from something - we'll find out what, eventually - wearing rags, hugely happy with himself, and he wants an old ferryman to get him across the river on the border of Jotunheim and Midgard. That leads to Thor telling stories to confirm who he is - or maybe just to boast; it's hard to tell with Thor - and the book flows out from there.

Again, Thor is fun to read about, the kind of mythological figure that generations of storytellers delighted in because his personality is so perfect for stories. O'Connor - here supported with colors by SJ Miller - places Thor in a believable world, bleaker and darker than the Olympians' but full of life and people, and tells a bunch of those stories, going back to the original source material as he always does.

O'Connor's mythological books are supposedly for younger readers - at least, they're made so as to be accessible to middle-graders, and published via an apparatus that's really good at getting books in front of middle-schoolers - but myths are deep and wondrous things, and should never be left only to children. O'Connor knows that well, and at the same time knows that children are smarter than you expect and more focused than you imagine. His books have an impressive array of backmatter, scholarly enough for the adults reading and accessible enough for the kids, to explain all of the references and send more dedicated readers back to the sources.