DRAWING A BLANK

Seventeen-year-old textbook geek Carlton Dunne IV has zero game and funnels his inner teenage male mojo into a comic strip called Signy the Superbad, which chronicles the smashes and crashes of a buxom blonde Scottish crime-fighting vixen. When his dad is kidnapped by an evil Scottish rogue, Carlton jets off to Scotland to rescue him. Along the way he meets Aileen, an alluring, beer-guzzling, rough-and-tumble gal who drags him headfirst into danger, not unlike his comic super-heroine. As per usual, Ehrenhaft’s dead-on characterizations and genuine teen dialogue will hook readers of all ages. Unfortunately this latest takes several dozen pages to get moving, and even then it still sputters and fights to gain momentum. Perhaps most distracting is the many extraneous footnotes that litter the bottom of the pages. Biston’s pen-and-ink drawings, however, amplify Carlton’s clever sense of humor and mirror his up-and-down escapades with Aileen. Truthfully, all Ehrenhaft really needs to succeed is to infuse the same wry, self-deprecating wit and spontaneity into his plotting that he so thoughtfully invokes in his characters. (Fiction. YA)