ROWLEY JEFFERSON’S AWESOME FRIENDLY SPOOKY STORIES 2

In this second entry in a spin-off of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, a boy who transformed into a bug is (mostly) restored to his old self, a severed pinky finishes medical school, and other unusual kids do surprisingly well.

With line-drawn cartoons and casual silliness to crank up the comedy, Kinney again offers a set of tales more likely to cause snickers than screams, despite the array of conventional horror tropes. In the first episode, for instance, Ruben enters a device in his dad’s science lab and, after being turned into a ladybug with a human head, is rescued from spiders by a kindly cockroach who suffers a gruesome fate when his father returns. Elsewhere readers meet the Grim Reaper as a baby who “cried every time he got his skull shampooed,” a zombie named Sylvia who pursues a successful acting career by playing against type, and a lad with a second mouth on his belly who discovers in a middle school locker room that he’s not the only one sporting extra body parts. Except for the ghost who gets sucked into a vacuum cleaner and a football fan who, due to a heavenly administrative error, has to watch his team be terrible for millions of years, the stories tend toward upbeat endings. The characters are all silhouettes or the white of the paper, but names cue some diversity in the human cast.

Terror that’s on the gentler, more positive side.