DOODLE CAT IS BORED

A cat is excruciatingly bored.

Doodle Cat, drawn as a red, cat-shaped silhouette with frantic eyes and sharp whiskers its only markings, sits on a blank white page. “I AM BORED,” says Doodle Cat. The next two pages have plain, matte-black backgrounds, and Doodle Cat stands (upright like a human) in a yellow spotlight. “EXCUSE ME EVERYONE I AM BORED! / HALLO?” This is no low-energy boredom; it’s desperate, bug-eyed, shrieking boredom. Suddenly, a crayon appears on the floor. Doodle Cat squints in suspicion, tries to eat soup with it, dances with it, and hears the crayon say, “I’m for doodling.” Aha! Doodle Cat, ever self-focused, nabs credit for that revelation (though if the concept of doodling is so new, why did the character self-identify as “Doodle Cat” all along?) and has a brain explosion that Farrell illustrates in a full-bleed spread of chunky psychedelic designs. The arc is now about drawing (it’s called doodling, but much of it is more deliberate than that). The breathless pace and forced brashness—two separate, explicitly bum-focused pages (“Here’s my bum”) plus Doodle Cat “surfing through time and space on a wave of farts with Wizard Susan,” an unexplained White human who never appears before or after—make every page seem like a new bid for readers’ attention.

There’s not much substance or cohesion here, but it may work to corral—briefly—little ones who won’t stop running around.