Buckle your seatbelts: This is one goofy ride.
A nutty ninja chicken and a hapless pirate penguin have more screwball adventures.
This third graphic installment in the ongoing series opens with Pirate Penguin sharing his outrageously zany origin story, immediately setting the sugar-high tone that continues throughout. In a series of loosely strung vignettes—some only a few panels and most not more than a few pages—the duo has many oddly madcap adventures, including an encounter with their friend Wizard Wombat, Pirate Penguin’s transformation into a weregoose that leads to a beauty parlor trip, a sudden visit from pal Astronaut Armadillo, and “a barbecue that could have gone better.” The beauty of this construction is that it makes the book an excellent choice to read either episodically or nonlinearly. Most of the duo’s exploits are rampantly nonsensical and go unresolved, Friesen apparently opting to prioritize silliness over plot and character development; that said, readers who revel in such imaginative wackiness should be over the moon. Straying from a conventional layout, the vibrant full-color panels often burst from their borders, utilizing unique sizing and shape; many have solid, unembellished backgrounds, focusing readers solely on the characters, who bounce around their panels with an infectious, manic glee. In a concluding Q&A, Friesen refers to his titular characters using they pronouns.
Buckle your seatbelts: This is one goofy ride. (Graphic fiction. 7-12)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60309-497-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
More trampling in the vineyards of the Literary Classics section, with results that will tickle fancies high and low.
Recasting Dog Man and his feline ward, Li’l Petey, as costumed superheroes, Pilkey looks East of Eden in this follow-up to Tale of Two Kitties (2017).
The Steinbeck novel’s Cain/Abel motif gets some play here, as Petey, “world’s evilest cat” and cloned Li’l Petey’s original, tries assiduously to tempt his angelic counterpart over to the dark side only to be met, ultimately at least, by Li’l Petey’s “Thou mayest.” (There are also occasional direct quotes from the novel.) But inner struggles between good and evil assume distinctly subordinate roles to riotous outer ones, as Petey repurposes robots built for a movie about the exploits of Dog Man—“the thinking man’s Rin Tin Tin”—while leading a general rush to the studio’s costume department for appropriate good guy/bad guy outfits in preparation for the climactic battle. During said battle and along the way Pilkey tucks in multiple Flip-O-Rama inserts as well as general gags. He lists no fewer than nine ways to ask “who cut the cheese?” and includes both punny chapter titles (“The Bark Knight Rises”) and nods to Hamiltonand Mary Poppins. The cartoon art, neatly and brightly colored by Garibaldi, is both as easy to read as the snappy dialogue and properly endowed with outsized sound effects, figures displaying a range of skin colors, and glimpses of underwear (even on robots).
More trampling in the vineyards of the Literary Classics section, with results that will tickle fancies high and low. (drawing instructions) (Graphic fantasy. 7-10)Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-93518-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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