One bad thing and one good thing about picture book A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything

I've read a handful of these non-fiction picture book biographies of certain comic book creators and/or their greatest creations before. Writer Kirsten W. Larson and artist Katy Wu's A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything (Clarion Books; 2021) obviously focuses on Wonder Woman. I found two things of particular interest in it: one good, one bad.

I should note that this is more a biography of the character than it is her creators, starting by introducing Wonder Woman, then turning to comic books, then her famous 1972 Ms. magazine cover, then her 1975-1977 TV show and finally her 2017 feature film, with several pauses to focus on broad changes for women in American society and Wonder Woman's ability to inspire women in the real world.

It opens with a two-page spread with three comic book-like narration boxes, the first two featuring quotation marks (It won't be clear to most readers until the last page's source notes, but the words in quotations are taken from a story in 1942's Wonder Woman #1, which actually came along about half a year after Wonder Woman debuted in Sensation Comics #1):

"As lovely as Aphrodite—as wise as Athena—with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules—

she is known only as Wonder Woman, but who she is, or whence she came, nobody knows!"

Until now!

Dominating the foreground Wu's version of Wonder Woman, rendered and costumed in a way that is quite visually (and, one imagines, legally) distinct from the DC Comics character, an athletic, black-haired beauty who seems to be made of pastel light and cartoon stars, only the vaguest suggestion of any kind of costume beyond a trailing red ribbon. (We'll talk more about Wu's Wonder Woman a bit further down.)

Behind her are the four Greek mythological figures mentioned.

From there we cut to "America, 1941" and what appears to be a comic book studio, in which we see a half-dozen handsome, even pretty young men in business attire all looking like drawings based on clip art search results for "business guy." They don't really look all that much like they came from the 1940s; indeed, no one's even smoking!

Two of them are busy at drawing tables, one leans over one of the artists, three gather around a drawing of a caped strongman labeled "He Boy." On the walls are colorful images of various Supermen, and an open box is full of a comic labeled "Zoom Man."

"The comic book industry is dominated by white men," the first narration box says. And, indeed, there are free-floating labels with arrows pointing out that all the characters on this page are "white men." (One says "Another white man" and another "Also white men.")

This is a) true, with so few exceptions so as to prove the rule and b) weird, because as you and I, comic book fans, are well aware, Wonder Woman is also the creation of white men: William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter...although you wouldn't know that Peter had anything to do with Wonder Woman, given that he's not mentioned at all in the story. This is the bad thing. 

As the story unfolds, important players behind-the-scenes of Wonder Woman's comic book career (and, later, TV and film careers) are highlighted with baseball card-like boxes depicting their images, names and some details about them.

The first of these come on pages seven and eight, and feature Marston and his wife, Elizabeth Marston. After a spread showing how much kids loved comic books and that grownups were worried about the violence in them, we cut to the Marstons' home, where Bill is deep in thought in an easy chair, while Elizabeth stands nearby, cajoling him, "Come on, let's have a Superwoman! There's too many men out there."

For that suggestion alone (that's all the role she plays in this book, anyway), she gets a baseball card, but Peter does not. In fact, he's left completely out of Wonder Woman's creation story, as the next spread features Marston with a briefcase and sketch of Wonder Woman. Of where she came from, Larson only says, "Inspired by the idea of a female superhero, Bill proposed a new comic book character, one who would be a good influence on children—Wonder Woman."

And then it's to the offices of All-American Comics, where M.C. Gaines okays the idea, and gets his baseball card. So, both Elizabeth Marston, who suggests a woman hero, and Gaines, who okays the hero, are pivotal parts of Wonder Woman's origin, but not the guy who drew here? There's a step missing here, obviously.

Peter's omission gets only more annoying as one reads on, given that other key figures named and "carded" include associate editor and "Wonder Women of History" writer Alice Marble, Marston's assistant-turned-ghostwriter Joye Hummel, Ms. cofounders Gloria Steinem and Joanne Edgar, television actress Lynda Carter and the Wonder Woman film's director Patty Jenkins. 

Now, certainly these folks all contributed to the evolution of Wonder Woman as an important character in American pop culture, and they all played roles of various degrees in helping maintain or increase her popularity, but none of them helped create Wonder Woman the way Peter did. Imagine, if you would, a book about Marvel's Incredible Hulk that includes the contributions of Stan Lee, Martin Goodman, Lou Ferrigno and Ang Lee, but never mentions Jack Kirby.

Because Peter didn't just come up with Wonder Woman's basic look and costume. He drew all of the Wonder Woman stories in both Sensation and Wonder Woman, covers included, as well as her newspaper comic strip (granted, with assistants helping on much of the background inking), from Wonder Woman's first appearance in 1942 until his own death in 1958. That's Wonder Woman's entire Golden Age career (outside of the Justice Society strips, I suppose, although I noticed when reading the earliest JSoA stories in DC Finest collections recently that Peter even drew some of her initial stories there). 

That means Peter designed and co-created not just Wonder Woman, but also Hippolyta and the Amazons, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls and just about everyone Wonder Woman villain you can think of (Unless you want to be cheeky and say, I don't know, Veronica Cale).

And, as we now all know—we do all know this now, right?—drawing the art in comics stories isn't a simple act of illustration, but another form of writing, just writing with pictures rather than words. Marston is the creator who obviously gets talked about the most, given how colorful his personal life was, how interesting his psychological theories were, and how he used Wonder Woman to try to popularize those theories, but Peter is just as much Wonder Woman's father as Marston was. 

So that seems like a pretty big omission on Larson's part, and one that makes me question everything else in the book. 

After the 34-page story concludes, there are two pages devoted to short text features in the back. One is entitled "The Origin Story...Of This Book," and details how Larson was a Wonder Woman fan as a child (thanks to the TV show), and notes that seeing the 2017 film made her wonder where Wonder Woman came from, which is how this book came about. She notes that she wasn't a comic book reader, which will seem obvious after reading the book.

The other page is entitled "The Women of Wonder Woman". It's only five paragraphs long, but it lists seven women, their names all in bold. It is, interestingly, here that Peter gets his only mention:

Wonder Woman's looks, created by artist Harry G. Peter, may have been inspired by Olive Richard, who lived with Bill Marston's family, had dark hair, and wore signature cuff bracelets.

"Lived with Bill Marston's family," you say? Huh. I wonder if there's anything more to that story, maybe something less likely to make it into a children's picture book? Notably perhaps, this is Richard's only mention in the book, as well. 

Anyway, the decision to omit one of Wonder Woman's creators from a story about Wonder Woman's creation is the bad thing, and, perhaps, a fatal flaw in this book. 

Now, what is the good thing?

Well, I was kind of fascinated by how Katy Wu draws Wonder Woman throughout the book. I am, quite obviously, not versed in copyright or trademark law (If you know me at all, you'll know I'm not terribly well-versed in anything useful; pretty much just comic books, and, to a lesser extent, giant monster movies and cryptozoology). 

But I would have thought that, this being a work of non-fiction about Wonder Woman, it might have been free to use Wonder Woman's likeness throughout. Certainly, the previously discussed With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider by Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin were full of accurate images of Spider-Man and other Marvel superhero characters (as well as a few others, like Fawcett's Captain Marvel). 

I've never read it, but, working in a library, I've definitely seen and handled What Is the Story of Wonder Woman?, one of those Who HQ non-fiction books for kids in which the subjects have big heads on the covers, and that Wonder Woman is wearing her traditional costume on the cover. 

Regardless, Wu opts to draw a Wonder Woman who looks like Wonder Woman if you squint, or from far away...at least at a few points in the book (Her other take on the character is more interesting, I thought).

You see this almost-but-not-quite-Wonder Woman version of Wonder Woman on the cover. She looks a bit like a fully colored thumbnail version of herself. Yes, she's got the read bustier with a bit of gold at the top, the blue shorts, a tiara and bracelets, but the details are missing: There's no star on the tiara, no eagle or "WW" on the bustier, no white stars on her shorts (I would have thought that Wu could have gone ahead and used a version of the eagle on Wondy's chest, as I thought the reason DC changed it to the "WW" symbol in the first place was because they learned they couldn't trademark an eagle...?)

This version also appears on the faux covers of Wonder Woman comics kids happily hold aloft on one page, and striding like a giant in the background on a page labeled "Present day," where she is missing her tiara (and facial features) but does hold a glowing golden lariat.

More interesting, I thought, was the Wonder Woman Wu drew on the first page, one that seemed more idea than character, made of something insubstantial, a black-haired being of fluid, shimmering red and blue light. In that image, she is trailing a solid if sheer-looking red ribbon, a motif that appears throughout the book, as if a literal manifestation of the thread of her story. 

On two pages devoted to a readers' poll of who should "serve alongside Hawkman, Johnny Thunder, and the others" in the Justice Society, we see this Wonder Woman seeming to explode out of a ballot box,  a fist raised in victory. She's more solid here, with flesh-colored skin and silvery rather than golden bracelets, but her costume is part red and part blue, partially obscured by the ribbon, and stars abound.

The very next page has a panel of her in this costume, the bustier seemingly changing from blue to red and back before readers' eyes. And then later, on the page devoted to the debut of her TV show, Wu draws an image of Wonder Woman hanging from a helicopter's landing skids and she's outfitted similarly to the way she is on the cover, although here she seems to wear a golden belt and her shorts have a golden trim, and while her boots are comic book-accurate in design (at least circa 1977, with the point at top and the stripes), the colors are blue and gold rather than red and white. Again, the ribbon plays a big part, drawn entering the page from one side and exiting on the other, while it entwines Wonder Woman's not-quite-right costume, as if to artfully obscure it.

As much as I liked Wu's attempts to draw Wonder Woman in a way that was recognizable but off enough not to make any DC or Warner Bros. lawery's fingers twitch, I think there were also some funny attempts to draw generic superheroes.

There is, obviously, that scene in 1941 with all the white men, where the various heroes all look like the kind one might find in a child's birthday card, or a coloring book, or a clip art file that comes up when searching "superhero", all capes and generic chest symbols (I assume she could have used a faux Superman here, a caped, dark-haired strongman in red and blue, just leaving off the trademarked "S" symbol? She probably also could have used some public domain heroes, although maybe the creators didn't want to suggest a specific studio or publisher in that image.)

Where it gets positively ludicrous is a drawing the Justice Society:

You know, J-Man. And H-Man. And G-Man. And the other guy.

Surely there was a better way to draw the JSoA without violating any trademarks, perhaps drawing them all in silhouette...? I don't know. I just find it funny to see the words "Justice Society" (and then the names Hawkman and Johnny Thunder) juxtaposed with those images, as if the artist read the script and was like, "Justice Society, huh? So, just some random group of vaguely superheroic looking guys, then!"

Now that I think about it, maybe J-Man is supposed to be Johnny Thunder and H-Man Hawkman...? (And maybe G-Man could be Green Lantern? He's got a cape like Alan Scott and he is wearing green! Maybe this is the JSoA of an alternate Earth in the old DC multiverse, like Earth-W or something...)

Anyway, A True Wonder is interesting enough to look at, in part to see an artist wrestling with drawing one of the most iconic of superhero characters when they aren't permitted to use any of the specific iconography, but if you, like me, care at all about where comic book superheroes actually come from, its excision of H.G. Peter from the story of his own greatest, most lasting work is sure to irritate. 

For more of Katy Wu's art, visit here or here. 

On Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's marvelous comic creator biographies With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider

In 2021 and 2023, writer Annie Hunter Eriksen and artist Lee Gatlin released a pair of children's picture books through Page Street Kids, both unauthorized biographies of two of the three primary comics professionals who created what we now think of as the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (the third, Jack Kirby, appears in both men's stories, but doesn't didn't get his own book...at least not yet).

Attracted both by Gatlin's highly idiosyncratic, cartoonistly work, which I was familiar with from his posting on social media (where he posts great drawings of The Thing and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), as well as curiosity about how a writer might go about reducing such men's complex careers into something short and simple enough for a picture book, I recently brought them both home from the library. 

As a grown-up and a long-time comics reader, I liked them both well enough, and I would certainly recommend them to anyone in that same demographic. As far as the intended audience of children goes, well, I'm afraid I can't really imagine how these would go over, as it's hard to imagine anyone young enough to be read to really being too terribly interested in Stan Lee or Steve Ditko. They do seem to be serviceable first biographies on the men, though.

The first, With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee, tackles the most famous figure American comics history has ever produced, whether rightly or wrongly. With just 30 pages to work with, most of which could only support a sentence or two in addition to the images that will dominate them, Eriksen would zero in on Lee's career as a would-be novelist who stumbled into the writings of comics and then hit the big time when he wrote some heroes who were extremely popular in the 1960s, heroes who would eventually become movie stars in the 21st century.

In fact, there's a jump in time from mid-1960s to the turn in century, with an image depicting Lee walking down a red carpet, leading Spider-Man and the Avengers characters, most of whom are drawn wearing sunglasses (Except for Black Panther, whose all-black garb  wouldn't look right with them, and a tiny, too-small-for-them Ant-Man, shown running to keep up with the long strides of the regularly-sized heroes). 

The focus is mostly on Stan Lee as a youngster (appropriately enough, given the target audience), and his time working for Timely/Atlas/Marvel, until he co-created The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, at which point Stan Lee really becomes the Stan Lee we now imagine when we think of him (For a significant portion of the book, he will be balding, his face looking naked without his signature glasses and mustache).

It's not a bad way to frame Lee's career, really, and certainly focuses on what is perhaps most significant to the broader, mainstream world beyond the comics shop.

The opening, thesis-like two-page spread is pretty great. Eriksen writes:

Stan Lee didn't have hulking strength.

Or fantastic flexibility.

Or catlike reflexes.

His superpower was creating heroes who did.

Each of these sentences is illustrated by an image of Lee as we usually imagine him now, with the shaded glasses, mustache and full head of gray hair, exhibiting one of these powers. 

So there's an image of a huge Stan Lee holding a coffee mug pinched between the fingers of a massive hand, the other one pinching the knob of a door that he's accidentally torn from its hinges. And then one of his left arm stretching into loops before returning to write on the yellow pad of paper he held in his other hand, as Mister Fantastic might be able to. And then one of him dressed in Black Panther's costume, complete with cute cat ears, the cowl open to reveal his familiar, grandfatherly face. And, finally, an image of him with his feet up on a desk, a lightbulb appearing over his head, while he raises a finger in a "Eureka!" like pose.

From there, Eriksen rewinds to his childhood: "But back when he was Stanley Lieber, a kid growing up in New York City, he didn't feel super." After a few pages on his childhood, the young protagonist lands a job in publishing: 

Luckily, a magazine called Timely Comics was hiring. With this gig Stanley could get his foot in the door in the world of writing. But for now, he would be Stanley Lieber: Errand Boy!

Eriksen doesn't mention a fact that tempers that "Luckily"; Lee's cousin was married to publisher Martin Goodman, a relationship which likely had something to do not only with his hiring as an errand boy, but also with his becoming an editor while still a teenager, after the famed comic book team Joe Simon and Jack Kirby quit Timely. 

She does detail Lee's work on that team's most famous creation, Captain America, which is when Stanley first became "Stan Lee," writing a filler story for the superhero under the pseudonym, wanting to save "Stanley Lieber" for his future great American novel. (Unfortunately, the story isn't clear that Captain America was Simon and Kirby's creation; the character just sort of exists here and is a steppingstone in Lee's transition from errand boy to writer.)

Gatlin's illustrations for the momentous occasion are pretty cool, though, with one page showing a cartoonish Captain America—none of the many Marvel heroes depicted within the book have the big, muscular, dynamic figures one would expect to see in an actual Marvel comic book—standing before a Hollywood-like chair labeled "Cap" and holding a script, saying, "Line? Line?...This is blank" in comic book dialogue balloons.

On the facing page, we see Cap and Bucky in action, battling the Red Skull and his men, while a young Stanley picks at a typewriter in the foreground.

That's soon followed by a scene in which Stan's wife Joan suggests he "finally sneak in a story he'd always wanted to tell," resulting in his "teaming up with Jack Kirby" and creating the Fantastic Four.  And then, "Stan furiously drafted while artist 'Sturdy' Steve Ditko drew the perfect design until a new face peered back at them: Peter Parker... The Amazing Spider-Man!"

After that second hit, his publisher's ask Stan, "What other superheroes do you have up your sleeves?" 

And this then leads to an image of a smug-looking Stan pulling at one of his sleeves, from which emanates a gusher of colorful stars, lightning, and Marvel ephemera (Mjolnir, pumpkin bombs, ants, Doctor Strange's cloak and so on). It's followed by a two-page spread featuring The Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Iron Man and Doctor Strange. 

The contributions of Kirby and Ditko (and Don Heck and Larry Lieber) aren't mentioned here.

It's a certainty a version of the creation of Marvel's most famous characters and the creation of the Marvel Universe that Stan Lee himself would have like! 

Granted, the creation and development of these characters has been something that the men who made them and the fans who loved them have contested and debated endlessly over the years and have long since been the source of high-stakes controversy. While Eriksen and Gatlin obviously include Kirby and Ditko as collaborators (at least on the FF and Spidey), reading this book, it does seem to suggest that Lee did the heavy lifting in the process. 

I don't think this is necessarily a sin on the part of the book's creators. I mean, how nuanced can we expect a book intended for a pre-literate audience to be, after all? And how much controversy should there be in a book serving as a first introduction to Lee's career? Still, adult readers (like me), are sure to notice these aspects, and to raise an eyebrow here and there. 

After the story ends—not with Lee's sad last years, nor his death, but with him standing in a crowd of cosplaying fans and declaring "'NUFF SAID!"—there's a two-page spread of mostly prose, followed by a bibiliography of sources (Not included? Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon's 2003 Stan Lee and The Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book from Chicago Review Press, which I'd personally recommend over some of those cited instead). 

There are three short sections across this spread, one on Stan Lee's cameos in Marvel movies, another on his collaborations with other creators and one on his "Stan's Soapbox" column. That second section, which appears under the heading "Friendly Neighborhood Bullpen", does mention Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Lieber and Bill Everet ("Like any good hero, Stan teamed up," Eriksen writes). 

This section also briefly details "The Marvel Method" of making comics (as opposed to the assembly line way they were mostly created previously), which allowed for greater collaboration between writer and artist...but, as an unfortunate side effect, likely contributed to the historical disagreements over who deserves credit for what (As I've understood it, artists working in "The Marvel Method" like Kirby and Ditko did with Lee are more properly understood as co-writers and artists, not just artists). 

Eriksen and Gatlin's next book, the wonderfully titled Along Came a Radioactive Spider: Strange Steve Ditko and the Creation of Spider-Man, seems to have been born, at least in part, by Eriksen's own dissatisfaction in the limited role Lee's collaborators played in the first book.

In fact, her bio on the back cover flap, begins with the fact that she 

realized while writing With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee...that she, like most people, was overlooking Steve Ditko's role in the Spidey origin story, which inspired her to create the biography he deserves (even if he would totally hate the attention).

It's true that Ditko doesn't get the credit Stan Lee does for creating Spider-Man, but then, much of that is likely due to the two men's very natures. Stan Lee craved the spotlight and spent much of his career in pursuing it and then nurturing the fame his comics work brought him (I think it's safe to say that the various producers and directors didn't have to twist Stan's arm too hard to do all those movie cameos he's now so well known for). 

Ditko, on the other hand, was Lee's polar opposite. He eschewed the fame his creation brought him (as Eriksen's bio alludes to) and eventually gained a reputation for being something of a recluse.

So yeah, the late Ditko likely wouldn't have wanted to see this biography about him, as flattering as it is. That said, it's a good one, and I enjoyed it more than the Stan Lee one that it followed, probably because, unlike Lee, I've never read an actual biography of Ditko, and, in fact, couldn't tell you anything about him other than maybe rattling off a list of comics characters he created, and what I've seen of his work.

The word the Eriksen and Gatlin team attach to Ditko is the one in the sub-title, "strange," and which, given the name of his second most famous Marvel hero, naturally has something of a double meaning. 

"There was absolutely nothing strange about comic book artists Steve Ditko," Eriksen writes in the book's opening, the format of which is an identical, four-part two-page spread to that which opened With Great Power. "His life was an open book!" 

This ironic statement comes above Gatlin's drawing of an annoyed looking Ditko shouting "No comment!" and trying to close his front door while a grinning, generic-looking reporter leers around it, and various arms holding cameras, microphones and notepads are seen on the other side. 

This continues into two more similar situations, in which the prose narration contrasts with Gatlin's cartoon-like illustrations (It's worth noting that this book is a much funnier one than the first), culminating in Eriksen relenting over an image of a smiling Ditko holding a pencil and seated at a drawing table, an image of Spider-Man in one of the panels on the big piece of paper before him.

Okay...so Steve Ditko wasn't really like the rest of the artists at Marvel Comics, but the same could be said about his—yes, Steve's!—most famous creation: Spider-Man. 

The next two-page spread details the strangeness of Spider-Man, and how greatly he differed from the typical superhero, a strangeness accentuated by Gatlin's particularly thin, angular and, well, spidery version of Marvel's flagship hero which, despite adopting a variety of famous poses, looks more weird and alien than ever (Honestly? After reading this, I think Gatlin's is one of my favorite portrayals of the hero; it's easy to see how civilians would be creeped out by this Spider-Man, and how J. Jonah Jameson would viscerally recoil from the strange figure Gatlin draws here).

From there, we get a fairly linear version of Ditko's story, just as we did Lee's before. Ditko also grew up poor in the Great Depression, and he was also attracted to the fantastic, which, for him, meant comics. 

There's a great spread devoted to his work at Marvel and the difference between him and editor Stan Lee, and his reaction to a new character that Lee and Jack Kirby were cooking up (Gatlin draws a great Kirby; his sole appearance in this book looking somewhat bored as he works, a cigar clamped in his jaws). 

It wasn't strange when Stan and The King teamed up yet again for their new story: a boy, a magic ring, and a transformation into the grown-up hero named "Spiderman."

Ditko's job was to illustrated the new comic, but "Spiderman was just another repetitive brave and brawny hero!...Steve itched to break the mold in the best way he knew how—by making Spiderman strange."

We see just how wide the gulf in the two Spidermen was through Gatlin's drawing of Kirby's version, a large, muscular figure sporting a more classic costume and wielding a web gun, and Ditko's version, which we are now all familiar with (Even if the artists that followed Ditko, starting with John Romita Jr., pretty quickly transitioned the hero into a bigger, better-looking, more heroic and, well, less strange figure). 

In this book, Eriksen has Ditko do the heavy-lifting with the development of the character, not just coming up with the desigsn and elements of the secret identity, but creating the book himself: "Suddenly, Steve found himself writing and drawing Spider-Man—a comic book history first."

The book concludes with a passage in which we see Ditko retreating from his own fame, dodging young fans and, in one great illustration, questions, as Gatlin draws Ditko, a pencil behind his ear, in a leaping pose, while a half-dozen dialog balloons, each containing a single question mark, go flying and bouncing all around him. 

The final spread shows a happy Ditko at a drawing board, surrounded by a colorful collage, and a dramatically posing new but familiar character. "So he did what he did best: got to work," Eriksen writes, concluding of his latest work, "The comic was out of this world...and his most fitting work yet! Steve named him DOCTOR STRANGE."

Throughout the book—which gives a shorter, more streamlined version of Spidey that sidesteps some of the questions regarding contributions from Lee, Kirby and possible influences from past characters—Gatlin draws not only the aforementioned comics creators, but also Peter Parker, Spider-Man and some of the hero's foes (The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, The Sandman and The Scorpion) but, somewhat surprisingly, Captain Marvel and Batman (as well as obscure Simon and Kirby creation Captain 3-D, and Captain Battle, who I didn't recognize*). 

As with With Great Power, this book ends with a short prose section and bibliography.  Here, that section offers a more detailed biography of Ditko, including dates and reference to some of the controversies that wouldn't really fit in a picture book, including aspects of Spider-Man's creation and Ditko's departure from the comic. 

"Steve Ditko Would Hate This Book," reads a headline-like label to one part of this feature, which briefly notes his post-Marvel career (namedropping The Question and Mr. A) and just how media-shy he was, including how few photos there are of Ditko (which did make me curious as to how Gatlin went about developing his Steve, which must have been much harder than drawing Stan Lee, whose look has at this point become almost as iconic as that of some superheroes), his dislike of the "poison sandwich" biography Blake Bell wrote of him and the "rule" imposed by Ditko upon those meeting him: You don't talk about it.

Regardless of what Ditko might think of the book, though, I liked it, and I wouldn't mind reading similar biographies from this particular pair of Kirby, Simon or other famous and influential comics creators in the future.

*Thanks to Anthony Strand for identifying him on Bluesky for me!

Review: Kate Beaton's Shark Girl

Yes, I realize that this is not a comic book but is instead a children's picture book. I think it's close enough to warrant coverage on a comics blog, though, and not just because of the overlap between comics and picture books as media which tell stories through a combination of words and sequential pictures.

No, this particular children's book, as the title of this post and the cover above say, is the work of the great Kate Beaton, responsible for everyone's favorite online comic strip Hark! A Vagrant (collected by Drawn and Quarterly into 2011's Hark! A Vagrant and 2015's Step Aside, Pops) and the excellent 2022 graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.

In other words, while her Shark Girl may be a picture book—Beaton's third, following 2015's The Princess and the Pony and 2016's King Baby—it's a picture book by a cartoonist.

Beaton seems to take some inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, at least broadly, her book featuring as it does a half-human, half-fish girl who makes a deal with a Sea Witch to get herself some legs to take care of some business on the surface world.

This particular half-human, half-fish isn't the traditional mermaid, of course. Her fish part is shark, and she has the pointy teeth of a shark. 

When Beaton introduces us to her, she says "she had no troubles in her life at all."

"Until the day... she got caught."

She gets caught, as the illustrations show, in a huge, weighted fishing net dragging along the ocean floor This is known as bottom trawling or dragging, and it's a particularly insidious way of catching fish, as it obviously picks up not just the target species, but any other fish or marine life that happens to be in the path of the net (Like, here, Shark Girl). Additionally, this method also tears up the bottom of the ocean floor, causing environmental damage to the ecosystem. 

 As Beaton explains in her narration:

She saw in the net little fish that humans like to eat. But there were also many fish, like herself, that they do not eat. The creatures could all die and be thrown away for no reason. 

As the net is being hauled aboard The Jellyfish, the boat under the command of Captain Barrett, the feeling of "REVENGE" swells up in Shark Girl's heart, giving her the strength to break free of the net. She immediately swims to visit the Sea Witch and tell her of how she hopes to achieve her revenge, and the Sea Witch gives her legs (And Shark Girl doesn't even have to trade her voice or anything in exchange for them; "Sea witches are half human themselves," Beaton writes, "they live for drama."

Shark Girl's plan is to, first, get a job aboard The Jellyfish, which she does easily enough (despite the fact that she is so tiny, about waist-high to Captain Barrett, is all gray blue, and has big, triangle-shaped teeth). And then lead a mutiny.

That second part isn't as easy, though. Shark Girl first broaches the subject with the crew in a panel—parts of the book read just like comics, with the art broken into panels, while others use the full page or the full two-page spread as a particular beat (or implied panel)—where she holds a hand to the side of her face and looks around suspiciously, a dialogue balloon featuring a crudely drawn image of the captain with X's over his eyes, and the world "mutiny" below it. The three-person crew looks on with big, round eyes and slightly quizzical expressions.

Over the course of a montage, Shark Girl manages to befriend the crew, despite various aspects of her sharky nature marking her as quite different from them, and she proves herself an amazing fisher, able to pull up fish after fish with her little fishing rod, thanks to her apparently unerring ability to tell where the little fish that the crew is after are.

Barret sees great value in her skills, and is therefore afraid to let her leave the ship, so one day he captures her and handcuffs her to a radiator, after which point her new friends the crew rescue her, she returns to the sea and they end up carrying out that mutiny she had set out to provoke at the beginning: 

The crew has taken command of the Jellyfish and restored order. 

They still fish, but they never overfish, and they only catch what humans will eat.

And they remember that the other fish are living creatures, too. 

Though far bigger and brighter than the Beaton art you're probably most familiar with, that in the book is quite clearly Beaton's. Rendered in Procreate, according to the fine print on the cover page, it looks painted, and though there are several rather dynamic images (particularly the full-page illustration of Shark Girl bursting free of the fishing net and seemingly swooping through the reader in the direction of the reader), much of the staging looks, well, comic strip-y. 

And certainly all the characters look like Beaton's characters. You can certainly recognize Shark Girl as hers on the cover, for example, and the human characters on the boat look more Beaton-y still, particularly the captain. They all have the funny, exaggerated expressions one might expect from characters in a comic strip or animated cartoon, and while there are certainly messages to the book—about caring for the environment, about greed being bad, about accepting others who are different—it's really quite funny too.

The mutiny, for example, occurs over the course of three panels, where the characters do things like take the captain's portrait off the wall and dump out the coffee out of his mug reading "#1 Boss" while he reacts melodramatically. 

And the page which first shows Shark Girl in the net has some 50-75 or so of the "little fish that humans like to eat," each with wide-eyed expressions registering differing degrees of emotion, from confusion to disappointment, to concern to the sort of dumb obliviousness that Beaton sometimes gives to the animals she draws (like her fat little ponies, for example).

In addition to giving fans another opportunity to enjoy her artwork, Beaton's Shark Girl is also the very best kind of children's picture book, that which can be equally enjoyed by kids and grown-ups.

If you have a little person you read to in your life, I'd definitely recommend the book for them. And if you're simply someone who enjoys fun artwork and excellent cartooning, I'd recommend you borrow a copy for your local library to check out. 

Little help here

So I just read Brendan Deneen and Cale Atkinson's First Day of Groot (Marvel; 2019), and while the rhyming text didn't do much for me (I'm obviously not the target audience for this picture book), the artwork is a delight. Atkinson draws the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from Iron Man and Captain America to Spider-Man and Captain Marvel, and his Avengers are the best. The pages are full of fun little Easter Eggs referencing Marvel lore, too, from the Aunt May-brand pancake mix the legendary Star-Lord is whipping up in the Guardians' galley to the copy of Hulk's Mystery Tales that Rocket is reading (featuring The Hulk dressed like Sherlock Holmes on the cover). And hey, scan each image extra carefully, as there's a tiny little Ant-Man or Wasp hiding in each of them...except for the ones where they are full-size, like at The Avengers picnic.

Anyway, near the climax, after the heroes have used teamwork to deliver a humiliating defeat to Thanos, there's this spectacular two-page spread, which is accompanied by the words:

Now that the day
is almost done...
Oh, wait! Galactic villains on the run!

It's too big to fit on the bed of my scanner, hence the photo. I've scanned the two halves of the image and will place them below, because I am afraid I am unable to name many of what appear to be Marvel's most awesome villains.

Here are the images:

Okay, so we all know the three big guys in the background are Orrgo, The Supreme Intelligence and Xemnu, The Hulk (AKA Xemnu, The Titan), here sporting an amazing mustache (the result of his eyebrows and mustache being colored differently than his fur, I think). Oh, and then there's Thanos, obviously, who seems to have recovered the Infinity Gauntlet that the Avengers stripped him of a few pages ago.

As for the rest, let's go left to right, and you can tell me who the heck the ones I can't identify are. Ready...?

1.) Hellcow

2.) Ruby Tuesday

3.) (Big Green Robot) The Living Brain

4.) (Fancy-Looking Guy With Sweet Mustache) Turner D. Century

5.) (Square-Jawed, Long-Haired Guy With Vest Over His Bare Chest) The Kangaroo

6.) The Walrus

7.) (Umm...) Cyrus Black

8.) The Orb

9.) (One Of The Green Guys Shown Hanging Out With Nebula Earlier In The Book) According to artist Cale Atkinson, this guy is an original creation.

10.) (HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THAT GUY) Taserface

11.) (Guy With A Guitar) The Hypno-Hustler

12.) (Phone-Themed Bad Guy) Phone Ranger

13.) Ronan The Accuser

Thank you for your help in this matter.

Some picture books of note:

Are We There, Yeti? (Simon & Schuster*; 2015): This debut picture book from artist Ashlyn Anstee is one more in the ever increasing number of books for children featuring yeti, bigfoot, sasquatch and other hairy humanoids of their ilk. The title and cover image layout the entire story, which hangs on the squishing together of the phrase "Are we there yet?" with the yeti, and Anstee accomplishes this by having a yeti be the driver of small children.

"This is Yeti," Anstee introduces us to Yeti on the first page, and the large, white, roughly man-shaped creatures waves hello. "He drives our bus," reads the next page, as we see Yeti striding toward a tiny, round school bus with a half-dozen children and a teacher or chaperone already aboard.

When they ask where they are going, Yeti only says that it is a surprise, and so begins a 16-page drive through various settings–city, beach, mountains–populated by an Akira Toriyama-like mixture of people, anthropomorphic animals and regular animals, each illustration fairly packed with funny little details for readers to tease out.

The entire way, the children ask the titular question, until about the halfway point of the book, when they arrive at a remote cave in a snowy environment. Where are they? Based on the squat, child-sized Yeti-like creatures that come out of the cave, it would appear they are either at a yeti school or else at Yeti's own home, playing with his own children.

Anstee finds several other places in which to swap in "Yeti" for "yet," and that pleasant enough joke is able to sustain the short story, and give her an opportunity to draw and paint fun stuff, like the not-so-abominable snowmen and dogs wearing shorts at the beach and a tree sloth piloting a biplane over a mountain while llamas look on.

Anstee works in animation, and it is apparent from the energy that permeates her drawings, and the dynamic sense of motion in them, as well as the super-simple, studiously cartoonish designs.

Dinosaur Christmas (Scholastic; 2011): Writer Jerry Pallotta and artist Howard McWilliam have seemingly attempted to construct a two-great-things-that-go-great-together type of book, by adding dinosaurs and Christmas together and seeing how that might work out.

Not too terribly well, really.

The book is premised on Santa Claus' extensive answer to a question on a post card from a little girl: "Dear Santa, What did you use to pull your sleigh before you had reindeer?"

The answer is, you guessed it, dinosaurs.

Now as all of us who are not creationists know, human beings and dinosaurs never co-existed. The last of the dinosaurs were extinct a good 65 million years or so before the first human-like primates started getting up and walking around on their hind legs, and there was absolutely no crossover–give or take a Mokele-mbembe or ropen. So if you want to think about this, this picture book is going to demand some difficult questions of you.

Is Santa Claus human, and, if so, how is it that he existed so many tens of millions of years before the rest of his species? If not, why does he so closely resemble humanity, and is it merely a coincidence that humankind would evolve to so closely resemble Santa Claus?

If Santa Claus is not human, what exactly is this immortal, unchanging being? Is he God, or a god? Is he an angel of some sort, created by God in his image, in the same way that man and woman would be so many years later?

What was his function back then? We see that he's dressed as he always is. What tiny mammals did he skin to create that fur-trim on his coat, I wonder, and how many did it take to do it? What type of skin was used to create the leather of his boots and belt? And did he invent eye-glasses? Apparently so. Perhaps Santa Claus was some sort of Promethean figure, a semi-divine go-between that brought culture to humanity, millions upon millions of years after he was around, tying various species of dinosaurs to his sleigh.

We see too that Santa lives somewhere snowy, in a wooden house, with electric lamps and lights and a Christmas tree, as well as a phonagram and wrapping paper and bells. So many piece of modern technology, created and employed by Santa long before mammals had crawled out from under the shadows of the dinosaurs that ruled the Earth!

I am not entirely sure pine trees existed at this point, although I am 100% definitely sure that Christmas–from the Old English words for "Christ" and "mass"–didn't exist yet. Hell, Christ didn't exist yet! Well, he did according to the Gospel of John–"In the beginning there was the Word, and the World was with God, and the Word was God"–but whatever your personal beliefs regarding the divinity of the man named Jesus who was revered as the Christ and put the Christ in Christianity, he didn't walk the Earth until the so-called Common Era. We used to divide time by when Jesus came onto the scene–Before Christ and Anno Domini, "The Year of Our Lord"–and clearly Christ wasn't around 65 million years B.C.

And remember, what did Santa Claus use these dinosaurs for? Why, to pull his sleigh of course. And why did he need his sleigh pulled? To deliver presents. But to whom? There are no human beings seen in the illustrations, although there is an intriguing spread showing a pair of Apatosaurus delivering gifts, one of them to a cave built high in a cliff wall and decorated with a mail box, Christmas tree, wreath, Christmas lights and a lamp. Did humans live within, or some other sort of Christmas-celebrating, gift-appreciating creature, perhaps of the same nature as Santa himself?

So many questions.

The bulk of Pallotta's story consists of Santa telling the little girl–and through her the reader–all of the various types of dinosaurs he had attempted to pull his sleigh over the years, each of which proved problematic in one fashion or another: The Pterosaurs (which aren't dinosaurs, I know) flew too high, the Velocirapters wouldn't stop fidgeting and slashing at one another, the Triceratops were too slow.

There is no element of danger in Santa's dealings with the dinosaurs, although Pallotta and McWilliam occasionally suggest it, only to then immediately deflate that suggestion, when dealing with large predators. The Giganotosaurus was too fast and the Tyrannosaurus rexes wouldn't stop licking Santa, like over-sized dogs...tasting him, perhaps?

By book's end, Santa has adopted the reindeer, although it doesn't seem to be simply because they are ideal for his purposes: "Today the dinosaurs are gone," Santa says. Gone from his gift-giving operation, or extinct? Perhaps just the former, as Santa does say he sometimes misses the good old days, and McWilliam's last picture is of Santa and many of the 14 different types of dinosaurs (or 13 plus Pterosaurs, if you insist) all peeking in the sleeping little girl's window with him.

Seems like an okay holiday book for little kids who are interested in dinosaurs. Provided the little kids in question aren't the type to ask about evolution or theology or cultural history while reading or being read to, of course.

Fall Ball (Henry Holt; 2013): This book is by Peter McCarty, the author/illustrator of a few books I've read and really loved, like Jeremy Draws a Monster, The Monster Returns and Henry In Love, plus a few other books I have never read.

There's not much to it. Some kids ride the bus home from school, they all play football for a page or two until dark, and then they all get called home. One of them, Bobby, eats a piece of pie and then watches football on TV with his parents.

And, um, that's the whole story.

It's certainly not as strong as the three other McCarty books I mentioned, and its main pleasure is in McCarty's design work and and line work. His children are all somewhat football shaped themselves; big, half-oval, egg-like heads the size of their bodies tapering into tiny little legs and tinier still feet. They've got blank, dot eyes and little noses and mouths, and little arms ending in littler hands, which seem to be in a constant state of flailing.

In fact, the children themselves all seem to float and fall like leaves throughout the book. Sometimes literally, as when the school bus goes over a hill and they seem to achieve some kind of zero G state, or when they play football or run through a giant pile of leaves.

I really like McCarty's delicate little lines, applied in a technique that looks a bit like pointilism, only with lines instead of points, as well as his use of color, with the children and many other figures all having a sort of essential, core whiteness, like that of the page, and then color is applied around the edges of them and of their accessories.

The dog, Sparky, is maybe the best example of this, as he's a white, dog-shaped blob with lines all around his edges and extremities suggesting fur and three dimensions, the only color inside those lines being on his eyes and nose.

This is by far my least favorite of McCarty's books that I've read, but even then it's a lot of fun to look at, so good is his art.

Green Lizards Vs. Red Rectangles (Scholastic; 2015): This weird-looking picture book is the work of writer/artist Steve Antony of Please, Mr. Panda fame. I was immediately attracted by the absurd title, which makes the central conflict of Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book seem entirely reasonable. I mean, the green lizards are clearly sentient--the one on the cover has even put up his dukes so as to fight a red rectangle--but the red rectangles aren't, like, anthropomorphic red rectangles. They are literally just red rectangles.

"The GREEN LIZARDS and the RED RECTANGLES were at war," Antony begins his story, over an image of a bunch of little green lizards packed tightly together in a long formation, facing off against a group of red rectangles in some sort of strange battle alignment.

It was a stand-off, as the Red Rectangles were smart (a scene of the Green Lizards toppling a huge rectangle shows other rectangles arranged as dominoes, so that the last of them will fall upon the lizards from behind), but the Green Lizards were strong.

What are they fighting for? That's what a little green lizard asks at one point, only to get squashed by a big red rectangle. The fighting goes one and one until someone declares "Enough is enough," and they decide to live together in peace, via solution which explains why Antony chose rectangles as the enemies of these lizards. The colors are for contrast, of course, and while the straight, sharp lines and angles of the rectangles are in stark contrast to the wiggly, round lines of the lizards, it's the way in which a symbiotic relationship is formed that offers the real explanation.

I won't spoil it here, but it's clever and cute. It's a pretty simple idea, really, and Antony has that one idea upon which to power the whole book, but it's a strong enough idea to bear the weight. Additionally, this is the sort of story that could really only be told in this particular format--that of the picture book--which is generally a good indication of a picture book's quality.

The Happiest Book Ever! (Hyperion; 2016): Hooray, a Bob Shea book! This offering from one of my favorite kids book's authors is a fairly meta one. The cover is covered in happy things, that Shea takes an extra step further to make even happier. So, for example, there's not just cake, but dancing cake. The sun shining in the the sky? It has a new haircut and snazzy glasses. That giraffe with two ice cream cones? One is for you? (This pattern repeats inside as well; there's a cute whale, for example, but it's not just any whale, it's "a whale with good news".)

Inside, each spread features a simple face, the face of the book, on the right-hand page. It's made simply of two large dot eyes, a smaller dot nose, and a brad, red, curvy smiling pair of lips. Beneath this face, runs the book's dialogue: "Whaddya say we make this the HAPPIEST BOOK EVER?...Let's meet some of my happy, happy friends!"

On the first spread, the left page, the one facing "the book," is a blank field of black. On the next, as the book begins introducing friends, they will appear on the left page, beginning with a frog, which is just a black and white photograph of a frog, and the dancing cake seen on the cover.

The book is a little disappointed that the frog doesn't seem happier, and keeps introducing more and more happy friends, like "a Flyin' Lion" (a lion that flies, obviously) or "Waffle Turtle and syrup!" (A turtle whose body is a waffle). Book gradually gets irritated with frog's apparent lack of happiness and calls on the reader to help, asking them to tell the frog some frog jokes (available in the back) or to shake the book. Eventually, the book loses its shit, and causes the frog to leave, which annoys all the happy friends, who are significantly less happy. Can the reader, and The Book, set things right? Probably!

It's an overall cute idea, with lot of cute little throwaway gags that come in the form of happy friends, all drawn with a dashed-off sincerity that make them look almost sketch-like. The way Shea controls these incidental characters' reactions to the book and The Book are pretty damn impressive as well. Highly recommended.

Henry Hyena, Why Won't You Laugh? (Aladdin; 2015): Writer Doug Jantzen's presents a sing-songy story told in rhyming couplets about a little hyena who has stopped doing what hyenas are best known for: Constantly laughing.

It starts:

A funny thing happened today at the zoo. Young Henry Hyena began to feel blue.

Now this kind of thing is really quite rare for hyenas always laugh without care.

Jantzen's story continues, telling us of all the things hyenas laugh at, which essentially amounts to every other animal that lives in the zoo. Sometimes they laugh at the simple misfortunes of the other animals, sometimes they laugh at their own pranks pulled at the expense of the other animals and sometimes they just laugh at the way the other animals look or act.

If you study the artwork, by Jean Claude, you can see that a hyena that stops laughing at them probably isn't of very great concern to the other animals. The monkey looks pretty pissed at the hyenas, the storks look embarrassed and Claude fills in some visual gags demonstrating the hyenas' treatment of other animals, even when the words don't point it out, like one image of a hyena holding out his hand to keep a joey wearing boxing gloves at bay while it tries to take a swing at him.

Henry consults the doctor, Dr. Long, who is a giraffe–because Jantzen apparently then needed a word to rhyme with "laugh"–and appears to serve as the zoo therapist. Henry lays on the sort of chair you only see in therapists' offices in film comedies and New Yorker cartoons (I've been to a few therapists, a few psychologists and one psychiatrist, and none of them had one of those sweet reclining bed chair thingees, which might explain why I was never completely cured).

It quickly becomes clear that the reason Henry isn't laughing is that Henry, unlike his peers, isn't a huge asshole. (Or, as Dr. Long puts it, "It's not that you're sick, and you're far from a fool. You've just learned that laughing at others is cruel.") That is the moral of the story.

So Henry puts on a tie and delivers a presentation to his fellow hyenas, and suggest they maybe stop being such assholes. In the following sequence, we see the hyenas playing nicely with the other animals, being helpful and even helping atone from some of their earlier pranks (by knitting the llama a new pair of socks, after they cut holes in its previous pair of pairs).

"Being nice was really the best way to play" is a fine moral for a children's book, although I was a little unconvinced by the ending, which naturally necessitates Henry laughing again, as we are told only that "Young Henry joined in and smiled with delight as all of the animals joked throughout the night. They had so much fun and before it was through, Henry's laugh was the loudest of all at the zoo."

I guess I'd need to hear these animal jokes to see if they were really funny or not, but while it might be nice to knit socks and deliver muffins to your neighbors, it's not really funny, is it?

Claude's art is really quite nice, and was the main reason I picked the book up and brought it home...the initial hook, however, being to learn the answer to the question in the title.

The animals are all generally rather plump, with highly expressive little faces that pretty clearly convey their emotions, be they sad or happy ones. Look at the frowning face of the slightly potato-shaped Henry on the cover; that's one heartbreaking illustration of an unhappy hyena.

Given their proportions, most of Claude's animals look like toy stuffed animals, and thus are perfectly depicted for the youngest of readers. The colors are quite bright and often unlikely in their appearances. While there may be a lot of blacks, browns and yellows in the coloration of many of the animals, the plants, backgrounds and objects are full of brilliant purples, blues, greens, reds and complex colors that lean closer to pastels than primaries. Even some of the animals boast unnatural but bright and candy-like coloring, like the purple and lavender llama and the bright turquoise elephant.

I Really Like Slop! (Hyperion; 2015): It has apparently been a rather long time since I've done one of these posts, as I usually do them just infrequently enough that a new Mo Willems Elephant & Piggie book shows up in each installment. But this time, there are three Elephant & Piggie books, and this is the first of them, alphabetically speaking (Next is I Will Take A Nap!, which do not cover here. It is, predictably, very good though, and contains a neat twist).

By my count, this is Willems' seventeen-thousandth Elephant & Piggie book, and it is here he finally addresses the subject of a pig's relationship to slop. "Eating slop is part of pig culture," Piggie explains to Gerald, when she walks by him holding a steaming bowl of neon green slop, surrounded by cartoon flies.

Like all of the books in the line, this is one long scene, brilliantly comedically acted by the two cartoon characters Willems has perfectly perfected by this point in their careers.

The two pass by one another, and Gerald reacts strongly to the very smell of slop. After an extended discussion about slop, and whether or not Gerald would like to try the foul-smelling concoction or not (Best part? When Gerald quietly asks about the flies, and Piggie responds "The flies are how you know it is ripe!" and one of flies says, in a little, balloon-less bit of font, "Yeah, man!").

When Gerald responds with a very big "NO WAY!" to the prospect of eating slop, and sees how crestfallen Piggie is, he then consents to try a very, very small taste of slop, which results in him turning colors and flopping around like a gigantic fish while Piggie doesn't even seem to notice that he looks like he has been possessed by the elephants from the nightmarish "Pink Elephants on Parade" number in Dumbo ("Do you know how I get that 'old shoe' taste? Old shoes!").

One could read a moral about trying new things into the story–it's certainly there–but beyond that, Willems' main focus seems to be once again demonstrating the affection between the two characters (How much does Gerald care about Piggie? Enough to taste slop!), and, of course, the humor of the scene, which ends with a nice, unexpected punch line.

I'll Wait, Mr. Panda (Scholastic; 2016): The old maxim that the original is always better than the sequel applies to children's picture books with greater certitude than it does feature films. It can be so difficult to come up with a winning hit book that when an author does just that, they will often (too often) attempt to replicate that success by turning their book into a series. Some concepts can handle a sequel or two or three, but more often than not, the original premise just isn't sustainable. If you have spent much time around picture books, I'm sure you can think of plenty of examples of sequels or series that work and sequels or series that do not (for a good example of a series that does within this very post, check out We Found A Hat below).

Steve Antony's I'll Wait, Mr. Panda, which follows 2014's Please, Mr. Panda, is, I am afraid, an example of a sequel that just doesn't work, even though it does retain many of the pleasures of the original. That original, you remember, was about a big, fat, grumpy looking panda bear who wandered around with a box of doughnuts, wearing a little paper hat with the word "Doughnuts" on it in script, offering a doughnut to various animals, all of which were, like him, black and white in their coloration. When they would answer in the affirmative, he would refuse them all, saying he had changed his mind. When the final animal, a ring-tailed lemur, says "please," Mr. Panda awards him all of the doughnuts–you see, he was just waiting for an animal polite enough to say "Yes, please" rather than just some variation of "Yes" or "I'll take one."

Based then on what we know, what is the premise of I'll Wait, Mr. Panda? That patience, like politeness, is a virtue seems to be a good guess.

In this book, Antony's gigantic, giant Panda is now wearing a tiny little chef's hat and a brightly-colored apron, decorated with the very sorts of brightly-colored doughnuts he was trying to give away in the previous book. In his massive paws he holds a wooden spoon and a bowl. On the first spread, he is approached by a particularly fuzzy looking alpaca (or is it a vicuna, perhaps? Or a llama?) and asked, "What are you making, Mr. Panda?"

"Wait and see," Mr. Panda replies. "It's a surprise."

The alpaca says it will not wait, and leaves. Meanwhile, a tiny little penguin, with a yellow beak, appears and says the title of the book quietly.

And that is the basic pattern. A different animal appears–a giant anteater in the company of some ants, a bunch of white bunny rabbits, a crane-like bird–and asks or guesses what Mr. Panda might be making and, when he tells them they must wait because it is a surprise, they haughtily say something negative about waiting and leave.

Only the penguin continues to wait and, like the lemur who was rewarded in the original, the penguin earns the surprise: A gigantic doughnut that is even bigger than Mr. Panda, covered with chocolate frosting and massive sprinkles, each about the size of the penguin's own beak. Mr. Panda walks away, and the penguin rolls his prize away, hopefully to share with a few dozen other penguins, as there is no way he will be able to eat it before it goes stale.

I have questions, beyond how Mr. Panda made such a big doughnut and where he acquired such huge sprinkles. My main question though is why on earth Mr. Panda, who we know from Please, Mr. Panda, doesn't even like doughnuts, would devote himself to making a doughnut of any kind, let alone a giant one, and why he has an apron decorated with doughnuts if, again, he doesn't like doughnuts.

Antony's artwork is again excellent, and his Mr. Panda design itself is funny, but this sequel lacks the mysterious, suspenseful tension of the original–in which a reader couldn't tell why Mr. Panda was wandering around offering doughnuts and then rescinding his offer. Here the only suspense is in regards to what Mr. Panda was making, and he himself states that it is as a surprise that the characters (and reader) must wait to learn. That's neither as organic nor as intense as trying to make sense of his strange behavior in the original.

Great art, though.

Monster & Son (Chronicle Books; 2016): I found writer David LaRochelle's words to be fairly uninteresting, although they are necessary in order to provide something on which illustrator Joey Chou can hang his images of famous monsters and their sons. Those words are presented in rhyming couplets, one line per two-page spread, beginning with "You woke me with a monstrous roar, my brave and fearless on, / and led the way that filled our day with rough and rowdy fun." LaRochelle takes us through a day in the life of a father and son, as they spend the entire day together, with a dozen more lines.

Each line runs over a long, rectangular, horizontal image of a famous monster and the monsters son or, in the case of the Wolfman, sons. A few monsters fall into fairly generic types, like the four-eyed monsters with tails who have sheets draped over them as they hide in your closet making noises, or a pair of skeletons playing catch with the father's rib bone in the graveyard, or the sea serpents or bigfoot/sasquatches (note the father eating the poor campers' rear tire as if it were a large doughnut).

Most appear to be taken directly from movies: You see King Kong and son on the cover, and there are appearances by Godzilla, Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. There are some large snow monsters playing in the Arctic, with the inward curved horns of a Star Wars Wampa, the vampire is of the distinct variety popularized by Bela Lugosi's portrayal in the 1931 Dracula, and there are even a pair of cyclops' with the distinct singular horn and goat legs of the one Ray Harryhausen made for 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (the pair are shown watching a trio of flying saucers descend on the city, perhaps an allusion to Harryhausen's Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers), and then there's the dragon, which looks exactly like the one Maleficent transforms to at the climax of 1959's Sleeping Beauty and is engaged in fiery battle with a knight who looks remarkably like the one from the same film, while a blonde princess in a pink dress looks angrily on from the tower (There is, of course, a "son" here, a smaller dragon with the same basic design hovering around in the background, and now I realize that perhaps this isn't the story of a day in the life of a father and son, but simply a parent and son. While many of the monsters are unequivocally male, most are more ambiguous, and this particular dragon is obviously female).

Beyond the fun of seeing Chou translate all of these famous monsters into his flat, blocky, cartoony, design-heavy style, my favorite part of the book is probably the human reactions tot he monsters. As the focus is on the monsters, they always look to be happy or at least content, clearly enjoying themselves. There are plenty of humans visible in many images though, and they generally look pretty pissed-off. The princess has a finger raised while waiting in the tower to be saved from the laughing dragons, and while I imagine she's meant to be wagging her index finger in a scolding gesture, it's not hard to imagine she's flicking everyone off.

The bigfoot have treed a few campers, who have the downward sloping diagonal lines of angry eyebrows above their dot eyes, the same expression on the faces of the poor people whose boats are swamped by the gamboling sea serpents. Less frequently occurring are looks of fear, like that of the helicopter pilot The Son of Kong seems to be using as a sort of improvised teddy bear.

I'd highly recommend this one to any monster fans, even if only to flip-through.

Tek: The Modern Cave Boy (Little, Brown and Company; 2016): The best part of this book is by far its format, cover and overall design. That may sound like a backhanded compliment regarding the content, created by Mutts' Patrick McDonnell, but it is not intended to. The format and design are pretty brilliant, while the story itself is not that great.

The cover image posted above won't properly convey the degree to which the book is designed to resemble a tablet, so if you find yourself in a library or bookstore in the near future, I'd suggest you look for this book if only to hold it and look it over. It's designed to resemble a tablet, complete with a fake button in the center along the bottom, and extremely thick covers to give it the size, shape and feel of a tablet. Additionally, the edges of all the pages are black, so if you were holding the book from any angle, it would look like a fake tablet.

I have honestly never read a picture book (or, um, anything) on a tablet, so I'm not entirely sure how well this replicates that experience, but I imagine pretty well. Open the cover, and your'e presented with a password similar to that on Apple devices. A few pages intimating the experience of navigating through a device in, the story begins, each page featuring a block of large text in a little white box, and a picture in a box below it, the art McDonnell's familiar, slightly scratchy inklines, here colored with watercolor. Along the top you'll see a battery icon and another letting you know the book is connected to Wi-Fi.

Neat gag, all around.

The story is that of Tek, a cave boy who lived "Once upon a time, way, way back, a long time ago, or maybe yesterday."

Tek stays in his room in his cave all day, playing with his electronic devices: His phone, his tablet and his game box.

"You should have never invented the Internet," Tek's mom grunts to Tek's dad.

I guess this is supposed to be a central gag to the book, that a cave boy is obsessed with modern technology that didn't even exist when I or Patrick McDonnell were his age, let alone in prehistoric times. I can sort of almost see how this tension could be a source of humor, but I didn't get it. The tension of setting and conflict never struck me as particularly funny, and I probably spent as much time asking myself stupid questions (Where did Tek get his tech? Why is he the only one who uses any of it?) and trying to figure out what McDonnell was going for than I did appreciating any aspect of that tension.

All of the jokes that did land with me were basically just McDonnell drawing funny faces on his characters, or sight gags like a fish evolving into a saber-toothed house cat in a single image (Or perhaps it is five different animals, all instantaneously evolving in rapid succession, as they march out of the water, single-file...?)

Also complicating things, these cave people co-exist with dinosaurs, which, five years ago I would have thought was all in good fun, but given what I now know about how many people seem to think human beings and dinosaurs did co-exist, it actually alarms me a little when I see stories about this sort of thing, even when they are clearly light-hearted and meant either as fantasy or jest.

So Tek won't leave the cave or peel his eyes from his screens, and he's missing out on stuff, like hanging out with his friend Larry, a gigantic bipedal alligator with a basketball. Finally, a nearby volcano named Big Poppa solves the problem by erupting, sending Tek, his cave and his devices flying into the air...and away from each other.

The format then changes, as Tek is disconnected, and then resembles that of a traditional story book, losing the look of a faux tablet. Tek, you will not be surprised to learn, sees how awesome the outside world is and all the awesome stuff in it, and he gains a new appreciation for all the stuff he had been ignoring. He leaves his gadgets behind to embrace a gadget-less lifestyle of playing basketball with giant alligators and looking at the stars.

It's a treat to see McDonnell draw dinosaurs, mammoths and cave-people, particularly the vaguely Alley Oop-faced title character, but there's little to the story beyond a simple "electronic devices are bad" message, despite how effective the format, the art and a few of the gags are (I liked the use of the emoticons, for example, or the names Tek gives the dinosaurs whose real names he never bothered to learn).

(Another thing I thought about while reading this? Roger Corman's 1958 Teenage Caveman, starring a young Robert Vaughan**. The twist of that movie is that while it appears to be set back in caveman times, it is actually set in the far-flung future, after we destroyed our world in a nuclear war or whatever and history essentially re-set itself. I didn't spoil that for you, did I? It was featured in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, so I just assumed you had already seen it at least a half-dozen times. If you haven't, don't; it's terrible. The movie. Not the MST3K episode, which is obviously the best way to watch it. Anyway, I imagined that perhaps Tek and his family lived in the post-apocalyptic future, after President Trump*** initiated a nuclear war with North Korea and China for saying mean things about him, and history started over, only Tek had found a secret cache of early 21st century gadgetry.)

The Thank You Book (Hyperion; 2016): It is my understanding that this 25th entry into Mo Willems' Elephant & Piggie library is the last Elephant & Piggie book, and given how fast and with such regularity that Willems has put out these books, that seems a little hard to believe. That said, this certainly reads like their last book.

The very simple plot is that Piggie and Gerald are sitting contentedly together one day, and Piggie, thinking about how much she has to be thankful for, decides and immediately announces that she will thank "Everyone who is important to me!" A surprised Gerald is doubtful she will be able to pull it off, and insists that she will forget someone.

The bulk of the longer-than-usual book then finds Piggie thanking every single character who has appeared in any of the previous 24 books, no matter how minor, with Gerald following along, continually reminding her that she's going to forget someone. Among those who get thanks is Willems' Pigeon, who Piggie thanks for never giving up, and who she apologizes to, "I am sorry you do not get to be in our books." The Pigeon makes eye contact with the reader while shaking Piggie's hand, and says "That's what you think" (He does, after all, appear in the end pages of most of the books, as if he snuck in and tried to hide).

Gerald is right; Piggie does forget to thank someone. Two someones, in fact, and the most important someones.

It's not the strongest of the books by far, although the pay-offs are both effective. But then, it's more of a victory lap of an installment, and it made me immediately want to re-read all the others, so I could place which characters appeared in which books, as not all of them are as memorable as, say, the snake (Can I Play Too?) or the whale (A Big Guy Took My Ball).

Thank You and Good Night (Little, Brown and Company; 2015): This book is another from cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, probably best known for his newspaper comic strip Mutts, which remains by far the best-drawn strip on most still-extant funny pages. McDonnell is no stranger to picture books, either–he won a Caldecott for Me...Jane–but he seems to have been gradually transitioning into the new (but comics-adjacent) media. While he's drawn almost ten picture books now, half of them have starred characters from Mutts.

Thank You and Good Night does not, but Mutts readers will recognize McDonnell's particular way of drawing people and songbirds, among other clues to the identity of the artist.

The story is a pretty simple one. Maggie, a little girl, is helping Clement, a more little still anthropomorphic rabbit, put on his pajamas. The doorbell rings, and a tiny elephant and tiny bear, also in pajamas are there: These are Clement's friends, Jean and Alan Alexander. They are here for a sleepover.

The trio do various sleepover activities, usual and unusual, and eventually get ready for bed. Once they're tucked in, Maggie asks them all to name what they were thankful for, and, of course, they have a lot to be thankful for. When she too climbs into bed, the life-like little animals have reverted into stuffed animals, suggesting the entire book was Maggie's play with her three little stuffed animal friends.

It's pretty darling, and the naming of things they are thankful for is prayer-like without being a prayer; you'd have to ask a particularly devout parent, but I thought it did a nice job of being religious or spiritual without doing so overtly; that section is offered in the spirit of prayer, if the animals don't exactly recite a verbal prayer, if that makes sense.

And, of course, it's McDonnell, so the art work is perfect. It's all perfectly chosen and seemingly-dashed off lines and soft watercolors, applied not to the cats and dogs that are his usual subjects, but the little animals that look as human as they do animalistic. The story is cute, but nothing momentous. But the art? The art couldn't be better.

Tooth Fairy (Child's Play; 1985): Audrey Wood's book about the Tooth Fairy is probably the most terrifying Tooth Fairy story I've ever experienced in any media, far scarier than dumb old Darkness Falls (the 2003 horror film starring Emma Caufield of Beverly Hills, 90210...although I suppose you guys all know her better from Buffy, huh?).

Writer/illustrator Audrey Wood uses a very comic book-inspired sort of lay out, with each page functioning as a panel, and some of the pages divided into actual panels. The dialogue appears beneath each picture, with the context being all that is used to clue readers in to who is doing the talking; there are no quotation marks or saids.

Brother and sister Matthew and Jessica are getting ready for bed when Matthew's loose tooth falls out. His mother comes in and tells him about the Tooth Fairy, who flies around every night with "her basket of goodies" and, if you put your tooth under your pillow, "she will swap it for some treasure."

I only ever got coins, maybe some dollars. Certainly no "treasure." But "treasure," according to the illustration, seems to be mean "toys," varying from marbles and balloons to dice and dolls. Also, fruit. And a unicorn figurine made from a busted, leaky mold, based on how rough that unicorn looks.

Jessica is jealous, and so concocts a plan to score her own treasure. She takes a kernel of corn, paints it white and puts it under her pillow, and then stuff gets pretty fucked up. In the middle of the night, the children find themselves shrunken down to a tiny size, dwarfed by their teddy bears, which now look like they are several stories high compared to the diminutive children.

The tooth fairy appears and whisks the children away to "the Tooth Fairy's Palace."

It is horrifying.

"Bridges, walls, towers, all made of teeth," she explains. "Every night, we Tooth Elves build a little more."

That's right, it is a city composed entirely of human teeth. Matthew's tooth doesn't go into the building material, but is placed on a pedestal in the Hall of Perfect Teeth.

Jessica's, which has some yellow showing through, is taken to The Tooth Dungeons, wear smiling yellow robots have whole wheel barrows full of human teeth, and are busily cleaning imperfect teeth with a vat of boiling green acid (?), a conveyor belt and tooth brushes as big as themselves.

Jessica's faux tooth is thrown into the vat, and an alarm is set off. The robots' smiles disappear, their eyes turn red and they turn on Jessica: "Your tooth is fake. We must put you in jail."

They pursue the children and the Tooth Fairy, who apparently has no control over these automatons, with their arms outstretched and grasping. The visitors escape, and the children slide down a slide also made entirely out of human teeth and wake up safe and sound and full-sized in their bed.

Matthew has earned treasure, an apple, a peppermint stick, a ball, a toy car and a yellow blob, and he offers to share with Jessica.

The nightmare of a castle built of teeth and scary robots is over. For now!

Woods' art is fairly rough and amateurish, but seemingly constructed that way on purpose. It is an affected style, rather than a lack of talent. I didn't care for the designs at all, which seemed very much of their era, and the humans all looked kind of off and weird to me. Everything else is pretty much pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel.

The book comes with a song on the inside front cover, and some dialogue in a play-like lay-out between Matthew and Jessica on the back cover.

We Found A Hat (Candlewick Press; 2016): Jon Klassen returns to the subject matter he is best known for, animals and their powerful desires to wear hats, with We Found A Hat, which follows I Want My Hat Back and This Is Not My Hat and makes Klassen's stories of animals and hats into a trilogy.

While the first two hat books dealt with the theft of hats and were resolved violently through what was likely murder and/or predation (off-page, of course), this one is much more morally complex, despite being told as always with Klassen's short, almost abrupt, but perfectly communicated lines of dialogue and being the story of two turtles who find a hat.

The book opens with the two turtles, nearly identical save for the designs of their shells, on either side of a white cowboy hat. "We found a hat," they say. "We found it together." They take turns trying on the hat, and decide it looks good on both of them (It doesn't though, which is one of the effective jokes of the book; it, being a human hat, doesn't fit them at all, and just covers their heads completely.

"But there is only one hat," they say, "And there are two of us."

And so you see the dilemma.

While the turtles, who talk to one another as well as to the reader, decide that the only thing to do is leave the hat where they found it, and forget that it even exists, one of them has a harder time of letting it go than the other–and the other knows its companion well enough to know what is in its mind, despite what it might say. How can the pair resolve the desire to wear the hat? Must one betray its fellow?

Sure, I guess they could take turns wearing the hat, although that's too simple, and the idea isn't ever broached. It's not a very funny solution, after all. And I suppose I should note that neither turtle kills the other, perhaps because unlike the conflicts in Klassen's other two animals and hats books, these two are both of the same species, rather than having a predator/prey relationship with one another.

I will only say that the solution is as surprising as it is funny, and that this book is just as good as Klassen's previous two, even if it is a more complex one, broken into chapters, even. As in those previous stories, much of the humor comes from the deadpan performances of the animal characters, and Klassen's incredible ability to demonstrate dramatic shifts in emotion by a simple movement of the pupil, or slight change in the shape of the eye.

Visually, Klassen's a master storyteller, and the hat trilogy is a masterpiece.



*A publisher you may understandably want to threaten to boycott if they really do follow through with their recently announced plans to reward an Internet troll so troll-ish he was banned from Twitter with a quarter-million dollar book deal.

**Woah. Did you know that Larry Clark of Kids fame also made a movie entitled "Teenage Caveman," and that it was written by comic book writer Christos Gage? I didn't! It doesn't appear to be a remake, at least not based on what little I just gleaned from IMDb, but I'll see if I can track it down and let you know for sure later.

***That joke was written before November. It's not really funny any longer.