This is not (quite) a graphic novel: Bossy Bear

Writer/artist David Horvath's Bossy Bear (Hyperion; 2007) is unquestionably a children's picture book, but it's one of those that is somewhat near the border to comics. Most of the words are in prose, but they are very short bursts of words, floating above the images. The dialogue, what little of it there is, appears in comic book-style dialogue balloons. And while the pages aren't broken into panels, if we accept each page as a panel unto itself, well, this could very easily be considered a comic.

Either way, it's pretty awesome, even for those of us who long ago learned that no one likes someone who's too bossy, and that we should share stuff with others.

This is how the book opens,

with a LOLcats like, Internet meme-friendly declaration. I've cropped the image, but only the field of mustard yellow that serves as a background. Most of the images in the book are exactly this bold: A bright-colored character given weight and dimension only by a shadow, standing in a big rectangle of color. Sometimes there are other characters or objects, and sometimes space is hinted at by backgrounds or the size of figures, but more often than not its just a simple character on a color, Horvath's "camera" zooming in or out to add drama occasionally.

If something about Bossy Bear looks a bit familiar, that's because Horvath is the co-creator of Uglydolls (along with his wife Sun-Min Kim), and these characters share the same designs sensibility, although they all tend to be recognizable animals instead of cute "ugly" monsters.

But back to the story: Bossy Bear is bossy, as his crown and ermine-lined cape probably clued you in on. "He likes things his way all the time," page two tells us, and page three adds "Bossy Bear spends his day telling others what to do."

The following pages show Bossy Bear interacting with the world, telling a variety of blank-faced, stupid looking animals to clean his room and give him things, yelling at a snail to crawl faster, demanding everything from Santa, etc.

About halfway through, a blank-faced, stupid-looking pig and dog ask B.B. if he wants to play with them, but leave when he gets bossy.

This leads to an existential, double-page spread, where we see Bossy Bear on the far left of a two-page field of empty gray, thinking to himself "Oh..."

Has he learned his lesson? Perhaps. (Spoiler alert!)

Soon a turtle with a red baloon comes along, and Bossy Bear demands it. To his surprise, the turtle complies, giving Bossy Bear something to think about.

"You don't think I'm bossy?" Bossy Bear asks, and the turtle responds "You are bossy...but you don't have to be."

So Bossy Bear walks off page, then returns with a present for the turtle.


It's...a crown, just like his!

The turtle puts it on and declares "Let's Go!" while he and Bossy Bear walk off the page, B.B. making eye contact with the reader.

The first time I read this, I just thought that was Bossy Bear's blank-ish, "I just learned a lesson face," but on the second and third reading (Um, it's pretty short, so three readings is, like, ten minutes time all together), it seems clear that Bossy Bear has realized that he might have just created a monster, and is, for the first time, learning what it means to be bossed around.

The moral of the story? Crowns and ermine-lined red capes look awesome, and you should totally wear them all the time.

This is not a graphic novel: James Kochalka's Squirrelly Gray

Remember a few weeks back when James Kochalka commemorated his 500-year anniversary of drawing little pictures of himself as a magical elf? At the time, I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve never reviewed any of Kochalka’s children’s books here, have I? I should do that soon; I’m sure EDILW readers are just dying to know what I thought of Kochalka’s children’s books…”

Well, I’m still waiting on the copy of Johnny Boo: The Best Little Ghost in the World I reserved from the Columbus public library (Hurry up and read faster, little kids; don’t you know grown men are waiting on you?!), but I’ve read, re-read and re-re-read Kochalka’s 2007 book Squirrelly Gray, so let’s start with that.


As you can clearly judge by the cover, Squirrelly Gray (Random House) is a rather adorable book. Of course, it’s a Kochalka book, and everything he draws is pretty cute, even when it’s just a bunch of super-powered teenagers trying to get high, or Kochalka himself arguing with his wife. This is a kids book, so it’s likely going to be even cuter.

The cover introduces us to some of the major players: S.G. himself, the Tooth Fairy, a Hungry Fox (with adorable overbite, saw-like teeth, and giant cat eyes) and a Magic Acorn. Awesome.

Now, there are some problems with the book, despite the predictable super-cute Kochalka art, and the familiar, comfortable Kochalka lettering.

This isn’t quite a graphic novel/sequential art/comics, but it’s not quite a picture book either; it’s one of those weird hybrids. On the left hand side of each two-page spread, there’s a page of pure text, and on the right there’s either a full-page illustration or, more often, a grid of panels, telling a scene of the story in comics form.

The problem is, the comics almost always repeat what has just been described in the words, so that there’s a strange and shifting overlap in narrative; sometimes the comics portion repeats it exactly, sometimes it repeats it differently, sometimes it contains new information alluded to in the text portions but not communicated in them outright. (It occurs to me that maybe this is merely a symptom of this being a book for little kids who are being read to; they can maybe make their way through the comics sections on their own, while their parent or reader tackles the blocks of texts on the left).

The other problem is that the text is all told in rhyme and it’s usually pretty lame. Again, little ones might not be as sensitive to shitty poetry as adults are, but I found myself wincing and groaning my way through passages like “Squirrelly gray, he bravely tried/ His very squirrelly best./ He Freed the little fairy while/ His heart thumped in his chest.”

These storytelling choices of Kochalka’s aside though, the story itself is pretty good. It’s a kind of animal fable about how color came into the world.

Once everything was gray, and out protagonist was a cute little squirrel who “spent his time in bed,/ Just watching static on TV,/ Quite bored out of his head.”

(I think Squirrelly Gray was suffering from depression, actually).

He takes to wiggling his teeth and, eventually, he wiggles them so much that they pop right out of his head. So he puts them under his pillow for the tooth fairy.

He’s awoken by a scream outside, gets his little squirrel-sized flashlight, and rushes out to see who needs help. It’s the tooth fairy, and she’s stuck in a spider’s web. He helps her out, and, for a reward, she gives him a magic acorn. There’s a surprise inside, she says.

This excites Squirrelly Gray, and there’s a neat panel of him frolicking with the acorn (“I always wanted a magic nut,” he says, happily punching it in one panel), until he realizes he can’t open it without his teeth. Irony!

Eventually the Hungry Fox comes along and asks what’s bugging S.G., and he has an idea for helping him crack the acorn open:

That part cracked me up: The fact that the fox has a club collection. Fox swings the club, intending to brain Squirrelly, but instead he hits the nut, which cracks it open, and out pours a rainbow.

Suddenly, the book is no longer black and white, but full-color. And, for some entirely random reason, the fairy nut’s magic power turned the fox’s club into a flower, which brings us to my second favorite page:

I love the panel of the fox being all confused. You even feel bad for the guy; I mean, why should his club turn into a flower. How does that make any sense?

His crushing depression healed, Squirrelly Gray runs off to play, skipping over a hill top while wearing the cap of the acorn like a little beret.

“And that is why the world we know/ Is colorful and bright./ We all have one young squirrel to thank/ For turning on the light!”

This Is Not A Graphic Novel...But It Could Be If It Wanted: Tao Nyeu's Wonder Bear

So this is the story of Wonder Bear (Dial Books), a new children’s picture book by Los Angeles-based artist Tao Nyeu:

These two little kids—one boy and one girl—climb up a hill and, once on top, plant a little garden. Based on the signs they stick in their garden, they’ve planted two rows of watermelon and a single hat plant.

Then it’s nighttime and they go to be in the bed that is suddenly by the garden. And the hat plant grows at a jack and the beanstalk rate, exploding into beautiful giant flowers. Out of one of those flowers crawls something wearing a hat like the one on the sign. It’s a bear! A giant white bear, probably a polar bear, with huge claws! It bows politely, and then holds its giant hat out to the children, and they peer inside (see cover image above). Is he going to eat them?

No, he’s apparently doing a magic trick. But instead of a rabbit, he pulls out fifteen monkeys, which look more like circus peanuts with pipe cleaner arms, legs and tails than actual monkeys. The monkeys form a giant cheerleader pyramid, and the bear shoots the children out of a cannon!

And then he blows some giant bubbles, bubbles in the shape of life-sized lions! These chase the monkeys and eat them, and, upon eating them, turn spherical and float into the sky.

Then the bear—who has grown even larger— eats a pawful of flowers, finally laying to rest this particular reader’s fear that he’s going to kill and eat the children. Oh wait, he’s not eating the flowers, he’s chewing them up and spitting them out, and through the agency of his magical bear saliva, they’ve transformed into magical flying sea creatures, which the kids, bear and monkeys all ride in through the sky.

After flying to the moon and the ocean, they eventually return to the bed by the garden, and the bear and his magical monkey friends tuck in the little children, who have by this point fallen asleep, because that’s what happens to little kids if they try to stay up too late. Then the bear puts all the monkeys back into his hat, then, in defiance of all physics, the bear climbs into his own hat, and then the hat flies away into the night sky.

Obviously, it’s pretty cool.

This is one of those strange children’s books which isn’t a graphic novel (or graphic novella, or graphic short story), but mainly due to its presentation and declaration of itself as a children’s picture book—there’s no reason it couldn’t be a graphic novel (or graphic novella, or graphic short story) if it wanted to.

While there are no panels, there’s no prose, either. In fact, there are no words of any kind. The entire story is told through the pictures, and each page—or two-page spread—functions in the exact same way the panels of a comic book might, one image leading sequentially into the next.

Nyeu’s art is beautiful. I’m perhaps a little prejudiced by the fact that her subject matter includes things that I personally find delightful—a bear, several cephalopods—but the various animal character designs are all pretty darling. Each animal—and the kids—have little pin-point eyes and blank faces that somehow still seem very expressive. Her bear looks at least half teddy-bear, more like a toy bear than a real bear, and, as I mentioned, her monkeys look more like an artist or craft-maker’s mental image of a monkey more so than a representational monkey.

Her overall art design (the patterns she uses to construct the pages and objects within the pages) and color schemes hit a sharp tone of nostalgia, reminding me of nursery wall paper, curtains, doll dress patterns, and the inside covers of books that I encountered when I was a little kid. Someone with a stronger grasp of American design history could name her influences; all I can say is that the orange, blue, green and white art looks a lot like my childhood, and seems more of the ‘60s and ‘70s than the ‘80s, ‘90s or ‘00s.

In a word, Wonder Bear is—are you ready for this obvious play on words which would make for the perfect critic’s blurb on the back of future editions?—wonderful. Ha ha ha!

You can read the book at Nyeu’s homepage, along with several other stories (I particularly liked “Laundry”). Be sure to check out the “Single Images” gallery too. Some of them are cute, and some of them are extremely weird, like image number 7, “The Roundup.” (Man, what is that image all about?)

Some of Raymond Briggs' children's books, which are actually comics

As I mentioned yesterday, I have a review of Drawn+Quarterly’s new edition of Raymond Briggs’ Gentleman Jim over at Newsarama.com.

I rather enjoyed the book, which is pretty amusing, but I got more value out of the introduction than the story itself, as it introduced me to the work of Raymond Briggs.

Well, that’s not actually true. My first introduction to Briggs was an animated version of his The Snowman, which my little brother and I stumbled upon while flipping through television channels one winter evening. It was silent, and we thought it was hilarious, because it’s basically about a snowman breaking into this little boys house and then wrecking shit. I think at one point it steals a motorcycle? And then goes flying around with him?

Years later I saw that it was actually a children’s book, and I remember reading it and the similar The Bear and really digging them both. And then I pretty much forgot about Briggs. I certainly didn’t think of him as a comics creator or graphic novelist.

And then I read Seth’s introduction to this new edition of Gentleman Jim, and it got me thinking: Is Briggs a comics creator or is he a children’s book author? Or is he both?

Here’s Seth on Briggs:

It is remarkable that an artist could be such an innovator, so ahead of the crowd and could have produced such an impressive list of comics novels and yet still somehow be overlooked when people talk about “the graphic novel.”

Seth’s point is more of an observation about a weird occurrence rather than a tirade against a grave injustice, as it’s not like Briggs has suffered in obscurity or anything. It’s just that he doesn’t get as much credit as he should, at least not from those of us in comics.

Seth again:

It’s simply the old story of pigeonholing. He started out as a children’s book author, and the label has stuck. Will Eisner’s A Contract With God, published in 1978, is often trotted out as the first official graphic novel (ignoring the fact that it is actually a collection of short stories and not a “novel” at all). Whi is it that no one has ever noticed that Briggs’ The Snowman, which came out the same year, is actually a better candidate for the title? In fact, Briggs had two full length, self contained “graphic novels” published several years earlier: Father Christmas and Father Christmas Goes On Holiday. *

Seth goes on to theorize that perhaps it has something to do with the audience for those works of Briggs’, although, “The fact that these were written for children shouldn’t remove them from the contest.”

As I mentioned in my Newsarama review, it may have as much to do with the publisher, format and presentation as it does with the intended audiences. Since I’ve been blogging, I know I often come across children’s books that look like, are labeled as and published and sold as children’s book, but which are actually straight up comics: sequential images that tell a story in the exact same way that Batman or Maus or Astro Boy does. Sure, a lot of children’s books are in a gray area between comics and not-comics—for example, if there are no panels, but every page functions as a panel, is that comics or not?—but some are clearly comics. Although, if you didn’t know what comics were exactly, if you weren’t familiar with that medium, you might not notice that hey, this picture book is actually a comic book.

And until quite recently, there was no profit in selling a children’s book as a comic book, because “graphic novel” wasn’t even a word in the publishing industry’s lexicon in the late ‘70s. If a book had a spine and a hard cover and was sold in a bookstore rather than a drugstore, it was probably a children’s book and not a comic book, regardless of if it had panels or contained sequential art and was devoid of prose.

So suddenly curious to read (and, in a few cases, re-read) Briggs’ work to see if what he did was comics or kids books, I rounded up as many of his works as our local libraries carried, excluding quite a few in which he was simply listed as the illustrator and another writer as the author (And there are actually a lot of these; Briggs had had a hand in what I’d guess is somewhere around 17 million books during his career).

My conclusion? Hell yeah, Briggs makes comics. A lot of the time. He also makes kids’ books. And he makes some books that are hybrids between the two; mostly comics, with a few pages that are illustrated prose.

Let’s take a look at a few of them in the comics category.


Let’s start with The Snowman, because its Briggs’ signature work. As you’re probably aware, it’s the story of a little boy who makes a snowman during the day (one with a golem-like body, rather than the three big snow spheres format). When he wakes up in the middle of the night, he checks on his snowman only to discover that he’s come to life. The snowman comes in and they get up to some hijinx together.

I didn’t notice when I had read it some ten years or so ago, but now it seems like one big long dark joke. Throughout the whole thing there’s this heartwarming vibe, as the two friends play together, and on the very last page, there’s only a single, tiny panel, of the boy standing over the puddle that used to be the snowman, now melted in the sunlight. Ha! His friend is dead! Get it? Wow.

There doesn’t seem to be anything equivocal about this: This is comics/a graphic novel/sequential art/whatever you want to call it. The pages are almost all broken up into panels, save for a handful of splash pages. The story is silent, so there’s zero prose to this at all.

I just reread the publisher’s text on the flaps for the book, and it doesn’t mention comics at all. The summary on the front cover flap says “Raymond Briggs uses more than 175 subtly colored, neatly arranged picture frames to tell” his story, and the back flap says “Briggs showed illustrators a new way to expand the limits of a picture book from within.”


The Bear is from 1994, but it’s extremely similar to The Snowman, in its story and its visuals. Another ginger-haired little kid—this one a girl—receives a big white visitor into her house, and has some fun with him before he leaves.

It’s not a snowman, but a giant polar bear. Her parents don’t believe her, and think her talk of a bear in the house is simply her imagination, and so for a few days they seem to keep missing the bear until it eventually goes away.

The big difference between the two works is the words. While Snowman was silent, The Bear is not.

I suppose you could say this was a hybrid book, though. Much of it is told just like Snowman, with the actions occurring in panels, and there’s even dialogue bubbles.

There are a few pages that resemble illustrated prose though; splashes in which the page is dominated by one large picture, and then words are written in straight lines in a white space nearby. This usually only happens in scenes with a lot of dialogue in them.


Now let’s jump way back to 1973 for Father Christmas, Briggs' book about the guy we call Santa Claus here in America.

This one is comics all the way; there’s no ambiguity about it at all. The images are all in panels, there are multiple panels per page, and the only words that aren’t in dialogue bubbles are the words “Father Christmas” across the top of the first page.

This book is also hilarious. It’s probably my favorite Briggs book, in part because the lines and colors are all so bold and solid, unlike his Snowman and Bear, with their soft lines and colors, and in part because it’s just really funny.

Father Christmas doesn’t live in a magical wonderland with a Mrs. and a cadre of elves suchlike; he seems to be an old bachelor who lives alone with his cat and dog. And man, he doesn’t even seem to be all that into Christmas.

He wakes up pissed, and we follow him through his longest day in great detail (his morning chores, his breakfast, getting ready for the day, making his rounds, et cetera). He swears at the weather, the snow, the winter, chimney, aerials, cats, stairs and soot. He sees he’s left a bottle of coke at one stop and says, “Hm, better than nothing I suppose;” when he opens his own presents at night, he complains about the blooming terrible tie and socks he’s given.

In other words, Santa’s pretty much just a cranky old man. He’s not totally bitter all day; he’s nice to his pets, and smiles quite a bit and enjoys some of the things he’s given (well, the alcohol only, actually) and sings a Christmas carol while showering, but he’s not the maniacally jolly caricature we’re used to. This is Father Christmas’ job after all, and Briggs has him relate to it the way pretty much everyone relates to their own jobs.

Here’s the very first page:


Here’s Santa leaving the house (I love the panel of the dog looking out the window):


And here’s the very last page, as Santa calls it a night:


(There’s also a panel of Father Christmas on the toilet with his pajama pants pulled down, a piece of toilet paper in his hand as he scowls at the toilet paper roll and shouts “I hate winter!” to it, but I lost the scan I made of that page, unfortunately. Oh, hey, someone else posted it on their blog already).

There’s a sequel to this book, mentioned in the quoted passage from Seth above, but I couldn’t find it; I wonder if it’s even in print anymore, as the copy of this book I got from a library had an “Out of Print” sticker affixed to the front, apparently to warn librarians not to discard it.

Interestingly, the comic Father Christmas reminds me of the most is Seth’s own Clyde Fans Book 1, or at least the first part of it. Both feature old men going about their days in minute detail; in Clyde Fans the old man is talking to the reader about the titular business and salesmanship, while the old man in Father Christmas is just muttering to himself and pets about shit.




Another of Briggs’ funnier books is Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age. It is about a boy named Ug and his search for soft trousers (“trousers” is a much funnier word than “pants,” although I’m not entirely sure why that is).

Here’s the first page:


Life really sucks in the Stone Age, as you can see. The folks back then lived a lot like us, but were missing a lot of the things that make modern life less sucky.

As you can see, they sleep on beds under blankets, but the beds are stone, as are the pillows and blankets. And they word pants, but they were stone pants.

Ug’s a dreamer though, and wishes he had soft trousers; he dad tries to talk him out of it, but Ug is always looking at life and wishing it could be different.

For example, his mother serves him bits of dead animals for breakfast, and he wishes they could have something different, like hot dead animal bits.

The kids play soccer, baseball and tennis with rocks, which isn’t as much fun; Ug wishes they had something that could bounce to play with.

He thinks about boating, the wheel, fire, animal agriculture, building houses to live in instead of caves, but his mother is hardly supportive: She thinks he’s slowly going insane, and keeps yelling at him (and his henpecked father) about all these crazy ideas.

Ultimately, nothing comes of them, but he and his father come awfully close at the end:

That last panel is so heartbreaking, isn’t it? They’re almost there, they just need someone to invent sewing and they’ve got it. That's actually the second to-last-page, above. This one also had a darkly amusing ending, but not nearly as dark as The Snowman.

One of the running gags in the book is all the anachronisms in it; the characters refer to increments of time like the week, minute or lunch, and Briggs dutifully explains them with footnotes:


This book is also unequivocally a comic book.




The most recent Briggs book I could find was 2004’s The Puddleman, which is a bit of a hybrid comic/picture book, along the lines of The Bear. Most of it is told with panels and dialogue bubbles, but there’s a page or two in which the large amounts of dialogue are presented as prose floating in white space above the characters.

The title character is an old man in a raincoat who carries puddles on his back and delivers them to the holes where one would find puddles. The little boy who stars in the story meets the puddleman while on a walk with his grandfather, although not until his grandfather gets distracted by a neighbor and the boy rounds the corner to talk puddles with the puddleman.

While the puddleman gives the book its name and makes for the most magical event in the book, the story is really about the relationship between the inquisitive, rambunctious little boy and his somewhat put-upon grandfather.

It’s a rather sweet little story, and one I imagine anyone who’s spent much time around a little kid would find sweeter.




The final book I read was When The Wind Blows, a 1982 book that blew me away. Seth refers to it in his Gentleman Jim introduction (it stars the Jim and Hilda Bloggs characters that are in Gentleman Jim). “Certainly his lasting importance is alone assured by the critical attention he received for When The Wind Blows…the book is almost universally recognized as one of the most touching and powerful treatments of nuclear war.”

And yet that didn’t really prepare me for the book at all. By the time I was finished, I was downright shocked that I had never heard of it—or Briggs in terms of a graphic novelist—before. Why wasn’t this mentioned in the same breath as Watchmen, Maus and The Dark Knight Returns, the holy trinity of transformative works that people are always citing as the tectonic shift in the comics medium?

Like all three of those books, When The Wind Blows is a deceptively mature** work that addresses the major anxiety of its day, captures the zeitgeist of its era, and deal with some of the same subject matter as those other three works.

If you haven’t read it, I highly suggest you look for it at your local library. It’s definitely a comic/graphic novel; it’s all panels.

Most of the action concerns the Bloggs; retired Jim and his stay-at-home wife Hilda, and is set at their home in the English countryside. Neither is very political or even interested in world politics; he goes to the library to read about current events, but seems to retain very little, while she isn’t interested at all.

That doesn’t mean they’re exempt from nuclear war though. When a man on the radio warns that the Cold War is about to get hot, Jim goes about preparing their home for a nuclear attack, following the guidelines in a pamphlet he got at the library, with Hilda barely understanding what’s going on.

The first half of the book is downright comical, as the Bloggs are very much like naïve, grown-up children (something played for laughs in Gentleman Jim). In fact, there was a great deal of suspense about whether there would be a war, because a nuclear missile going off at some point just seemed so dissonant from the tone Briggs establishes around the Bloggs household.

The pages are jam-packed with little panels—20 to 30 per page, more often than not—but would occasionally give way to a double page splash, of a dark missile or a dark submarine, and a caption like “Meanwhile, on a distant plain…” or “Meanwhile, in a distant ocean…” slowly building suspense.

At the risk of spoiling it if you haven’t read it, the bomb goes off (in an incredible sequence, involving an all-white flash on a double-page spread, one that temporarily destroys the comics grid on the following pages, and we watch as the sequence of panels gradually return to normal after being bathed in hot white light and shaken violently.

From there, the rest of the book is the Bloggs coping with what’s going on, trying to keep a stiff upper lip and encourage one another, and it is just heartbreaking stuff. Neither seems to know what’s going on exactly, not even recognizing the onset of deadly radiation poisoning (or refusing to recognize it), and throughout the entire narrative they keep comparing the Cold War (and the threat of nuclear war) to the World War they lived through, which has become completely romanticized by the early ‘80s in their minds. They also keep forgetting to say “Ruskie,” but keep slipping back to talk of “The Jerries.”

We all know, at least in an abstract sense, than all wars inevitably cost the lives of innocent civilians, but it’s one thing to know that as a faceless fact, and quite another to see innocent civilians caught up in a conflict they don’t understand, know anything about, or particularly care about. Briggs doesn’t really delve into things like who shot first or why, and the Bloggs are totally out of it; they don’t even know who their prime minister is, or what’s going on with the Russians and the Americans at the time. And yet they still have to pay the same price as those that do.

Reading this last week was a strange experience, because I haven’t really thought about horrifying the prospect of nuclear war—something I used to actively worry about as a little kid—actually is for so long, and I actually felt a bit of relief reading this; a “Whew, well at least that’s over.”

But then I thought about the fact that, nuclear conflict or not, there were probably thousands of people like the Bloggs in Iraq, people that were completely ignorant of their government and that of the United States and the powers in the region and whatever conflicts the rest of the world might have with their leader, people who were more than content to live their own lives as they were. And those people got destroyed anyway.

And now it’s Tuesday night as I type this, and between reading When The Wind Blows and thinking about the Cold War and our current hot wars, Russia and Georgia have gone to war, and the Cold War seems less over than it did last week.

So, if you haven’t, read When The Wind Blows. It will make you feel horrible, which is as good a testament to how effective a work it is as anything else.



*Here I should note that if Contract With God should be disqualified from being called a “graphic novel” simply because it’s a collection of short stories instead of a novel, so should all three of these Briggs works, as they are more “graphic short stories” or, perhaps if one’s generous, “graphic novellas.” But little good ever comes out of arguments over what to call these damn things we read; “graphic novel” is what the most people call them, and language is ultimately democratic. The mob says “graphic novel,” and the mob rules.


**I am allowed to call a Frank Miller book “mature” without losing all my comics blogger cred right? To clarify, I mean mature as in dealing with subject matter beyond what people off the street might expect, be it a Batman comic book that has child-molester Joker breaking his own neck and Batman and Superman beating each other to death, or a book about cartoon mice that is actually about the holocaust.

Weekly Haul: Memorial Day Week Special

It’s Wednesday evening as I write this, and usually that means I’m getting ready to post reviews of this week’s new comics releases. But because of the Monday Memorial Day holiday here in the states, new comics day was pushed back a day.

So I decided I’d review a haul of something other than comics this Wednesday—children’s picture books, which, like comics, rely on both words and pictures to tell a story. Unlike the comics reviews you usually read in the Weekly Hauls, this isn’t a haul of books I’ve personally purchased (they’re all library borrows), nor did they all get released this week. Some of these are indeed new-ish, but at least one is a couple years old.


The Lonesome Puppy (Chronicle Books) by Yoshitomo Nara Japanese fine artist Nara’s artwork will no doubt be familiar, even if you can’t place exactly where you’ve seen in before. Those of you who run in geek circles (and I’m assuming if you’re reading this, that’d be you) are probably familiar with it from Giant Robot magazine covers and coverage, and various products bearing Nara’s distinctive sense of character design.

This is Nara’s first children’s book, and it’s a beautiful looking one, with the individual paintings each looking more like the sort one would find in a gallery than illustrating a storybook. The format is that of a picture book—single images with prose text floating over or around them—but passages of it read like comics, if you take each full page to represent a panel. There are also several occasions where a single image acts like a piece of sequential art, with multiple images of the same little girl in different positions, implying movement.

It’s strongly enough told through the art that, even if you took out all the words, the story would be the same and very clear, although the moral might be more implied than blunt.

As for that story, it’s told by the lonesome puppy in the title. He is “all alone and lonesome,” and “always hoping for someone, somewhere to be my friend.”

The reason for this loneliness? He is very big. Very, very, very big. Like, you know Clifford the Big Red Dog? He’d be the size of one of this puppy’s fleas.

Well, exactly how big the lonesome puppy actually is is a little unclear. When he first shows us how big he is, his back paws are in Asia and his forepaws in North America. He’s big enough that you can see the curvature of the earth below him, and he would be easily visible from space. He seems somewhat smaller later, when a little girl is able to climb him, and she seems to be only slightly smaller than his nose.

At any rate, he’s too big for anyone to notice him. At least until one day, when a girl notices his back paw. She climbs up it until she reaches his back, then walks to his head, tumbles down the slope of his forehead, and crashes into the big, red nose at the end of his snout. They are equally surprised by one another, but quickly became friends. “Friends forever,” actually; “Though sometimes they fought, as friends do, they still had fun and played together.”

Then here’s the little moral of the story, which I must confess I found quite touching: “No matter how alone you are, there is always someone, somewhere, waiting to meet you. Just look and you will find them!”

Though written as if to address children, it really does sound like a message that a little kid wouldn’t need to hear in the same way an adolescent or grown-up might, as (most) children young enough to be reading picture books—or have them read to them—have family around them most of the time (or, at least, I hope they do).

It’s a really rather romantic story: Freakish, lonely creature no one seems to notice is finally noticed by a girl, and they become friends forever, and the creature finally finds happiness and companionship. It really sounds like a teenager finding their first love as much as it sounds like a giant puppy finding a human to notice it, doesn’t it?



Mr. Monkey’s Classroom (Harper Collins) by Jiwon Oh Here’s another children’s picture book that sensitive adults should steer clear of when feeling blue, as it’s potentially tear-inducing. It’s about two friends/housemates named Cat and Mouse who are a cat and a mouse, respectively. Mouse’s first day of school is coming up, and Cat, who’s already started school, helps her little friend get ready for the big day. But once they get there, Mouse is heartbroken to find Cat immediately begins to ignore him and start hanging out with the other, older kids she knew from last year. Mouse, meanwhile, is having a hard time adjusting to the stress of school, and it culminates in a little breakdown during lunch period, when Cat sits with her school friends and not Mouse.

It all ends happily, but Oh so perfectly captures the emotions of being a little kid in a strange new environment that reading it was a little like having one of those stressful dreams where you’re still in school and you, like forgot an assignment or something.

It’s hard to get a real sense of Oh’s artwork from seeing pictures of it online, as she uses a lot of little collage elements with vastly different textures to give the whole world of hers a very craft-like, hand-made feel. The buttons on the characters’ clothes and, in some cases, their eyes, look like photos of real buttons, and certain fabrics or objects look like scans or photos of real fabric; although the characters are clearly 2D drawings.

That world is one that looks like a sort of pan-Asian fantasy land assembled from bits of pieces of eastern design, with the white, Sanrio-proportioned cat in front of backgrounds of mountains, trees, temples and cranes that seem like they could be from a Japanese woodprint or a Chinese tapestry (Oh is Korean).

This is actually her second book featuring the characters. In 2003 Harper Collins published Cat & Mouse: A Delicious Tale. Oh’s design sensibility was similar—if anything, the previous book seemed more Asian in its visual themes, backgrounds and costuming—but the technique seemed much simpler, with the collage elements used more sparingly (and the influence of computers standing out more).

In this story, Cat and Mouse are best friends who live together, and do everything together. They are quite happy until one day Cat’s old friend Monkey came to visit here, and gave her a cookbook called “World’s Best Cookbook,” which made her realize “Mouse could be the most delicious meal in the world.” (A two-page spread shows Mouse picturing all the different ways her sleeping friend Mouse could be made into a dish, and Oh draws all these treats with mouse ears and/or tails sticking out of them. One shows the sleeping mouse encased in a green Jell-O mold, another has him on a plate, tucked under a piece of thinly sliced meat as if he were tucked into bed beneath a comforter, and so on.

With the thought in her head, she couldn’t help but get hunger every time she saw Mouse, so she moved far away to resist, doing things like meditating atop a mountain and under a waterfall and fasting until she became sick.

Mouse, meanwhile, looks for her, finds her, and drags her back home to nurse her back to health. They have a talk and, later, when playing at the beach, Cat thinks, “Mouse does look delicious, but how could I have thought of eating him? He’s my best friend.”

I’d highly recommend either of these books; they are both very visually rich, with a lot of little background characters and details for kids to pore over while waiting for whoever’s reading to them to finish the sentence and turn the page. But I’m not a parent or teacher or anything, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about: I just think these are nice-looking books that I enjoyed reading.



The Pigeon Wants a Puppy (Hyperion) by Mo Willems The original pigeon book, 2003’s Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. No lie, I laughed all the way through that thing, and read it over and over the first night I spent with it. The absurd situation—Why does the pigeon want to drive the bus? Why does the bus driver ask us to stop him from driving the bus? Why does the pigeon ask us to let him?—alone is such a random conflict, and Willems’ pigeon design is so perfect, looking hastily crayon drawn and fully-realized at the same time. I am literally in awe of how much emotion he gets out of the pigeon’s expressions, seeing how little he actually has to work with. Basically, just the pigeon’s eyes and wing gestures.

Well, this is the new pigeon book. Once again, the pigeon has a particular desire, as he has had in all the other pigeon books (not counting the board books for the littlest readers), and he spends the entire book pleading his case, until the twist ending. Like all of Willems’ pigeon books, it’s really well designed, and the art is brilliant. But this one’s not really all that good.

It might just be that the pigeon asking for stuff is getting a little old, or it could be the fact that the interactive nature of the book isn’t as formal as in the bus book. In that one, the driver specifically asks the reader not to let the pigeon do something, setting them into the conversation, so that every phrase the pigeon utters is directed at the reader, and with a turn of the page, he responds to the “no” answer that Willem intuits his audience will give.

I haven’t, like, focus-grouped this or anything, and only personally know one little kid who has read any pigeon books/had them read to her, and she loved it even more than me. The thing that she liked was yelling at the pigeon; when her mother would read what the pigeon said, the little girl would shout “No!” at the pigeon, while laughing at it.

In Bus, I got the impression that I was in the city, minding my own business, and got put in this extremely awkward position by first a random busdriver, and then a talking pigeon. Here, when the pigeon starts trying to convince me that he should have a puppy, I’m confused as to why he’ talking to me about it, or what he wants me to do about it exactly. Do I look like a puppy salesman or something?

So—not the best pigeon book. But it is still a pigeon book, and I could hang out with Willems’ pigeon (or his elephant and piggie) all day, every day, I think.

Given the simple formula of these things now—pigeon wants something, campaigns vigorously for it—I don’t understand why Willems doesn’t just crank one of these out every two weeks or so. I’d read ‘em. For more on the pigeon, you can check out his home page here. Also, Willems’ blog is a neat source of art, both by him and by children.



Woolvs in the Sitee (Boyd Mills Press/Front Street) by Margaret Wild and Anne Spudvilas Well, this book certainly could have benefited from a more skilled copy editor looking the text over before it went to print. Pretty much every word is spelled wrong, even “wolves” and “city” right there in the title! Okay, I’m just kidding; writer Wild did that on purpose. Her protagonist is a youngish boy named Ben, who writes the whole short book in that mostly-phonetic manner. He seems to live alone in a filthy basement, occasionally visiting his neighbor lady for clean water. He is very concerned about the “woolvs in the sitee,” and she isn’t; until one day she disappears and, fearing the woolvs got her, he prepares to go after her.

What the holy hell is going on here? I don’t know, but that too, seems to be intentional. The hints in Ben’s text indicate that the situation he’s now living in is rather recent, that he used to have a family, that the skies used to be blue and there weren’t always wolves to fear. It’s kind of an implied post-apocalyptic story, and I kept waiting for a resolution of some kind, where this would all be revealed to be a metaphor for some war or drug abuse or something, but it never comes.

This is basically an unnerving, distressing fucked-up book for teenagers and adults that simply looks and reads like a children’s picture book. I didn’t at all care for Spudvilas’ art; it’s fine and she’s competent, but it strikes a strange balance between creepy atmospherics and representational illustration that seems at odds with the misspelled, hand-scribbled looking text. The words look as if they are part of a document Ben himself has created and the reader is looking at, while the pictures look like the work of a professional illustrator.

This Is Not A Graphic Novel: Japan Ai

Aimee Major Steinberger is a huge geek.

She’s a professional animator and a writer for Haute Doll Magazine whose interests include cosplay, anime, videogames, comics and ball-jointed dolls created by the Japanese company VOLKS, a type of doll she created one of the first English language websites devoted to.

She’s also six feet tall, which is taller than your average American woman and, in Japan, is tall enough to be considered gargantuan.

The amount of love she has for the various elements of Japan’s nerd cultures and the amount of distance between her scalp and toes accounts for the title of her hybrid cartoon/prose carnet de voyage, Japan Ai: A Tall Girl’s Adventures in Japan.

The book isn’t really a graphic novel, and it’s one of those peculiar types of books that gives sticklers like me such a hard time, because it’s not clearly one thing or another.

Some pages do look like they came from a graphic novel. Some pages are broken up into border-less, sequential images, with assumed, natural panels. Others are mostly prose with a little bit of illustration thrown in. Others are filled with maps or diagrams. Some are simply a single drawing with a caption, drawn in the loose, manga-inspired, half-chibi cartoon style that dominates Steinerger’s book. Others are more serious, representational drawings.


(Above: A comics style page, and an illustrated prose style page)

Publisher Go Comi! is apparently targeting the manga audience with the book, based on the digest-like format of it (Japan Ai will look perfectly naturally on a shelf dominated by manga), which is probably smart; manga fans are certainly the audience most likely to appreciate this.

Reading the book is a bit like having a visitor come to your house to show you photos of their recent vacation. Only instead of photos, they’ve got a bit stack of drawings, most of them in a pretty adorable style.

Steinberger introduces herself and her travel companions to the readers, and gives us the set-up: She’s going to Japan, home of VOLKS, to interview the people at the company, and is turning the trip into an excuse for “the ultimate otaku vacation” with her equally geeky gal pals.


Their trip is a mixture of touristy things (often with a geeky bent; a trip to the Tokyo Tower brings a mention to Magic Knight Rayearth, a visit to the shrines uses Sailor Mars as a touchstone to explain Miko).


They shop for cute things and clothes, they enjoy the local cuisine, they visit hot springs, they visit a photo studio that dresses them up as geisha, they laugh their way through theme cafes, they go to a kereoke bar, and visit Harajuku.

It’s all an awful lot of fun to read, but the parts I enjoyed the most were those that dealt with Japanese geek cultures I have no experience with at all.

For example, this crazy Takarazuka Revue scene? All-female stage musicals dealing with tragic romances? This looked downright fascinating from the outside looking in, as did the whole VOLKS/ball-joint doll scene.


After her interview and tour, Steinberger walks us through a VOLKS Omukae Ceremony, which she describes as “a doll adoption,” but is pretty elaborate. The person getting the doll sits in a chair at one end of a red carpet, while a guy in a robe with a book says that the company hopes “your doll will bring you peace for the rest of your life together.” The doll is laid out in a coffin-looking box covered with flowers and surrounded by candles and back-lit gauze.

At the climax of the ceremony, the down owner blows out a candle right in front of the doll, which blows life into it, and then everyone claps.

The book ends with a huge glossary of terms and lists of where to get practical information when planning a trip to Japan. Reading Steinberger’s drawing and hand-written account isn’t exactly the same as going, nor is it the next best thing, but it makes for a pretty cool way to hear about someone else going.

(Above: For all the cool things in Japan, for some reason it was during this page that I really, really felt a stab of "Wow, I've gotta get to Japan STAT!" That's how much I like coffee and doughnuts. And is Mister Donut's Japanese mascot a little lion with a crueller for a mane? Fantastic.)

You can read more about Japan Ai, and see plenty of Steinberger’s outtakes, journal entries and photos here.

More Polo

Like Régis Faller’s previous Polo book, Polo: The Runaway Book (Roaring Book Press; 2005) doesn’t purport to be a graphic novel at all, but rather a rather standard children’s picture book. But it too is a work of sequential art, with page-sized single images and border-less, panel-filled pages abutting one another sequentially to tell a story.

Is being a graphic novel something a work has to explicitly declare? Because Faller’s Polo books aren’t labeled as comics, despite the fact that they quite clearly are, make them somehow not-comics? Is not-comics the default setting for all books, even those told in sequential art form, unless the book or publisher or author says otherwise?

I don’t know; I’m asking. These books certainly meet all of my criteria for what constitutes that medium that we sometimes call “graphic novels” or “comics” or “sequential art.” But the fact that this isn’t labeled as any of those points toward a weakness in those terms.

It’s only 80 pages long, has only two instances of dialogue, and is full of big, colorful, square pages—not what you think of when you think of “graphic novel.”

It’s bound, has a hard cover and a spine—not what you think of when you think “comics.”

And I don’t know if anyone ever thinks of the word “sequential art,” except Scott McCloud and people who have read his books thinking and talking about the term.

Well, whatever you call this thing, it features Polo, the dog with the bottomless backpack, back for another round of whimsical, dangerous, morally questionable adventures, with some more great art by Faller and some more fantastical settings and surreal sight gags.

Faller seems to have refined his Polo design quite a bit, as our pup protagonist now looks slightly slimmer and more elongated (surely something his readership in the recommended 4-8 age group will note immediately), and the colors are a lot warmer this time out, with more reds and complex shades than all the blues and primaries employed in the original.

Also, there are words. You see the cover up there, with Polo shouting, “My Book!”? Well, he does so twice within the book too, and it seems weird to me…like when Wile E. Coyote or the Pink Panther or Tom the cat (from Tom and Jerry) would talk.

Things open rather cinematically, with a anthropomorphic rabbit in a dress visiting a bookstore shaped like a tea-pot. There’ slitle stock there, just fifteen books, but she picks one out and has it gift-wrapped. The shopkeep is a frog. A female frog. You can tell she’s female because she has breasts. Even though she’s an amphibian. Maybe if she were a mammal, it wouldn’t seem so odd.

Also, the frog is much larger than the rabbit. This is something about Polo’s universe I just can’t get used to—the random assignation of size among species. But wait, it gets worse. After she buys the book, the rabbit goes outside and gives it to a pelican, which is even smaller than her, and totally naked. See, in Polo’s universe some animals walk upright and wear clothes, while others behave as they do in our universe.

These scenes are rendered in just four colors—red, white, black and yellow. The panels are small squares, in the middle of the pages, with lots of open space around them, and the pages themselves are red, rather than white. The panels all have borders drawn around them too, whereas most Polo panels have imaginary borders created by the place where the color of the panel meets the white of the space around it.

The pelican flies day and night to get to Polo’s little island, where it opens its beak and Polo pulls out the gift-wrapped book. That takes us to the title page. So, like, if this were a movie, that would have been the stuff that happens before the title sequence.

After the title page, we return to the expected look of a Polo book, in terms of the colors of the images, the pages and the nature of the panel borders.

Polo, who sleeps in his clothes, is reading his book in his bed at night. He clicks off his light and goes to sleep. A rope descends outside his open window, and in slides one of those little glowing moon people from the previous volume. It reads a page of the book, laughs aloud, and takes off with the book. Prompting Polo to utter his first words: “My book!”

Good thing he sleeps in his clothes. He grabs his backpack and scrambles up the rope. He’s thousands of feet in the air before the rope is cut, and is sure to plunge to his death. If not for a cotton candy cloud, which breaks his fall.

The cotton candy cloud houses a hall of mirrors, and Polo sees that the moon creature is inside one of those mirrors. He follows him in, and, on the other side of the mirror, is a vast white, infinite, horizon-less infinity.

Polo chases his quarry past a penguin knitting a scarf, and a bit of yarn entangles the moon creature’s leg, and, as it runs, the yarn line forms a landscape which Polo and the Penguin run over. At one point, they encounter a small castle with a door, and decide to enter.

But it’s alive! And it eats them!


What is going on?!

Polo decides they should eat a candlelight dinner, as long as they’re trapped in a sentient castle made out of yarn and nothingness.

He serves his new friend raw fish, while he himself has a drumstick.

I know penguins and chickens aren’t the same, taxonomically speaking, but I do believe its rather bad form to eat poultry when dining with a bird of any kind.

The penguin doesn’t seem revolted to see Polo prepared to eat a relative of its, however. It doesn’t come to that, however, due to Polo’s taste in pepper:

After the strange yarn-and-nothingness castle spits them out, the pair fall through a cloud and land on a dirigible being piloted by a giant rooster, who is the exact same size as the penguin, and larger than Polo.


A heart appears over the heads of the rooster and the penguin. Does this mean they are in love? Perhaps. Note how happy Polo is to see the rooster. Considering that he was just about to eat a chicken leg, and may, in fact, have more roast chicken in his backpack at this very moment, this is a terribly disturbing scene.

The added weight proves too much for the pedal-powered air-ship, and it sinks into the sea. The rooster and Polo stand upon the penguin’s back, and using a bit of the popped-balloon as a sail, they eventually make their way to an island.

I think something’s up with that rooster and penguin. Check it out:



Well, whatever it is, I’m sure they—


Oh come on, they just met! And they're already sleeping together!

The next morning, the trio explore the island until Polo finds a stairway. He heads straight up it, but the birds, being cowards stay at the bottom of the stairs and wave good by to the courageous canine.

Or perhaps they want to continue to consummate their inter-species love without third-wheel Polo around.

At the top of the stairway, Polo sees this:


And this reminds me of two happy memories from my youth.

It looks an awful lot like the Masters of the Universe Point Dread & Talon Fighter Playset, the first He-Man vehicle I was ever given (Sadly, I lost the Talon Fighter and the battlement stand, but I do still have the now badly-scratched record that game with it and features a little audio play about He-Man, Skeletor, Beast-Man and giant ants).



And when Polo gets in and starts flying this golden, bird-shaped ship, it reminded me of The Mysterious Cities of Gold, an awesome cartoon that used to play on Nickelodeon after school, and was one of the greatest things ever.


(Above: The opening sequence of the second greatest after-school cartoon series of all time)

God I loved that show.

But back to Polo, he’s flying around in this golden vehicle when he spots the moon man in a little hang-glider contraption, reading his book.

With typical Polo disregard for danger, our insane little friend throws himself on to the contraption, endangering both his own life and that of the little moon guy.

And for what? A book? Damn, that must be one hell of a good book, Polo.



The moon man tears a page out of the book, folds it into a paper airplane, and then rides it away.

In another mad plan, Polo lassoes the neck of a nearby duck, which is somehow strong enough to support Polo’s weight, and tries to ride it after his book.

The duck isn’t going to have any part of that, however, and bites the rope. Once more, Polo plunges to his death.

Luckily, he left the golden bird ship on cruise control, and he lands in its cockpit. And then crashes it into a desert.

Polo wanders in the desert, finds a genie, has a feast with it, watches some scantily clad elephant women dance for his amusement and is given by the genie a magic seed that grows into a giant dandelion.

Inside the dandelion? The moon thing with the book. Man, I think that thing wants to be caught.

From there, they end up on a cloud full of cloud men. A crowd of them are congregated around a ring like those in boxing matches or professional wrestling matches. Inside two cloud men battle with clubs.

Polo breaks it up with his tuba playing:


That makes this is the only instance in recorded history of a tuba being used to accomplish something worthwhile.

With the possible exception of dotting the “i” in the Ohio State University marching band performance of “Script Ohio.”


(Above: Rabid OSU football fandom is the most irritating aspect of living in Columbus, but even I have to give it up to a marching band that can pull that off. That shit is tight)

Having wooed them away from cloud club fighting with his hot oompa sounds, Polo is ushered to meet the princess of this strange cloud world, who is a pig. She and Polo have a cloudball fight (kinda like a snowball fight, but with clouds), until Polo accidentally pastes the princess’ vulture vizier, who has Polo thrown into the tower.

The tower is made out of clouds though, so he falls through the wall and into the princess’ bed. She kisses him on the cheek (Polo, you cad! What about the female rabbit who sent you that book!) and leads him to her royal cloud car, upon which he makes his escape.

He crashes it into a floating platform of moon men, and finds the one he’s been chasing, reading the book aloud to its fellows before some giant glowing mushrooms.


Despite all the trouble the lunar thief caused for Polo, and the man times Polo risked his life and those of his compatriots, all is forgiven, so its back to Polo’s island for a boat party with all the characters from throughout the story, plus a few from the previous story and some who haven’t appeared before this page, like a panda in overalls and a red dragon in a rowboat.

The moral of the story is that it’s okay to steal, as long as it’s for a good reason, and you’re sufficiently sorry when you get caught. Or don’t sleep with the window open. Or maybe it’s “be prepared, and don’t be afraid to take insane risks.” Or just that Faller is a pretty great artist, and can draw whatever he likes.

This Is Not A Graphic Novel...Oh wait a minute, actually it is

You know the one about judging a book by its cover, right? Well, here’s a good example. From the outside, artist Regis Faller’s The Adventures of Polo (Roaring Brook Press; 2006) doesn’t much look like a graphic novel. It’s a big, colorful, 11-by-10 inch (or thereabouts), hardcover rectangle that looks like your average children’s picture book.

But inside? It’s totally what we think of when we hear or use the term “graphic novel.” The story is completely wordless, with no dialogue or narration of any kind. And while many pages are devoted to a single image,
many more are broken into panels; borderless images stacked side by side and on top of one another in comic book-format grids, with the white spaces between them forming naturally occurring gutters.

Faller’s art is great, and his designs top-notch (although something about dog-star Polo’s nose bugs the hell out of me…I don’t like the cylindrical shape of it, and the way it stands erect), and the colors are brilliant and well-chosen. There are plenty of neat little moments in the book, the plot of which is essentially simply Polo wandering around until Faller runs out of pages.

Polo lives on an island dominated by a tree house (that is, a house that is actually a tree; the page above is the first page of the book). On the second page, he puts on a back pack (which we soon find is filled with all kinds of crazy things) and an umbrella and than walks on a tightrope over the ocean. This rope becomes a line that forms stairs, than a slide and after a very circuitous route to a boat, he’s off on his adventures.

The book reminded me a lot of a side-scrolling videogame, particularly something from the old Nintendo Super Mario Bros variety, I think in part because it seems to be a cute little 2-D figure exploring locales at random, and in part because of the specific settings and objects encountered (clouds, underwater, the backs of whales, the moon, mushrooms, stars, etc).

I kind of found myself despising Polo throughout too, and it goes beyond my not liking the looks of his nose. There’s a certain irresponsibility about the character that irks me. He just goes off and gets in some pretty serious scrapes, but something always happens at the last minute to save him a justified death. Like, when he rides an asteroid into the ocean and is about to drown, for example, a pelican swoops in and picks him up in its bill. The universe seems to love Polo a little too much, and bends probability to the point of breaking to save his ass. I suppose if I were a little kid, I might not mind, but as a grown-up, I found myself getting really stressed out by Polo’s reckless actions, and angry that he never suffered for them.

Once he gets to his boat, which, in the first sign of Polo's incredible vanity, is named after Polo, the little dog sails until night time. Then he puts on his diving suit (complete with bubble helmet), and drops the ocean floor. He finds a treasure chest with a glowing star in it (above), and this he takes to a large fish wearing a crown and holding a stick. He puts the star on the fish's stick, and the fish magics him back up to his boat.

The S.S. Polo is then beached atop a whale, and Polo converts his boat into a plane, which the whale then throws up into the sky. He visits an island with a volcano, and ten an island with a monkey band, which Polo rocks out with in their tree house (which is a series of platforms on a tree). Then, in an incedible act of irresponsibility, Polo and the monkeys tie helium ballons all over the platform, causing it to rise high into the air above the island. How are you going to get down guys? You'll fall to your deaths when the helium runs out!

Heedless to this danger, Polo rides a baloon on ou of their, cheerfully waving to the doomed monkeys, who cheerfully wave back to the doomed Polo, who drifts out over the ocean on a single baloon.

But wait, Polo's got a propeller in his backpack, which he somehow attaches to his pack and propels himself with. But a huge mosquito pops his baloon, and Polo falls to his death...

But, in one of many instances of Polo's incredible luck, he lands on the water but doesn't sink. He just stands on the surface. Is Polo Jesus? No, he's just standing atop a submarine.


Even though the vessel is capained by a cat, the natural enemy of Polo's people, the cat welcomes our hero into the sube with open arms.

This leads to a pretty funny sight gag:

Well, I laughed.

Then things get really weird.

Dog and cat pool their efforts, each manning one of the two sets of pedals that power the sub. Soon they crash into an iceberg, and surface to investigate. At the top of it they find an igloo.

Who could live here, I wonder? Perhaps it's an eskimo or-


Oh shit, it's a bear!

When the bear rushes out of its igloo to defend itself and its home from the two intruders, it slips on the ice and falls into the ocean below.

Polo and his cat friend sensitively laugh at him and then Polo's all like, "Hey, let's look in his house!"


And what an odd house it is. There's nothing in it but a huge...hole in the floor?

There's barely room for the bear to sleep in the corner without falling into the hole. Tiny little Polo can barely kneel next to it and lean to look in without falling in.

And what's in the pit?


Okay now, I don't want to overthink a kids' book here or anything, but indulge me for a paragraph or so. The bear's igloo houses nothing bug a pit...in which he keeps a snowman. And that snowman does not look happy to be there. He's just sitting there staring worriedly down at his stack of ice cubes, making the same face I do when I sit down to pay bills or do my taxes. Did the bear capture him and put him down there? Did he build him down there, bring him to life, and leave him there? What's the bear planning on doing with him? Eating him? Is this like that scene from Silence of the Lambs? I really can't make heads or tails out of this situation.

Anyway, the snowman's happy to meet Polo (He puts his tophat on special just to tip it at Polo). Polo whips a chisel and hammer out of his backpack, and then quickly tunnels his way out of the iceberg. From there, he jumps to a smaller nearby iceberg, and chisels the hell out of it until its suddenly transformed into a working boat made out of ice. The cat, snowman and Polo ride on until they encounter a rope ladder. The cat and Polo scramble up it, leaving the Snowman and the ice boat. He doesn't seem to mind, and whips out a newspaper to read. (This is the third sea-going vessel Polo's abandoned in 60 pages).

The ladder leads to the moon, where they find an orb-shaped spaceship in which a little moon creature lives. It leads Polo into a crater, while the cat just, like, stays in the ship.

In the tunnel, Polo encounters a magic mushroom.

Mushrooms are awesome, kids.

The tunnel opens into a cavern full of huge glowing mushrooms and lots of little glowing moon people. They point out another magical mushroom to Polo, and, after a few adjustments, he blasts off in it, headed back towards earth.

See, mushrooms are totally awesome!

The trip was cut short by a collision with an asteroid, which sent Polo plummeting into the sea (this is where the previously mentioned pelican saves his ass).

The bird deposits Polo safely back on his island , and he promptly pulls out a book to read. What's he reading?


Why, that vain bastard...

Many of the creatures Polo encountered on his adventures return in this last panel. It looks like a happy ending. For everyone except for the polar bear, who doesn't show up. Perhaps he hit his head on an ice chunk and drowned.