The Muppets Get Spooky in the Comic Collection Muppet Mash

The Muppets seem to be everywhere these days, and one enjoyable form in which they have surfaced is the comic book. Roger Langridge has crafted several books in The Muppet Show Comic Book series, one of which is the Halloween-themed Muppet Mash. Each of the four sections is meant to be an episode of the show, and each focuses on a particular type of monster, making this a silly, spooky collection fitting for this time of year.

In Chickens of the Night, Gonzo begins displaying some very strange behavior after his trip to Transylvania. While weirdness is Gonzo’s trademark, his new choice of attire and his secretive habits begin to make his friends suspect that he has returned a vampire. Are they jumping to conclusions, or does this mark a dramatic change for Gonzo? While the main story is fun, my favorite part of this segment is Casey Was a Bat, a parody of the beloved baseball poem Casey at the Bat.

That’s a Wrap introduces a woman with an Egyptian vaudeville act. Statler and Waldorf both fall for her immediately, as she reminds them so forcefully of a performer they saw in their youth. Could she actually be that same Cleopatra wannabe? This one is a lot of fun because it’s so odd to see the crusty curmudgeons attempting to be romantic, all the while undermining each other’s efforts in that department. I also enjoyed all the Egyptian puns, many of which I only got because of the crash course in Egyptology that accompanied my LOST immersion last year.

Monster Munch finds the members of the Electric Mayhem ecstatic that the legendary blues musician Howlin’ Jack Talbot will be sitting in with them for this episode. Their enthusiasm soon fades, however, when he is unable to get through a song. Similar in some ways to the first story, it revolves around the growing suspicions that this musical hero may, in fact, be a werewolf. Will the band ever manage to complete a performance with their special guest?

Finally, The Curse of Beaker is a Frankenstein-like story in which Bunsen, never particularly concerned about the welfare of his lab assistant, orders him to place his brain inside a gigantic robot he has constructed. Beaker concocts a clever way to subvert this unpleasant plan, but will the results lead to disaster? This story integrally involves a small creature called a poob, which I don’t ever recall encountering before this book. Were these cheerful furry creatures a part of the Muppetverse all along, or did Langridge invent them? This is a fun showcase for Beaker, and it also affords the entertaining opportunity of seeing the ominous-looking Sweetums in a dress.

Each story contains a hefty dose of Muppet mayhem, and as a result, it all feels a bit chaotic. There’s an ongoing story in each, but we also get regular Muppet Show segments like Veterinarian’s Hospital and the cooking corner with the Swedish Chef. It’s a little odd to see the Muppets in this flat format, but they are just as dynamic as ever, and their expressions are wonderful. Some of them look closer to their proper versions than others, but all of them are easily identifiable. Of course, you’re not getting any audio cues, and that is particularly noticeable during the many musical numbers, but the songs included here are a lot of fun anyway.

Only one of these stories takes place on Halloween, but the creepy holiday is obviously the prevailing theme. This gives the story added seasonal appeal in the fall, but it would be just as entertaining at any other time. Muppet Mash uses horror staples but transforms them into something goofy, much like the Riddikulus charm in Harry Potter. If you have trouble laughing in the face of fear, see if these Muppets might be able to help you out.

Iconic Disney Characters Meet Classic Fantasy in Wizards of Mickey: Mouse Magic

One of the most iconic incarnations of Mickey Mouse is as the mischievous sorcerer's apprentice in the most famous segment of the film Fantasia (and the only segment repeated in Fantasia 2000). I imagine that this role served as inspiration for the Wizards of Mickey comic book series, which was compiled into graphic novel form and published by Boom! Studios. The first part of this originally Italian saga, Mouse Magic, includes four comic books written by Stefano Ambrosio, with artwork by Lorenzo Pastrovicchio, Marco Gervasio, Marco Palazzi and Alessandro Perina.

The story begins with Mickey, who once again is a sorcerer's apprentice, but this time, he works for a wizard named Nereus who seems less intimidating and has more faith in him. Nereus reminds me of Gandalf here, cantankerous but profoundly good and concerned about the well-being of the common folk. Like Gandalf, he entrusts Mickey with a magical object, asking him not to use it but to prevent others from using it. Unfortunately, brawny bullies are about, which makes Mickey's task much more trying and ultimately leads to his involvement with a much larger crisis than the drought facing his home village.

While Mickey is the main character here, classic villain Pete soon surfaces as a primary antagonist, and before too long, Mickey meets and befriends Goofy, an aspiring herbalist who distrusts magic, and Donald, whose consistently nonfunctional spells keep getting him into trouble. While Pluto does not make an appearance in Mouse Magic, that void is filled by Fafnir, a "puppy dragon" who adopted Donald and whose clumsy but lovable ways hinder the trio at times and help at others. Late in the book, we also encounter spunky sorceress Daisy, who has a prior history with Donald and is friends with pampered princess Minnie and clairvoyant Clarabelle. It seems plain that this trio of gals will soon team up with the fellas to present a united front against the forces of evil.

The mix of established and new characters works well, with several fresh faces emerging at the wizards' tournament in which Mickey and his friends end up competing. Of these, my favorites are the enormous dragons, who scoff at their "scaleless" competitors and insist that their ancient magic is far superior to any requiring a wand or a "diamagic," one of the shards of the crystal where all the magic in the land was once concentrated. The purpose of the tournament is to win the diamagics from each other so that the ultimate victor will be able to unite the crystals and become Sorcerer Supreme. Naturally, with this degree of power at stake, some competitors will be resorting to underhanded methods in an effort to emerge triumphant.

The tournament itself becomes central to the story fairly quickly, but each of the story's four parts involves time away from the tournament as well, both with Mickey and with Nereus, who is being held prisoner by an old enemy. While this is an epic adventure, there is room for some humor, particularly where Donald and Fafnir are concerned. Some of the spells that are used have some amusing effects as well. The quality of the artwork is excellent; while I find the purely white faces of Mickey and Goofy, not to mention Minnie and Clarabelle, a little strange amidst all the vibrant color surrounding them, the characters otherwise look fully themselves, and the panels are filled with intricate detail. While the story still seems a bit complex for those in early elementary school, it doesn't feel nearly as dark as Mickey Mouse and the World to Come.

Unlike other Disney graphic novels I have read, this one includes no sneak previews at the end, so it's considerably shorter than most, but I can't say for sure whether the story itself is of significantly different length. It seems about average, though, at roughly a hundred pages. That's plenty of time in which to get to know the characters and become acquainted with their world, with the promise of more installments to follow. The mouse at the heart of the Magic Kingdom could hardly be a Muggle; delve into his enchanted side with this first volume in Wizards of Mickey.

Visit Harry Potter and Many Other Fantastical Folks at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure

A couple years ago, my aunt and uncle took a trip to Florida, and while they were there, they saw advertisements for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which would be opening the following year. My aunt told me that whenever they decided to go to Florida to check out this new park, I was invited to go along. Just before my birthday this year, they announced that we were going this spring, and it was an epic vacation that included Universal and Disney World, as well as Sea World, a drive-through safari, a renaissance fair and an airboat ride through a swamp filled with alligators. But Harry was the one who propelled this particular venture for my aunt and uncle, who, unlike me, are seasoned travelers. We spent two days at Universal Studios, which was where the Wizarding World of Harry Potter was located.

Universal is divided into two parks. Our passes allowed us to visit both parks, but on our first day, we ventured only into Islands of Adventure, which includes several themed sections, of which the Harry Potter one is the newest. We also returned to this part of the park our second time through, after we had made our way through Universal's more low-key park. Islands of Adventure is jam-packed with rides, attractions and costumed characters, and you'll be hard-pressed to see everything you want to in a single day.

As it happened, our first day at Universal was St. Patrick's Day, and the park seemed to be especially packed as a result. We just made our way through in order of what was closest to the entrance, which meant that we started out with the section focusing on classic comic book characters. Marvel Super Hero Island included some pretty intense-looking rides; the only one I went on was the Spider-man ride, which simulated a ride through the city where we helped Spider-Man battle baddies and got sprinkled with water or tinged with heat from fiery explosions. While we were in this part of the park, we saw a parade of Marvel characters and snapped a few pictures. A few of them came up onto the sidewalks and posed for photos with guests.

While the Marvel world was fun, I really loved Toon Lagoon, which was filled with nifty cut-out displays of characters from comic strips ranging from Beetle Bailey to Family Circus. We spent a fair bit of time here just snapping pictures of each other next to or under the various displays. I loved the one with the cranky Shoe editor muttering, "A good editor never sleeps," and I got a kick out of the unaccompanied dialogue bubble just above head level simply stating, "I feel like there is a cloud over my head."

This part of the park included my two favorite rides, aside from the thrilling Hogwarts Castle tour. Dudley Do-Wright, the clueless Mountie, was the theme of the log flume, and we spent close to two hours waiting for Dudley Do-Wright's Ripsaw Falls, after which point we decided that the fast passes would be a good idea. The wait wasn't bad, though, because the line was filled with quirky announcements, Dudley Do-Wright cartoons and artwork. The ride itself is a log flume ride rather like the Magic Kingdom's Splash Mountain, and it tells a story using jumbo figures and dialogue and narration coming out of the speakers nearby. The basic storyline has Dudley clumsily saving the day from the nefarious Snidely Whiplash, with the result that he is celebrated by the town but still rejected by the girl of his dreams. The tale is entertaining, and the ride is tons of fun for a hot day. I rode it three times over the course of two days, and I got completely soaked each time - though the third time, I rode it later in the day than I should have, with the result that I was shivering all through dinner. You're best off getting this one out of the way well before 5:00. Same goes for Popeye and Bluto's Bilge Rat Barges, which is comparable to the white water rapids ride at Hersheypark. If the splash from going down a waterfall doesn't get you, the downpour from waterfalls above you will. Plus, you have the people up on the bridges paying to aim water at you. There's no avoiding getting drenched on this ride, though handily, there is a sealed plastic compartment in the middle in which to store your belongings, and they'll stay pretty dry as long as you put them in there. Like Ripsaw Falls, this includes several jumbo figures from the cartoon scattered throughout the ride and combined with dialogue from the speakers. It's very entertaining and refreshing.

Another ride involving a circular raft is the Jurassic Park River Adventure, the only ride I went on in that section of the park. It starts out nice and mellow, almost like the Jungle Cruise, and the gorgeous score from the movie augments the beauty of those animatronic plant-eating dinosaurs. Then you leave the sunny outdoor area and go inside, where it's dark and dire warnings about malfunctions flash and blare. This part of the ride is creepy, particularly the huge Tyrannosaurus Rex that lunges down upon you just before you go down the ride's final hill. There's a bit of a splash to this one, but it's nothing compared to the ones in Ripsaw Falls and Bilgerat Barges, and you could probably ride this one a little later in the day and not have to worry so much about getting dry. Outside of the ride, there are a number of photo spots, and we just enjoyed wandering through on our way to the wizards. The Lost Continent is around here too, and we didn't spend much time there at all the first day, but the second day we did the walk-through show Poseidon's Fury, which had some really cool special effects, not to mention a very enthusiastic human guide.

Seuss Landing is designed mostly with kids in mind, so none of the rides are that thrilling for adults, but this part of the park is incredibly visually appealing. Everywhere you look is a statue of some Seuss character, and the whole thing is eye-poppingly colorful. I took oodles of pictures in this part of the park, and it's just a joy to walk through. Whatever your favorite Seuss book is, you'll probably find it here in some form or another. The carousel is a real thing of beauty, populated as it is by all sorts of Seussish creatures, and I love the display dedicated to the Lorax and the old Onceler. We rode on the Cat in the Hat ride, which is an entertaining dark ride that takes you through the events of the book, and the trolley ride, which provides a little tour of all the Seussian attractions in the area. Kids should love this park, along with adults who appreciate whimsy.

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is an amazing sight for any Rowling fan. You get there, and it's like you have entered the wizarding village of Hogsmeade, where Hogwarts students go for occasional field trips. It's so compact that it's hard to really get a feel for how it looks without standing in the middle of it. Shops tower on all sides, some of them actually selling merchandise, others only storefronts there just for show. While the Hogwarts Express does not actually go anywhere, you can get your picture taken with the engine and stroll through the station. This park has three rides, two of which I went on, as the Dragon Challenge looked a little too twisty for me. The Flight of the Hippogriff is short, but it's an exhilarating little roller coaster, and I love the line for this ride because it includes Hagrid's hut, and you get to hear his voice booming out from the speaker. I was hoping that there would be a photo op spot with Hagrid or a character walking around, but this little area is very cool. I just wish that guests were able to actually go into the cabin.

The park has no specific characters walking around, but it is filled with witches and wizards serving as prefects. The main attraction of the park is Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, a mega-cool virtual tour of Hogwarts. You can't use express passes on this one, and the line is rather confusing. You're not allowed to bring loose articles with you, unless you can manage to stash them in your clothing. I didn't realize this until I got almost to the front of the line, and I was told to go downstairs to stash my stuff in a locker, except there wasn't a locker available. My aunt was waiting outside, so she took my purse for me and I went back and managed to get back to roughly where I had been in line before, and I ended up on the ride just a few minutes after my cousin. Still, I think the line seemed a bit disorganized. I loved looking at all of the displays inside the castle, though. Talking portraits, desks of significant characters, the Gryffindor common room... It was a definite feast for the eyes and ears. The ride itself is a three-dimensional deal that combines movement and physical displays with virtual ones. You'll get to see several major points inside the castle and out. The idea is that you're following Harry and Hermione on broomstick, and some of the angles are pretty dizzying. I'll admit I walked off this one feeling a little woozy, but it was worth it to get the sensation that I was soaring over the Quidditch pitch or swooping through the Hogwarts dungeons. Several characters from the movies make an appearance as well, so this ride really is a lot of fun.

Also inside the castle is the massive gift shop, Filch's Emporium, where you can buy t-shirts, pillows, pins, action figures and all sorts of other collectibles. One thing I didn't see there was a postcard rack; there's a separate shop for that, and while we were there, they rolled a small cart outside so that we could buy postcards from there as well and have them stamped with the Hogsmeade postmark. Filch's Emporium was the only shop we entered the first day; on the second trip, we perused Zonko's joke shop and Honeyduke's candy shop, both of which were feasts for the eyes. My park souvenirs included a Hagrid pin and Harry's wand; while we didn't brave the massive line at Ollivander's wand shop, a couple of other places sold the wands as well, with styles modeled after the wands of several major characters.

Of course, we also had to try some butterbeer, the beloved beverage that so many Harry Potter fans have longed to taste. Scattered throughout this portion of the park are several butterbeer kiosks, and they draw quite a crowd as well. The plastic souvenir mugs are both snazzy and practical, as you won't have to worry much about them breaking while you're wandering through the park. After the first one, though, you can get it in disposable cups instead the mugs and pay less. The drink itself is a sort of mix of cream soda with butterscotch foam, and it's very refreshing on a hot Florida day. Pumpkin juice, another prominent Harry Potter drink, is available too, but we didn't try that, nor did we eat at the Three Broomsticks, the park's restaurant. Just as the pair of Mickey Mouse ears was my one essential purchase at Disney World, the butterbeer was my Must Buy at Universal, and it was worth the anticipation. Speaking of souvenirs, I highly recommend bringing a couple rolls of quarters and pennies so you can use the pressed penny machines located at many points throughout the park. These are very inexpensive but fun collectibles, and it can be a sort of treasure hunt to track as many down as you can. I think I returned from Florida with more than 30 from the different places we went to, and I would have had more if I'd thought to bring quarters ahead of time.

All in all, Universal's Islands of Adventure is an amazing place to spend the day. It's crowded and pricey, but the rides, characters, shops and general extravagance of the themes presented in as much vibrant detail as possible make it a thrilling stop for Harry Potter fans and fun-lovers of all ages.

Monsters, Inc.: Laugh Factory Generates Giggles and Intrigue Aplenty

Each of the Disney Pixar films has been outstanding in its own way, but for sheer sweetness and inventiveness, it’s hard to beat Monsters, Inc., so I was thrilled to find Monsters, Inc.: Laugh Factory, a BOOM Kids! graphic novel published in 2010. About a hundred pages long, this book was written by Paul Benjamin with artwork by Amy Mebberson and other contributions from Troy Peteri, Aaron Sparrow and Erika Terriquez. It includes four interconnected “chapters,” each of which requires protagonists James “Sulley” Sullivan, the jumbo-sized furry blue monster now running the company that supplies Monstropolis with energy, and Mike Wazowski, his one-eyed, wise-cracking best friend, to crack a mystery. Boo, the adorable toddler with whom Sulley shares a special friendship, has a hand in each tale, as does Celia, Mike’s snake-haired girlfriend.

One nice thing about this collection is that each story is fairly long, which allows for a more leisurely panel pace. I never had trouble jumping from one panel to the next as I sometimes did when reading Uncle Scrooge in DuckTales: Messes Become Successes. The pictures and the words tell the whole story every step of the way. What’s more, there is continuity in the storyline. We’re not just seeing four tales that happen to take place in Monstropolis; each follows the other logically. The last story does a particularly good job of tying the first three together.

Another great element of this book is the humor. I caught myself laughing several times while reading it. That’s partly because Mike keeps cracking corny jokes and partly because Boo is so cute she gives me the giggles, but really, it’s just a very lighthearted book with plenty of wit. Comical side characters include Roz, the ornery slug monster who oversees the Child Detection Agency; Mrs. Nesbit, a well-to-do tentacle creature with a jittery disposition; and George, an insecure fuzzy orange factory worker who is slightly smaller than Sulley.

Part of the humor comes from the allusions to other Pixar movies. For the most part, these show up in the form of posters, toys and furniture in the rooms of the children whose rooms the monsters enter in their quest to collect laughter from them. Boo’s room is a particularly rich source of references. Once I spotted the first couple of nods, I began searching for them deliberately, and that added to the entertainment value of the book. Each of them made me smile, but my favorite is when we see Sulley sitting in Boo’s room, reading her the Little Golden Book version of Finding Nemo. Additionally, two other Pixar characters play a fairly significant role, making this book more entertaining for those who are pretty familiar with Pixar.

Each of the four stories is a mini-mystery. In the first, gag props go missing, and since Mike is the top laugh gatherer at the factory, he becomes the prime suspect and must clear his name. In the second, Sulley has to figure out why all of the kids they’ve been visiting lately have been too terrified to laugh. The third deals with a sudden rash of toy disappearances among the kids on the monsters’ routes, and the final tale brings the villains from the previous stories together to kidnap Mike and Sulley, leaving Celia and Boo to do most of the sleuthing themselves. Though there are a couple of scary moments, the situation never feels too dire, and the humor is definitely kid-friendly.

Aside from the four chapters, this book includes a collection of covers and a page dedicated to a spotlight on the CDA. It surprised me not to see advertisements for other comic books and graphic novels, which I’ve encountered in other books from BOOM Kids!; this makes the book a bit leaner than most. However, I would not say that it detracts from it. Laugh Factory is an endearing book that follows logically after Monsters, Inc. and easily lives up to its name.

Of Mice and Men and Global Domination: Mickey Mouse and the World to Come

I have missed out on a lot of interesting Disney stories because I am not a comic book reader. I’ve been trying to amend that somewhat by scouring my library’s collection of Disney graphic novels. As nearly all of them seem to have been published within the last two years, I’m missing out on anything earlier, but it’s a good way to start, anyway. One intriguing book my search turned up was Mickey Mouse and the World to Come, a futuristic graphic novel whose main story was written and drawn by Casty and whose secondary tale was written by Alberto Savini and Abramo Leghziel. Other contributors include translators David Gerstein, Jonathan Gray, Francesco Spreafico and Stefania Bronzoni, letterers Deron Bennett and Johnny Lowe, designer Erika Terriquez, editor Christopher Meyer and assistant editor Christopher Burns.

In the main tale, which is broken up into four sections but really is just one very long story, Minnie and Mickey Mouse are separately kidnapped and caught up in a sinister plot with global implications. While Minne remains in the custody of the villainous Rhyming Man – so named for his habit of speaking only in rhyme – Mickey soon connects with his old friend Eega Beeva, a human from the 2400s. The two of them undertake a quest to Illusitania, a serene country that has fallen into evil hands. There, they will need to not only rescue Minnie but also foil a doomsday plot that could have catastrophic effects on the whole world.

The oppressive tone of this book surprised me. It reminded me quite a bit of Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, which involves a legendary floating country guarded by gigantic robots capable of both great good and terrible destruction. This, too, has enormous robots that a couple of ambitious villains want to control. Eega Beeva, a character I’d never encountered before but who I later learned was first introduced more than 60 years ago, provides all the exposition we need to get a pretty good handle on what’s going on, though it still seems a bit complex for the “eight & up” designation on the back. It also seems a little dark; he references the 2012 rumors surrounding the Mayan calendar and posits that a similarly dire scenario involving an Aztec myth is unfolding.

In Illusitania, we find the kindly king, who developed an advanced technology in an effort to reshape the world into a more hospitable place, and his sly son, who has been working to undermine him. We also meet the spunky young princess, who soon befriends Mickey and Eega Beeva. Together, they strive to figure out exactly what the prince and the Rhyming Man have planned and how to stop it. It’s an action-packed story loaded with some pretty heavy ideas about the appropriate use of technology and how much power is too much for one person to have.

There’s not much humor in the main story here, so I found Peg-Leg Pete and the Alien Band a relief. At 16 pages, it’s quite short compared to the primary tale, but it makes for a nice dessert after the hearty main course. In this story, a literal band of aliens visits Pete and invites him to be their drummer. Pete, looking out for number one as usual, is reluctant to welcome them, but then he begins to think their offer might not be so bad – provided that they make some special concessions for him. This is really just a silly side-trip that offers an opportunity to laugh at Pete’s mostly harmless bluster. He certainly doesn’t come across as very intimidating after the cruel villains in World to Come. The whole thing builds up to a punch line that I saw coming a mile off, but it made me laugh anyway.

The book also includes sneak previews of Wizards of Mickey: Mouse Magic, Hero Squad: Ultraheroes, Donald Duck: Double Duck , Toy Story: The Return of Buzz Lightyear, The Incredibles: City of Incredibles and Uncle Scrooge: The Hunt for the Old Number One, as well as capsule previews of a couple dozen Disney graphic novels. I was unaware of most of these, so it makes a handy reference as I try to track down others.

Mickey Mouse and the World to Come is highly inventive and ambitious. The main story feels much more adult than the one involving Pete, and its aim seems to be more education than entertainment. It seems that Casty wanted it to serve as a cautionary tale. I also think that a prior familiarity with some of the other books in this series would help; while it is mostly stand-alone, there are a couple of points in the story when the author steps in to recommend reading a previous tale. While I prefer to see Mickey in less harrowing situations, this book certainly offers a thrilling adventure.

Undaunted Ducks Search for Treasure in Uncle Scrooge: Messes Become Successes

When it was on the air, I often watched DuckTales, the Disney cartoon focusing on Scottish skinflint Scrooge McDuck and his efforts to protect his existing fortune and amass a larger one. While his iconic nephew Donald occasionally came into the picture, his triplet great-nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie were much more frequently involved in his adventures, as was his sweet great-niece Webby and his dunder-headed personal pilot, Launchpad McQuack. I hadn’t ventured to Duckburg in quite a while, so it was fun to return to it with the comic collection Uncle Scrooge in DuckTales: Messes Become Successes.

This book, released in 2011, includes nine different stories about Scrooge, his nephews, his niece and his various friends, acquaintances and rivals. Also included are the covers of the individual comic books from which these tales are drawn and sneak peeks at other Disney comic volumes, including Darkwing Duck: Crisis on Infinite Darkwings, in which Darkwing must deal with an infestation of alternate universe versions of himself; Donald Duck and Friends: Double Duck, in which Donald becomes a spy; Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers: Worldwide Rescue, in which the Rangers must navigate a crocodile-infested underworld; and Uncle Scrooge in DuckTales: Like a Hurricane, another collection of Scrooge comics. The main course, however, consists of the stories preceding this portion of the book.

Most of the stories are fairly short, ranging in length from two to 19 pages. All of them involve Scrooge and most also involve the triplets and Launchpad. Donald, Webby and oddball inventor Gyro make more infrequent appearances. Meanwhile, certain villains, particularly Scrooge’s primary competitor in wealth, the bearded, kilted crank Flintheart Glomgold, often surface to make his life more difficult. The quality of the artwork is excellent, and the dialogue is well done, with Launchpad’s distinctively dopey speech patterns particularly entertaining. The stories contain lots of little reference to movies, books and TV shows ranging from The Aristocats and Lord of the Rings to Quantum Leap and Star Trek, so while Scrooge searching for his treasure, spotting these references is a treasure hunt for the reader.

The book opens with Lovelorn Launchpad. In this short tale written by Paul Halas and Jack Sutter, Launchpad’s intense infatuation with an Amelia Earhart-like pilot leads him to initiate a rescue mission after her plane falls off the radar. This story quickly establishes Launchpad as good-hearted but slow-witted, two characteristics emphasized in Bob Langhans’ Double Indemnity, in which an evil sorceress named Magica creates a clone of him and transforms the original into a pigeon. The book’s shortest story, A Dolt From the Blue by William Van Horn, finds Launchpad exercising his foolishness on Gyro’s experimental plane.

Gyro’s genius causes problems for Launchpad in The Belt of Time, whose contributors include Disney-Abril, Haroldo Guimaraes, Diego Jourdan and Jason Arthur, when the inventor attaches a time-traveling belt to the hapless pilot. This is one of several stories involving the nefarious Flintheart, who tries to outwit Scrooge in the brief but funny Scrooge’s Nose Knows Gold, written by John Lustig, and outbid him in The Last Auction Hero, created by Paul Halas, Dave Angus, Jose Maria Millet Lopez and Joe Torcivia.

Of the nine stories, the only one I really couldn’t get into was Paul Halas and Tom Anderson’s Big Blimp in Little Trouble, in which Scrooge decides to start offering paying customers blimp tours in an effort to boost his business. However, I loved The Arcadian Urn, written by the same pair. In this story, the longest in the book, Scrooge, Launchpad, Donald, the triplets and Webby travel to a mysterious island housing the legendary Atlantis-like city of Arcadia in hopes of bringing back a valuable artifact. My favorite story, though, is probably the last one, Carl Banks’ Christmas Cheers, in which the triplets, Donald and Scrooge all want something specific for Christmas and wonder if there’s any chance of their getting it. A fun tale involving a retired reindeer and a hidden cache of gold, it concludes the collection on a festive note.

While I have several collections of comic strips, I don’t often read comic books telling an ongoing story for several pages. I like the format but I often felt, as I read these stories, that I was being asked to fill in a lot of blanks between panels, or some of them anyway, and I wasn’t necessarily doing a very good job of it. That’s more of a problem in some than others, but I think I had that stilted experience at least once during every story. On the other hand, by the time I reached the end, I usually had a clear idea of what the basic arc of the story had been. I just had a little trouble connecting some of the dots as events unfolded. Aside from this phenomenon, which might be improved if I got better accustomed to the format, I enjoyed this sojourn with Scrooge and hope to get my hands on Like a Hurricane before long.

Tom Wilson's A Ziggy Christmas: A Fairly Bland But Heartwarming Book

Tom Wilson’s Ziggy cartoons, usually single-panel and focusing on the lovable blob of a title character and his many animal friends, have been spreading gentle cheer for several decades. While I find the cartoon rather similar to Family Circus in that it is much more likely to make me smile than laugh, Ziggy does occasionally come up with a zinger as he comments on the excesses of modern society. His cheerful disposition in the face of disappointments makes him an appealing character and a fun throwback to the 1970s; he debuted in 1969 and seems to fit very nicely into the decade that followed.

A Ziggy Christmas is a cute little gift book of about 40 pages. It bears a strong resemblance to A Charlie Brown Christmas as Ziggy is disgusted with all of the materialism he sees surrounding the holiday and one of his rebellious gestures is buying a tiny tree that’s a dead ringer for the one Charlie Brown selects. The book is not exactly a series of unrelated strips, but it doesn’t have much of a plot either. It’s more of a general theme of yearning for a simpler celebration.

The book, published in 1980, is fairly colorful but not as much as it could be. The front cover, featuring Ziggy and his furry and feathery friends decorating a glowing tree out in the forest, is the most detailed part of the book. It’s only on the covers that Ziggy is flesh-toned; throughout the book, he’s the same color as the white backdrop. Just a black outline occasionally wearing a red and green scarf, he is at least a bit more colorful than the rest of the people populating the book. With the exception of a couple of guys in Santa suits, everyone we see is black and white, and the only color on them is the wrapping paper on the presents they carry.

Still, the book contains a fair bit of color, mostly in Christmas-related items. The trees at the lot are varying shades of green, the Santa suits are bright red, the tangled mess of lights in his living room is red, green, blue and yellow… Every page includes some type of element making it look more festive. At times Ziggy comes across as frustrated, but he always bounces back from being let down. What’s more, when he sees someone else in distress, he always sets aside his own problems to help.

As is typical with Ziggy, most of the book is more feel-good than genuinely funny, but it has its moments. For instance, there’s the rather amusing observation that “sending Christmas cards is an old tradition… that comes from the ancient custom of not sending presents!” I also love the strip – one of only two in a book full of panels – in which Ziggy painstakingly wraps a box containing a toaster, only to discover that his dog was in the box when he wrapped it.

Ziggy is an upbeat fella who just won’t let life depress him for long. While A Ziggy Christmas isn’t particularly strong in the story department, it has a lot of heart, and it would make a wonderful gift for a friend who is feeling just a little downcast at Christmastime.

Bil Keane Revels in the Family Circus in Sing Me a Loveaby?

When it comes to comic strips, everybody in my family can agree on Peanuts. Beyond that, however, our tastes vary wildly, from my brother’s favorite strip, the dearly departed Calvin and Hobbes, to my grandma’s, Family Circus – which happens to be Nathan’s least favorite. In fact, it doesn’t make much sense to call it a strip, since it almost exclusively comes in the form of a single panel, much like the Ziggy comics of yesteryear. In production for more than 50 years, this wholesome comic focusing mostly on the cute and exasperating things that kids say and do is frequently to be found on the refrigerators of parents and grandparents.

In Sing Me a Loveaby?, a Family Circus collection my grandma recently handed down to me, Bil Keane collects 125 black and white cartoons into a slim volume. On each page, the cartoon is enclosed in a thick black circle, and in most cases, dialogue from one or more of the characters is printed beneath the circle. Once in a while, there are dialogue bubbles within the circle, but usually you just have to take your best guess at who is talking. For the most part, it’s pretty obvious from the picture who the speaker is, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell.

The Family Circus clan includes the bespectacled and often beleaguered Bil, the father who is a two-dimensional version of the cartoonist, and Thelma, his short-haired but rarely short-tempered wife. Also based on Keane’s own family are the four children, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy and toddler PJ, all of whom are sweet at some times and annoying at others. Jeff, the son upon whom Jeffy is based, now serves as his father’s assistant, while Glen, upon whom Billy is partially based, works as a Disney animator, so the love of family-friendly artistry runs in the blood.

While most panels only focus upon those six characters, other friends, neighbors and relatives occasionally show up, along with family dogs Sam and the unfortunately named Barfy and cat Kittycat. The most prominent of the human side characters is the children’s paternal grandma, who is a widow; her husband often appears in outline form as a spirit watching her and the other characters, but he is not a part of this collection.

The cartoons featured here are pretty typical for the series. We have many instances of the children making cute observations or asking odd questions with an air of wide-eyed innocence. For instance, in one cartoon, as Thelma is pouring herself some coffee, Dolly explains to Jeffy, “We have orange juice and that’s Mommy juice.” In another panel, one of the kids calls his grandma on the phone while wearing a clown costume and says, “Hi, Grandma! Betcha can’t guess who this is!”

The humor is generally very mild and related to a child’s fresh perspective on the world. Much of it is linguistic in nature as the kids make unintentional plays on words. One of my favorites in this book is when a mouse-eared Dolly, upon returning home from a vacation, tells her friend, “After Disney World we went to Apricot Center.”

I was a little surprised at how many specific cultural references were in this book. I tend to think of these cartoons as being pretty general; their popularity seems to lie in their applicability to families of all types, with panels from the 1960s making just as much sense to contemporary readers. In this book, we get nods to Rush Limbaugh, Bart Simpson, Dr. Seuss, Game Boy and General Schwartzkopf, as well as the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast and the Biblical Battle of Jericho. Christianity plays a prominent role in Family Circus in general, with the children often reacting to the pastor’s sermon or a Bible story or simply engaging in some out-of-the-blue theological musings. It’s actually not a big part of this book, but a few panels delve into religious topics.

With just 125 panels, each usually only containing a one-sentence caption, Sing Me a Loveaby? is a quick read. Family Circus is not a laugh-aloud type of comic; most panels are only worth a weak chuckle. Nonetheless, this book is likely to bring at least a smile or two to the face of anyone who knows what a circus life can become when you have a family with young children.

Ingest the Wisdom of Linus With Help Stamp Out Things That Need Stamping Out

Like most people I know, I consider Renaissance Beagle Snoopy my favorite character in Charles Schulz’s classic comic strip Peanuts. He’s so dynamic and entertaining, and I can certainly relate to his frustrations with rejection letters. When it comes to the humans, however, I tend to gravitate less toward the round-headed kid, despite my empathy for the slings and arrows that outrageous fortune sends Charlie Brown’s way, than his younger friend with the striped shirt. Linus Van Pelt is an anxious lad who is prone to philosophizing. Indeed, the two qualities often go together because thinking too much has a tendency to make one jittery. Just take a look at LOST’s frazzled physicist Faraday. Or me.

Given my love of Linus, I was tickled when, after a recent visit with my grandma, my dad brought home a tiny book that his brother had given him years ago. Entitled Help Stamp Out Things That Need Stamping Out (And Other Philosophical Gems of Linus), the green hardcover gift book published by Hallmark in 1969 is slim and pocket-sized. Within it are 11 “chapters,” each four pages long and each headed by a title beginning with the word “on.” For instance, the title, which goes with the cover image of Linus holding a picket sign featuring these words, is from “On Being Specific” and is Linus’s response to Lucy’s complaint that his sign slogan, “Help Stamp Out Things,” is too vague.

Each title rests in a box with a thin red border at the top of the first panel in the cartoon. Each page is a panel unto itself, so you’re really just getting 11 individual cartoons. The book is also rather lacking in the eye-catching department, with black and red the only colors aside from the green of the cover. Red only appears in the characters’ clothes, so at least we don’t have red grass making everything look arid, but Charlie Brown’s signature yellow shirt looks a little funny in cinnamon. Additionally, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Violet are the only characters who appear in the book with Linus, so there’s not a whole lot of variety.

Still, you can certainly get an idea of these three characters’ personalities, particularly the forceful Lucy, who displays openly antagonistic behavior to Linus in four of the sections. Most of all, you get a good sense of Linus, who is jumpy at some times, wise beyond his years at others and always intent and curious about the world around him. He can be a bit of a smart-aleck, which isn’t such a good idea when his sister is such a hot-head, but his superior intelligence is due not only to his immersion in books but to his willingness to experiment. Does a smile really make a good umbrella? What is the ideal temperature to bring out the optimum flavor in a thumb?

Many of the observations that form the punch line of each section are quite quotable. I think my favorite is, “I don’t like to do anything that interferes with my not doing anything!” Who hasn’t had such a thought when an unwanted chore interferes with a lazy afternoon? And everyone would do well to remember Linus’s disgruntled resolution, “I’ve got to stop this business of talking without thinking.” With everyday topics ranging from Mixing Categories and Interruptions to Home Remedies and Good Judgment, the book is bound to resonate with most readers at least once. For me, it’s frequent. This little collection of wit and wisdom is only one of a dozen released by Hallmark in the 1960s. I hope I come across more of them; this may not be a very extensive collection, but every cartoon is right on target.

Farley Follows His Nose and Finds an Adventure

For Better or For Worse will always have a special place in my heart as the comic strip that convinced me to start reading the Sunday comics. My mom had read one of the strips aloud, and it felt so pertinent and true-to-life that I was intrigued and had to read it for myself, and then I decided that I really ought to make a regular habit of it. Since Elizabeth had many of my personality traits and was just a little older than me, I always found plenty to relate to in the strip, in which the characters aged at a normal rate and creator Lynn Johnston crafted many complex storylines.

With the strips covering nearly 30 years in the life of the Canadian Patterson family, it was only natural that Farley, the great big English Sheepdog who was the family pet, would not make it to the end of the strip, and the storyline dealing with his death was one of the most touching and heartbreaking of the strip’s long run. However, in 2008, Johnston decided to go back in time, creating new strips involving the Pattersons as a young family, and in 2009, she and her daughter, Beth Cruikshank, collaborated on a picture book that brought Farley roaring back to life.

Farley Follows His Nose is not a collection of comic strips. Johnston’s distinctive style is stamped all over the pages, but she has huge spaces to work with instead of the usual tiny boxes. There’s something really visceral about that, as refreshing as a big wet dog shaking himself out over a verdant lawn, as Farley does early in the book. We see matriarch Elly, the strip’s main character, at the beginning and end of the book, and we get enough of a glimpse of the children to see that Elizabeth is a toddler – clutching the stuffed bunny she loses in the television special The Bestest Present – and Michael is in elementary school. The focus, however, is on the exuberant Farley.

This is a very simple story that reminds me a bit of Beverly Cleary’s Ribsy, in which the beloved dog belonging to Henry Huggins gets loose and traverses the town on a series of adventures. Ribsy’s trek lasts longer; Farley’s is restricted to one day. But the dog’s-eye – or, more accurately, dog’s-nose – view is similar, as is the series of friends he makes, only to quickly continue on his way. The story is held together by the device of a wave of words or phrases, four of them all smooshed together, each in a different color. Each phrase is a smell that captures Farley’s attention, and the rainbow-colored list is followed by an “and…” that takes readers to the next page, where the most exciting smell of all is presented in extra-large, colorful letters and followed by an exclamation point.

Farley does a lot of sniffing in this book. We often see him raising his nose to the air or snuffling in the dirt as onomatopoeic words describing his olfactory activities surround his head. It’s his sense of smell that leads Farley to the next stop on his uncharted adventure, and when he decides the time has come to head back, all he has to do is follow the smells backward, reminding me of the classic animated Sesame Street sequence in which a lost child was advised, “Try to remember the things you passed, and when you come back, make the first thing last.” He doesn’t do it entirely consciously; he’s mostly thinking about the possibility of returning to the site of the best smells of the day, which included hot dogs, popcorn and children. Still, it’s a good strategy, and it makes me wish my sense of smell was a little more fine-tuned.

This is a story that is repetitive and uncomplicated, but with just enough variation from page to page to keep things interesting. Most pages include only a couple sentences, with the pictures doing most of the talking. The primary audience is clearly children about Elizabeth’s age; even Michael could probably consider this a bit below his reading level. However, when it comes to longtime fans of the strip, Farley Follows His Nose is fantastic fun for all ages.

Jeremy and His Parents Exasperate Each Other in Zits Unzipped

If you were to ask me to identify my favorite comic strip, I would most likely tell you Peanuts. Charlie Brown, Linus Van Pelt, Snoopy and the rest of the gang have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, always bringing a smile whether I find them on a greeting card or a Christmas ornament. But if you wanted to know which strip makes me laugh hardest on a regular basis, I would probably have to go with Zits.

I first became aware of this strip by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman my freshman year of college, when Jeremy Duncan, the central character, reminded me of my brother Benjamin, then In high school. Nowadays, he reminds me even more of my brother Nathan, who just graduated from college. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read the strip and felt like Scott and Borgman must have a surveillance camera trained on our house. No two teenagers are alike, but these two seem to have tapped into something fairly universal when it comes to capturing the struggle of adolescents to make sense of school, friends and parents. While Jeremy is the primary focus, we also get plenty of the other side of the coin as we get inside the heads of Jeremy’s mom and dad, Connie and Walt. While teens can laugh at all the exasperating things the adult Duncans do, parents can sympathize with them as Jeremy makes them want to tear their hair out.

In Zits Unzipped, published in 2002, we get about 120 pages of black and white comic strips featuring Jeremy, his parents, his mellow best friend Hector, his girl-next-door-type girlfriend Sara, his offbeat buddy Pierce and various other friends and acquaintances. A majority of the strips deal with Jeremy’s home life. Connie is over-involved and high-strung, while Walt is oblivious and square. Jeremy is surly and uncommunicative. He’s also a pretty good kid, though, and Connie and Walt are pretty good parents. They’re all just muddling along together. The biggest laughs tend to involve Connie’s abject horror at some aspect of Jeremy’s personality, but I love the more gentle humor of Walt’s cluelessness as he tries to grasp modern pop culture and technology.

This is a fairly early collection, and while most of the characters look pretty much the same as they do now, Jeremy looks slightly off, and Pierce, who is introduced in this book, has a significantly different appearance. He’s still very recognizable with all those piercings, however. Minor characters like attached-at-the-hip Richandamy and know-it-all Brittany don’t seem to have changed much, nor have Hector, Connie or Walt.

While the look of the strip is generally fairly realistic, it often incorporates unusual techniques to achieve a certain effect. For instance, in one strip, Connie is driving somewhere with Jeremy in the passenger seat. As she jabbers, we see Connie’s head on wheels with a bored Jeremy sitting inside. In another, Jeremy and Walt have the house to themselves, and the sight of two bears raiding the kitchen gives us an idea of the disaster they leave in their wake when they get hungry. Some such moments incorporate pop culture references as well, like the strip that alludes to Cast Away as Walt tries to converse with Jeremy. Gradually, he seems to grow masses of facial hair, while a palm tree pops up in the background and Jeremy’s head morphs into a volleyball.

The book contains a mix of individual strips and those that tell a story stretching across several pages. It’s nice to have a liberal sprinkling of both. The one-offs are great for a quick laugh, while the multi-strip stories allow greater investment. Two of my favorites in this collection involve Jeremy and Sara exchanging Christmas presents and Jeremy having an ill-advised horror movie marathon when his parents go out of town overnight.

Zits is a comic strip that continues to delight with its keen insights into the dynamics of parent-teen relationships and the pressures of contemporary high school life. If a weekly or even daily dose of Jeremy, his parents and his friends isn’t enough for you, Zits Unzipped is a wonderful book in which to immerse yourself.

Here Comes Snoopy, and Here Comes Fun

While I am fond of all the characters who populate Peanuts, the classic comic strip created by Charles Schulz, my favorite would have to be Snoopy, that cheerful, imaginative beagle with dreams of novelist glory that are frequently thwarted by unfeeling editors. Even though Snoopy didn’t become a writer until later in the series, it was a no-brainer for me to scoop up the 1950s-era collection Here Comes Snoopy when I spotted it at our local city-wide book sale. Like Here Comes Charlie Brown!, this volume is just over a hundred pages long and is drawn from a larger collection, this one called Snoopy Vol. 1. Unlike that book, it is unified by the fact that the title character appears in every single strip.

There’s actually quite a lot of overlap between the two books, with a majority of the Snoopy strips from that book showing up in this one. This is very early Snoopy, so he looks a bit more like a regular dog and a bit less than the very distinct canine found in so many Christmas ornaments, plush toys and Minnesota public art statues. Still, we definitely get the sense that Snoopy is not quite an ordinary dog. There’s something a little unusual about him, whether he’s spending his days imitating Charlie Brown and his friends or sobbing into Schroeder’s shoulder after a particularly moving piano performance.

While Here Comes Charlie Brown! is pretty much just a hodgepodge of early strips, Here Comes Snoopy most definitely belongs to the beagle. Mostly, we see him either on his own or interacting with Charlie Brown, Linus or Lucy. Other characters do make the occasional appearance; Schroeder appears in several strips, and we see Violet and Patty, though neither of them says much. Each strip contains four panels, though some are square, some are ovals and some have no outline at all.

Charlie Brown is well aware that his dog is an oddball, and sometimes that seems to frustrate him. More than once, we see him offering to teach Snoopy a simple skill, only to have him demonstrate that he is far too advanced for that sort of lesson. It annoys him that Snoopy is such a know-it-all. He also is irritated by Snoopy’s constant shedding. Nonetheless, he loves showing his dog off to everybody, and it’s apparent that Snoopy brings him just as much happiness as he does frustration.

While Linus is generally a gentle, philosophical soul, he and Snoopy have always had a somewhat antagonistic relationship because of Snoopy’s tendency to steal his security blanket. Hence, most of the encounters we see between the two are rather tense. Sometimes we see Snoopy clutching his blanket in his teeth and zooming off while Linus holds on for dear life. At other times, Snoopy tries to sneak up on Linus and give him a good scare, but Linus always seems to be one step ahead of him and retaliates with something even more ferocious that sends Snoopy streaking off in terror.

Lucy doesn’t have as much to do with Snoopy as her brother does, but generally their meetings are more cordial. While Snoopy enjoys poking fun at her, he also appreciates the affection she lavishes on him, even though he thinks a tasty treat would be a more exciting gesture than a pat on the head. Lucy, like Patty and Violet, generally approves of Snoopy, and he sometimes brings out her softer side, though she’s not afraid to confront him when she thinks he is being ridiculous.

It’s a little strange to have an entire book full of Snoopy cartoons and not see Woodstock once, but Snoopy’s feathered pal didn’t join the strip until 1967 (and didn’t get a name until 1970). Snoopy is a solitary creature here. Not only do we not see Woodstock, we don’t see his doghouse either, which makes him feel much less like the king of his domain. He’s more of a perpetual tagalong. Some days, he seems to revel in his status, but at other times, he wishes that he were human and even goes so far as to say that he would avoid dogs if he hadn’t been born one, since he finds canines fundamentally distasteful. His feelings seem to fluctuate.

Mostly, though, he appears pretty happy with his lot. He has half a dozen ready playmates, a steady supply of food and the freedom to indulge his imaginative whims. In one of the strips, Charlie Brown and Shermy walk up to Snoopy and, finding him looking despondent under a thick snowfall, tell him, “Be of good cheer.” This amuses me because my brother and I once had a conversation about the Christmas song It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year and how neither of us could ever remember being told, “Be of good cheer.” But Snoopy receives this very instruction. It occurs within the first few pages of the book, so if you’re reading it, you might consider it an instruction to the reader as well, but hardly a necessary one. Cheer can hardly be avoided when Snoopy is coming your way.

Enjoy Some Old-Fashioned Peanuts Fun with Charles Schulz's Here Comes Charlie Brown!

I’ve always loved the Peanuts characters created by Charles Schulz, and I come by that affection honestly. Charlie Brown and the gang have been popular in my family for decades, as evidenced by the collection of comic strips that my grandma gave me this week after looking through some of her old books. Here Comes Charlie Brown! was originally published in 1955. This edition dates back to 1966, but that’s still 45 years of Peanuts fandom, and I bet that the older generation of McCartys were Schulz fans long before that. Who could blame them?

This simple book is a small paperback with a bright orange cover showing a despondent Charlie Brown with a baseball cap on his head and a bat slung over his shoulder, a mitt dangling from the end. Presumably he has just lost or forfeited a game; his baseball managing woes come up frequently in this collection of about 120 black-and-white four-panel strips. This book is actually basically an abridged version of Good Ol’ Charlie Brown Vol. II, so it would probably make more sense to get that book, but since this one fell into my lap, this is what I’m reviewing.

Because my edition was published more than a decade after the first, the back cover is something of an oddity. For one thing, along with the bright orange of the front, it has a large block of green with a thin white line between the two portions of the page, reminding me of the Irish flag. For another, the language is very dated, talking about how you want to get in with “the in group,” and this is it. “Guaranteed to help you kick the blues without the aid of headshrinkers or happy pills,” the blurb promises.

But what’s most notable about the back cover is that the group includes two characters who appear nowhere within its pages since at the time of publication, they had not yet been created. These anachronistic kids are Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally, introduced in 1959, and naturally curly-haired Frieda, who didn’t show up until 1961. Don’t expect to find Snoopy’s feathered friend Woodstock, bespectacled Marcie or tomboyish Peppermint Patty in this book either. However, you will find blond-haired Patty, her best friend, dark-haired Violet, and quiet Shermy, all of whom become much less prominent in later years. The book also features Pig-Pen, who remains a fairly major character but is mostly a one-note guy, with his strips generally involving his inability to stay clean.

The characters in this book look pretty close to their final form, but they’re not quite there yet. Schulz still had a bit of perfecting to do before they reached their final iconic looks. Linus and Schroeder probably are closest to their final versions at this point. That seems fitting for Linus, since he spends so much of the book preoccupied with getting older. He takes pride in being able to tie his shoes and button his shirt, and he dreams of the freedom he will find when he finally turns six. He’s beginning to have his doubts about the existence of Santa Claus and to suspect that not everything his older sister Lucy tells him is true. However, he remains stubbornly youthful in one respect: his refusal to give up his beloved security blanket. Moreover, his innocent inexperience is apparent when he tells Lucy that he can’t imagine living to the ripe old age of 30.

Schroeder‘s preoccupations in this book are pretty typical. He spends most of his time playing the piano, showing off musical knowledge of composers such as Bach, Brahms and Chopin. Of course, he saves his most ardent admiration for Beethoven, and his hero worship not only annoys Lucy, who has raging crush on him, but Charlie Brown, who spends most of the book aggravated by one thing or another. Schroeder also plays some baseball here, or at least shows up to play, but the team is such a disaster that not much ever happens on that front, and soon he’s back to tickling the ivories and daydreaming about his favorite composer. My favorite Schroeder moment in this book comes when Charlie Brown reads a passage describing a dark period of Beethoven’s life, and Schroeder wonders, bewildered, “How could anyone be Beethoven and not be happy?”

Lucy isn’t very happy in this book, and it’s not just because Schroeder loves Beethoven more than he even tolerates her, though that doesn’t help. “Never fall in love with a musician,” she sagely advises. But she has bigger problems to worry about. One day, she takes a notion into her head that the world is literally getting smaller, and it’s because people are wearing down the ground by walking on it. She begins a one-girl campaign to stop people from shrinking the planet before it’s too late. While she eventually wearies of this activism, she spends a lot of time in the book spouting off bizarre “facts” that she merely made up, much to Charlie Brown’s consternation.

Despite his stint as spelling champ in A Boy Called Charlie Brown, I never thought of Charlie Brown as being all that studious, but that is the way he comes across here. At least, he knows enough to be very agitated with Lucy’s dissemination of false information, especially the erroneous tour of local trees that she gives Linus. He seems determined to be well-informed himself; throughout much of the book, we can see him reading, always soaking up historical and scientific tidbits to pass along to others. He reminds me of my dad, who is always running to the Internet to find some background information on various topics that we’ve been discussing. Unfortunately, no amount of written knowledge seems sufficient to improve Charlie Brown’s luck in baseball or to convince the rather mean-spirited girls who surround him that he deserves to be treated with anything other than scorn. It’s little wonder he empathizes with the overlooked sparrows, building a birdhouse exclusively for them. As he explains in a wonderfully quintessential Charlie Brown moment, “I always stick up for the underbird!”

Then, of course, we have Snoopy. While he has not yet begun to let his imagination run truly wild – he does not have a typewriter, for instance, and he doesn’t fantasize about gunning down the Red Baron – he’s well on his way at this point. He spends a good portion of this book working on his impressions, imitating animals, historical figures and neighborhood kids. This last is his favorite, though Charlie Brown warns him that he’s headed for trouble if they find out he’s doing it. Snoopy is generally a happy dog, as evidenced by the series of strips in which Lucy reprimands him for his exuberant dancing, but there are a few things that bother him. Here, his biggest vexation is weeds, and the yard full of tall, unmown vegetation sends him into a constant state of panic when he finds himself within its confines.

This is a simple collection in which the story arcs never last more than a few panels and never become very complex. They do reveal character, though, so if you love Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder and Snoopy, you should be very pleased indeed at the words Here Comes Charlie Brown!

Mo Willems Travels the World in You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons

“In the world of children’s books, the biggest new talent to emerge thus far in the '00s is the writer-illustrator Mo Willems.” This quote from The New York Times Book Review may seem a bit bold, but I’d have a hard time arguing with it. Willems, who has been lauded for his work on Sesame Street and his prolific output of high-quality books for the past decade or so, is a minimalistic genius with a knack for crafting stories that are at once hilarious and poignant. I’ve been consistently impressed with his abilities, so when my friend Libbie passed along the intriguing volume on which this quote functions as a back-cover blurb, I was eager to delve into the book and see what insights it might hold.

The book in question is You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons: The World on One Cartoon a Day. The hefty book documents the trip that Willems took in 1990, when he was a 22-year-old college graduate. With a notebook, a pen and a spare set of clothes, he set off for a year-long voyage, on the cheap and off the beaten path, a journey of self-discovery and cultural awareness. He didn’t follow a clear roadmap; his went with the flow and spent as much time sampling local flavor as he could, proudly wearing the badge of “traveler” rather than “tourist” – a distinction, he says in his introduction, made mostly by the fact that “travelers” do not buy T-shirts of the destinations they have visited.

Earlier this year, I tried to do the 365 Project, an online challenge to take and post a photo every single day for a year. I lasted little more than a month. How much more difficult would it be to manage a cartoon a day? Then again, while I am impressed with his diligence, I know that if I were to undertake such a monumental trek, I would want to have some record of it, and if you’re a skilled cartoonist, this seems like a natural way to do it. I don’t know if it ever occurred to him at the time that he might one day compile the results into a book; he describes the cartooning as “the ritual that held the trip together, gave it purpose, made it real.” Each day got one sketch and only one, and it’s funny to read his incredulous reflections on some of the cartoons, wondering why this was the moment from that day that he decided to capture. He stopped just short of 365 days, which is rather disappointing considering how close he came to a perfect year-long record, but maybe it’s fitting for a trip and a collection of cartoons that is decidedly off-beat.

Willems’ trip is an epic adventure. While I am impressed with his ritualistic discipline, what really wows me is his fearlessness in meandering from one country to the next, usually with no companions to guide him along his way. While Willems displays a talent for making new friends, and this must have made his trip considerably more pleasant than it might otherwise have been, there’s still a sense of isolation about his trek. This is his solo journey, and others just happen to come in and out of it from time to time. For me, a gal whose strongest literary identification has always been with Bilbo Baggins, the timid protagonist of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit whose deep adventurous streak lay dormant for years before it burst forth, I found that reading this further stirred up my wild Took side, even though only a few of the stops on Willems’ itinerary are on my own must-see list.

Dave Barry provides a footnoted Foreword on the subject of travel that had me in gales of laughter as he describes the tedium of being a part of an official TWA tour and expounds upon his frustration with European toilets and tour guides who are too obsessed with flying buttresses. Willems’ introduction is quite amusing as well, though it also explains the circumstances of his trip quite effectively and includes some reflection upon how it impacted his life. He saves most of that, though, for the epilogue, in which he discusses how his trip forced him to see that the world may feel very big when he’s globe-trotting all year, but the sentiments about which the Sherman Brothers wrote have a basis in fact. People on the other side of the world are just as real as those in the United States, and he can no longer feel detached when he watches footage of disasters unfolding in some other part of the globe. The trip and his book, then, are largely lessons in empathy. While he sees the weird, the wacky, the wonderful things that make each place unique, he shows that even in the most remote locations, that shared humanity is very real.

Willems divides the book into sections of a month at a time, with each month’s entries preceded by a two-page spread of a map containing a list of countries he visited and a rough trail depicting his journey. He started and ended in the United States; in between, he visited England, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, France, Spain, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, China, Macao, Japan and Canada. It seems he especially liked Thailand, as he spent well over a month there; other stops got short shrift, like Israel, which he left early after missing the bus to Jerusalem and deciding to hop a bus to Cairo instead. When he does return to America, it’s interesting to see him making his observations from an outsider’s point of view. After so much time away, it’s easy for him to look at the United States as foreign territory too, especially places he’s never been before.

Every cartoon in the book has a page to itself. Those who have come to appreciate Willems’ style from his children’s books will most likely recognize some similarities, particularly in his self-portraits, which have much in common with his illustrations of Trixie’s dad in the Knuffle Bunny books. The vast majority of the cartoons depict people, most of them random strangers doing something that struck him as unusual or funny. The drawings are full of bold lines and expressive faces, and each includes a caption noting the date, the location and the moment’s significance. Underneath most pictures is further explanation by Willems 15 years later. Some of these notes are illuminating, some poignant, and most have some element of humor to them.

For me, standouts include the following:
6-13 – “Perhaps they come standard with a third-class ticket, because never in my life have I taken a ferry trip that didn’t include at least one drunken Australian guitar player.”
7-13 – Willems marvels over the shallow chatter he overhears from a pair of American girls touring Dachau.
8-17 – A simple depiction of a raging monster with the caption “my tummy”.
9-19 – A self-portrait depicting his joy at receiving mail from his friends back home via the American Express office.
10-10 – Another self-portrait, this time showing Willems attempting to take a “shortcut” across a river in India.
11-22 – A despondent Frenchman searches for his lost puppy in Nepal.
12-24 – A description of the difficulties a traveler faces in finding decent reading material.
1-10 – A reflection on the joys of hitch-hiking in Malaysia.
2-18 – “Scarecrow traffic cops.”
3-17 – A Chinese version of Randy, the overly layered little brother in A Christmas Story.
4-18 – A kid trying really hard to get toss a ketchup packet into a bucket at a McDonald’s birthday party in New Mexico.
5-14 – The rather detailed account of Willems’ ordeal with a terrifying Canadian border guard.

This is not a children’s book. Willems depicts drugs, alcohol and various forms of debauchery. He discusses the devastating effects of wars and natural disasters. He occasionally draws people half-clothed or entirely naked. While he thanks his parents for giving him the travel bug from a young age and espouses the virtues of children exploring the world early, this volume contains his ruminations as a young adult and a more mature adult, and the intended audience is adults as well. That’s not to say that a child might not get something out of this, especially a teenager thinking of traveling abroad in the near future. However, I think most elementary-aged kids would find many of the pictures and explanations perplexing, and many parents would find them inappropriate. Because of Willems’ far-reaching popularity with youngsters and because this looks like a book that could be aimed at that age group, it’s best to be aware that this is a Willems book that deviates from the norm.

But oh, is it fascinating. I loved seeing his little slices of life and reading his observations on how the world has changed and how it hasn’t. I think the book provides great insight into how he thinks and offers hints about where he might have gotten ideas for some of his later stories. The book is witty, thought-provoking and compassionate, and in this way, it does have a great deal in common with the rest of Willems’ books. It’s an unusual exercise in immersion journalism that leaves the reader wanting to see the world but also more ready to find the remarkable in the everyday. As Willems says, “Whenever I want to roam free and experience the world again, all I have to do is open my front door and step outside. I know that the world will be there to meet me.” Wise words indeed. But I’m glad he decided to meet the world first.

"And I Would've Gotten Away with it, Too..."

Scooby Doo is a classic. Everybody knows that. And I have no great objection to the show or its title character. Scooby has earned his place with Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and others. But recently, I have been home to watch the Kids' WB after school lineup with my brother, and I've had the opportunity to watch episode after episode of the furry coward's sleuthing. (Don't ask me why they stuck a vintage show like Scooby Doo in with Pokemon and Jackie Chan Adventures. The much more pressing question for me is, why is this lineup immediately proceeded by Elimidate??? But that's another issue.)

I never really watched Scooby Doo that much before, certainly not back to back. So it's only now that I've come to realize just how formulaic the show really is. The following is a list of some of the many things that you can count on happening in just about every episode:

* Shaggy fixing himself a ludicrously complicated snack, only to have it swiped by Scooby at the last minute
* Fred ordering the protesting Shaggy and Scooby to branch off by themselves while he looks for clues with Daphne and Velma
* Shaggy tricking Scooby into taking the more dangerous part of their mission
* The five being reunited, then separated again, then reunited again
* Velma shouting "Jinkies!"
* Daphne disappearing
* Scooby being bribed with a Scooby Snack
* Chase scenes
* Instantaneous costume changes
* Really corny music
* Fred saying something obvious like, "Look! Footprints! It might be a clue!"
* Cops showing up at the end
* Unmasking, in which the villain(s) is revealed to be the only other character(s) in the episode
* "I would've gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those kids and that dog!"

Had enough? Me too. The basic thing I have discovered is that if you've seen one episode of Scooby Doo, you've seen 'em all. That said, it's still funny, even if some of the laughs come from the corniness. Shaggy and Scooby's antics are always entertaining, and it's rather
interesting to listen to the audience laughter in the background. Sometimes I scratch my head and wonder what was so funny; some of the comedy is a little dated.

Velma has always been my favorite, the bespectacled nerd who gets to play second fiddle to Daphne. If Daphne's more visible, though, she's certainly not more important. She's pretty clueless, rarely contributing anything to the case and usually vanishing or getting herself kidnapped. Fred is Mr. Know-It-All, always ready to take charge and figure out what's going on. And usually he?s right, too, unlike in the later series when, as a 10-year-old, he was always ready to waggle the finger at Red Herring. Then there are always the extras, who are cookie-cutter copies of one another. They've got one ghost, one zombie, one witch, one old man, one cop... you get the idea. Same voices, too. I guess you could say that one thing Scooby Doo provides is stability. Don't expect too many surprises.

Certainly, Scooby Doo is not the only show whose plots so closely resemble one another. In Magic Schoolbus, for instance, the subject is always different but you always know who is going to say what and when. And the Scooby Doo theme song is hard to beat. As far as TV theme songs go, it's almost right up there with Gilligan's Island. So Scooby may be a little corny, and a little predictable, but he's still popular after all these years, so he must be doing something right.