The
“Mutts” Summer Diaries. By Patrick
McDonnell. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.
Glitch. By Sarah Graley. Graphix/Scholastic. $14.99.
Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts is a
delight in any season, and now there are books showing that for all five of
them. Yes, five seasons. The “Mutts”
Diaries was followed by The “Mutts”
Winter Diaries, then The “Mutts”
Autumn Diaries, and then The “Mutts”
Spring Diaries, and now The “Mutts”
Summer Diaries. Apparently, in McDonnell’s world, the seasons, after
getting an overview, run from winter to autumn to spring to summer. But Mutts is so much fun anytime that the
sequence scarcely matters – and really, each of these books is simply a seasonally
focused reissue of Mutts strips
related to that particular season and gathered from various Mutts collections through the years. The
gentle amusement of this comic strip is quite unlike anything to be found
elsewhere: McDonnell’s art, imbued with the spirit of long-ago cartooning but
always possessing a contemporary twist of its own, generates a feeling of
timelessness that goes beautifully with the small but notable adventures of
Earl the dog, Mooch the cat, and the many other creatures (human and nonhuman)
who inhabit their world. This being a summer-themed collection, there are quite
a few strips set at the beach, where Earl and Mooch and their humans go for
vacation and where Crabby the crab, Mussels Marinara the mussel, a whale named
Engelbert, and various other characters come into their own. Here, Earl and
Mooch meet a lobster who, told that scientists believe that lobsters do not
have feelings, says he does not
believe that scientists have
feelings. They find a snow-cone stand, where Mooch says he always wondered what
happened to the stuff after it was shoveled; and a corn-dog stand that leads
Mooch to decide that all his “meals should be on a shtick.” Earl and Mooch have
adventures along a boardwalk, too, and fun listening to shells to hear the
ocean, but the heart of Mutts (a
strip with a great deal of heart) is encapsulated in a simple three-panel
sequence showing Earl and his human, Ozzie, just sitting side by side on the
sand in the first panel; in the second, Ozzie gives Earl three pats on the
head; and in the third, Earl is thinking, “Vacations are good.” Even in a sweet
summer like this, though, McDonnell finds room for some of his “cause” comics,
an integral part of Mutts. There are
“Shelter Stories,” urging adoption of animals, featuring Mooch and then Earl
making their biggest possible pleading eyes to “inspire thousands of shelter
adoptions.” There is also a “Farm Animal Sanctuary” sequence, in which Mooch
looks at a cow and observes that “it’s a lot easier to milk an almond” and baby
chickens are identified as “my peeps.” Sometimes McDonnell simply gets carried
away with his own artistic ability, as when a single panel shows Earl standing
on the beach with a very realistic-looking dragonfly twice his size atop his
head and Mooch saying, “Shoo.” But more often, McDonnell speaks through his
characters, as when a shark approaches Earl and Mooch, who are standing on a
pier, and says, “Save the sharks!” Mooch immediately proclaims, “YESH!” And
then he tells Earl, “He had me at ‘save.’” Animals “have” McDonnell at “save,”
too, while comic-strip lovers have plenty of opportunities not only to save Mutts strips in various collections,
seasonal and otherwise, but also to savor every one of them.
There appear to be “cause” elements in Sarah Graley’s graphic novel Glitch as well, but they are handled
rather awkwardly and seem grafted onto a story that clearly reflects Graley’s
own life and interests – as Mutts
reflects those of McDonnell. But unlike McDonnell, Graley never brings her
characters particularly close to likability. Glitch is one of the now-very-common books based on the notion of
being trapped in a video game (there is even a series of novels with that exact
title, Dustin Brady’s Trapped in a Video
Game). Graley’s protagonist is a singularly clueless and rather unpleasant
14-year-old named Izzy, who lies to pretty much everyone pretty much all the
time and gets away with it simply because Graley wants her to. This is
presumably the character based on Graley herself, although one would hope Izzy
has more rough edges than Graley does. Izzy has a best friend named Eric, who
is not a boy although she has a boy’s name and is drawn with male features, a
male shape and androgynous hair. This too presumably reflects Graley’s personal
life or some sort of advocacy: at the end of the book Graley thanks “my
partner, Stef, for helping me figure out the twists and turns in the story
early on” and for doing the book’s lettering. However, if there is a “cause”
lurking here, it is scarcely the central point of Glitch, which appears to be intended simply as something of a romp
– despite periodic references to Izzy having been bullied at school, comments that
are used to show that her parents are clueless rather than to indicate that
they are involved and concerned. Izzy is truly messed up: the book starts with
her and Eric eagerly awaiting the release of a new video game called “Dungeon
City” and pledging not to play it until they can do so together – until, a mere
five pages later, Izzy breaks the promise and creates a transparent lie about
wanting to check disc quality so she can play without Eric. That Izzy is some
BFF! Izzy soon finds herself sucked into the game, where she learns from a
one-eyed robot character that she is the usual “chosen one” who will save the
entire video-game world. Izzy tells the robot, Rae, that she is “a strong,
independent woman” who does not need his help, then needs him to help her get
out of tight spots – but will not take his hand to be led away (another very
weak “cause” element, perhaps?). Izzy gets bitten in the game, returns to the
real world and finds the bite is real, then promptly lies to her parents about
it and blames the family’s blameless cat. “Lying to us isn’t okay,” her mom
says (her parents are interracial, by the way; this is irrelevant to the story
but, yet again, perhaps some sort of weak “cause” element). Izzy promptly
repeats the lie, more forcefully, then runs up the steps of her home shouting
incoherently. And all this is simply setup for an ongoing foray into “Dungeon
City” with Rae. When Rae tries to explain the game, Izzy repeatedly says “skip”
because she thinks she knows everything already. Then she chooses how to play
the game and makes Rae turn her, “a strong, independent woman,” into a Space
Witch with gravity-defying hair and a sweater made of stars. Um, well. That
Izzy is quite a bundle of contradictions, and often distinctly unpleasant.
Graley never quite manages an effective balance of the twin elements of the story
– those in the real world and those in the video game – and the whole plot
creaks constantly and nearly collapses under its own weight, especially as it
starts to become clear that Rae is not at all what he claims to be. Yes, Graley
eventually engineers a reconciliation between Izzy and Eric, and the two of
them join forces to defeat the “Dungeon City” evil because “we work better
together as a team.” But neither the video-game elements nor those of
real-world friendship seem genuine in any significant way: Glitch is all for show, the authorial hand moving the characters
and events around being always very apparent. What gets the book up to the
level of a low (+++) rating is the pacing of the story, which is well done, and
the art, which handles the graphic-novel format nicely by varying panel sizes,
eliminating panels altogether in some places, and allowing characters to form
and re-form (in both the video-game and real-world sequences) in ways that
nicely reflect their thoughts and plans, trivial though those may be. Glitch is not a very good story and Izzy
is definitely not much of a protagonist, but Graley does have some artistic
skill and a good grasp of the graphic-novel medium. For young readers devoted
to graphic novels, especially ones who imagine that video games are genuinely
significant in some real-world way, those positive characteristics may be
enough to make the book enjoyable.
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