Lunch Wore a Speedo: The
Nineteenth “Sherman’s Lagoon” Collection. By Jim Toomey. Andrews McMeel.
$14.99.
Pieces and Players. By Blue
Balliett. Scholastic. $17.99.
Giving readers what they
expect in terms of character and plot can be a great way to build a fan base
and keep it satisfied. This is a staple of forms from detective fiction to
character-based comedy, and it certainly works in cartooning – comic strips
such as Sherman’s Lagoon rely on
readers’ knowledge of the basic setting and characterizations, with Jim Toomey using
that familiarity to produce theme-and-variations strips that may take some
getting used to for those who have not seen his work before but that are
instantly recognizable (and very funny) for those who have. The latest Sherman’s Lagoon collection, the 19th,
has an in-joke in its title and on its cover: you have to know that Sherman,
the dim-witted shark, often calls human beachgoers “lunch” because that is,
after all, what they are to a shark (this shark, anyway). Less happily, the
collection also has a typical element on the back cover: the strip shown there,
about multiple unlikely occurrences happening all at once, talks about someone
on the beach being “struck by lightening [sic]”
– Toomey is not always the world’s best speller, and apparently his editors did
not notice that he meant “lightning.” It is easy to forgive the occasional faux pas like this, though, because
Toomey has now honed and refined his characters to a point at which their
misadventures are always worth at least a chuckle and often a guffaw. In the
latest collection, perpetual schemer Hawthorne the hermit crab creates “Crab
Growth Formula” to help other denizens of Kapupu Lagoon bulk up – but it also
gives them crab claws and antennae. Sherman, Hawthorne and Fillmore (the
sort-of-intellectual sea turtle) are temporarily turned into humans by Kahuna
the Easter Island god statue (hey, you have to be there!) – so they can go to
the Super Bowl. Later, back in the lagoon and their usual forms, the three take
a ride in an undersea Volkswagen left there as part of an “art installation” on
the sea floor. Ernest, the eyeglasses-wearing fish who is the strip’s computer
whiz and hacker, reprograms a data-collecting robot so it can, among other
things, operate a blender for perpetually lazy polar bear Thornton during his
never-ending beach vacation. Later, Hawthorne accompanies Thornton to the North
Pole, where Thornton’s mom has arranged a marriage that of course does not come
about. Also here are Sherman and Hawthorne’s visit to Lake Nicaragua to see the
freshwater sharks and incidentally join an armed uprising, a visit to Kapupu by
a bluefin tuna that Hawthorne wants to sell as sushi, a touch of cloning,
Sherman’s interpretation of the term “flash mob,” and various other forms of
silliness that are amusing precisely because the characters and personalities
here have been formed and polished (well, maybe not exactly polished) in 18 previous collections.
Toomey’s undersea world takes some getting used to for those not yet familiar
with it, but those who, umm, take the plunge will soon find themselves, err,
sucked into a great deal of hilarity.
The use and reuse of
familiar characters is not, however, enough, in and of itself, to make a story
work. The limitations of the approach are apparent in Blue Balliett’s new novel,
Pieces and Players, which gathers
characters from several of her earlier books and sends them into an adventure reminiscent
of ones that Balliett has offered before. The plot involves the theft of 13 art
masterpieces – one of course being a Vermeer, recalling Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer – and the assembly of a
group of five preteens to figure out what has happened and recover the art. The
young sleuths include Calder, Petra and Tommy from The Wright 3 and The Calder
Game, Zoomy from The Danger Box,
and Early from Hold Fast. And there
is the requisite mysterious adult who may be playing a game of her own (Mrs. Sharpe):
she has not appeared before, but her type
is familiar from earlier books. Balliett reintroduces her young characters
clearly, so there is no need to have read the earlier books to understand who
is who – and in fact, readers of the earlier books may find the reintroductions
rather dull. But Balliett is clearly going for some sort of resonance here by
reusing existing characters from her books rather than creating new ones – and,
for that matter, reusing plot elements that she has explored before. The importance
of art comes through as clearly in Pieces
and Players as in other Balliett books, although the passages emphasizing
this may be a little heavy-handed for some readers; and the descriptions of
museums and settings in Chicago are nicely done, although, again, may not be to
the taste of those unfamiliar with or not particularly interested in details
about the city and its landmarks. The real flaw of this (+++) book, however, is
that much of its effect depends on the interaction of characters who are, in this
context, only mildly interesting and not always well differentiated. Because their
personalities were formed in other books, readers looking to read more about
them in a different-but-familiar mystery environment will have fun visiting
with them again and seeing how, again, they piece clues together to solve a
mystery that itself has many echoes of those in earlier Balliett books. Readers
new to Balliett’s work will, however, finds Pieces
and Players rather pale in plot and its characters something of an “in”
experience – not an “in joke,” since this is not character comedy, but more of
an “in mystery.”
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