Kid Amazing vs. the Blob. By
Josh Schneider. Clarion. $16.99.
Shorty & Clem. By Michael
Slack. Harper. $17.99.
Many kids like to imagine
themselves as superheroes, doing superheroic deeds with superpowers. Josh
Schneider takes the idea into much-more-amusing territory, though, with Kid Amazing vs. the Blob. Here we have
the most mundane circumstances possible: a young boy named Jimmy is called on
by his mother to find out why his baby sister is crying. What is not mundane is that Jimmy responds in
superheroic mode. Schneider gets the whole scenario just right: Jimmy “touches
the tennis racket like this and pulls
the light string like so” and heads out of his room through a “secret door and
into a secret elevator” that takes him to an underground warren of passages
equipped with everything from alligators to dinosaur fossils to a space
shuttle. A huge string of bright-yellow “AAAAAAA,” representing “an extremely
annoying howl,” stretches over the pages as Jimmy becomes Kid Amazing, wearing
footie pajamas, dishwashing gloves and a baseball cap – all described at the
bottom of the pages in typical superhero-ese: “These rare red dishwashing
gloves are there to shield his mighty hands from lava, ice, lasers, acid, toxic
goo, and pruny-ness.” Soon Jimmy contacts “the Commissioner” (his mom), who
asks him to find out what the howling is all about. Jimmy knows it is “the Blob,”
and promises to “take care of her.”
So he follows a “stink trail” that leads “right to the Blob’s lair” and appears
in Schneider’s illustrations as a green miasma out of which monster heads
emerge – air so smelly that even a picture on the wall has to wear a gas mask.
Jimmy spritzes the stink with some perfume whose smell he likes but that his
mother did not want when Jimmy gave it to her (it smells like French fries).
Then he heads along a trail of slime right to the Blob “on her throne” (in her
high chair). She continues to yell so loudly that “the howl is melting his
brain,” but then Jimmy finds “the Blob’s howl neutralizer” (a pacifier) and
pops it into the baby’s mouth. And the “AAAAAAA,” which has been covering the
entire background of several pages, suddenly stops – with Kid Amazing going on
to explain to the Commissioner that “the Blob needs a new stink-containment
unit” and suggesting that a cookie would be a suitable reward. Kid Amazing has
indeed saved the day – except that, at the book’s very end, his sister has
pulled off her stink-containment unit (diaper) and there is about to be another
big mess for Kid Amazing to handle. Kid
Amazing vs. the Blob is at once so realistic and so far out that kids who
are older siblings, whether they are amazing or not, will immediately recognize
the circumstances – and probably start planning a secret underground base of
their own.
Schneider’s watercolor and
pen-and-ink illustrations fit Kid Amazing
vs. the Blob every bit as well as Michael Slack’s Photoshop digital ones
fit Shorty & Clem. Slack’s book
is about roommates but could just as well be about siblings. The fact that
Shorty is a big-eyed, eyeglasses-wearing dinosaur (a “shortysaurus,” a kind of
compressed T. rex), and Clem is a small blue bird, does nothing to disguise the
fact that these are good friends who have a quandary to handle. Actually,
Shorty is the one with the issue: while Clem is away, a package arrives, and
Shorty is delighted – until ,he discovers that it is addressed to Clem, not to him.
Obviously, Shorty cannot open Clem’s package – but oh, how he wants to! So,
instead of opening it, he tries to figure out what must be inside. It could be
a race car, Shorty decides, so he will drive the car-containing box; and he
does just that, with a “vroom vrooom vroooom” that soon becomes a “CRASH!”
Oops. But at least the box bounced back from the crash – maybe that means it
has a trampoline inside. “I will not open Clem’s package,” Shorty repeats to
himself, but he can jump on it! So the box gets partly crushed and makes a
“thump” noise – which leads Shorty to decide that there must be bongos inside,
so he plays them by “playing” the box, which he does with considerable
enthusiasm and by use of his tail as well as his arms. Wait! No, there are no bongos
in the box, thinks Shorty. There are monkeys
in it – he just has to see them.
But…but…this is Clem’s package. Now
what? Well, suffice it to say that Shorty’s self-control goes only so far, and
that when Clem comes back, “he is going to be so mad.” And Clem does come back
– with a surprise for Shorty that goes beyond the surprise of the box and its
contents. The result is that everything works out just fine, Shorty and Clem
are closer than ever, and the super-silly illustrations (against plain white backgrounds)
manage to convey a wide range of emotions without ever letting things get too serious. Parents may have to
reinforce the lesson that it is not really all right to open anything addressed
to someone else – but at the same time, they will find that Shorty & Clem neatly and very cutely
addresses kids’ insatiable curiosity, and the difficulty of waiting even a tiny
bit longer for whatever super surprise is just about to be revealed.
No comments:
Post a Comment