Dream Jumper, Book Two: Curse of
the Harvester. By Greg Grunberg & Lucas Turnbloom. Art by Lucas Turnbloom. Color by Guy Major.
Graphix/Scholastic. $12.99.
Stick Cat #3: Two Catch a Thief.
By Tom Watson. Harper. $12.99.
The notion of beginning a
work in medias res, in the middle of
things, has a long and honorable history. The phrase itself dates to the work
of the Roman poet Horace, writing around the year 13 B.C.E., and he was
referring to how works of much earlier times were constructed. Nowadays, given
the frequency with which books are issued in series rather than as single
volumes, it is possible not only to begin an individual book in the middle of
things but also to start an entire series in the middle, if one so desires. The
approach, however, works better in some cases than others. Both Dream Jumper and Stick Cat are a lot of fun, but readers would do better to begin with
earlier series entries than to make the characters’ acquaintance for the first
time through the latest volumes. The reason is that both the latest books build
on what has happened before, and in the case of Dream Jumper, very little in Curse
of the Harvester makes sense unless you have read Nightmare Escape, which started the sequence. This series works
because of pacing and the fine coloring by Guy Major more than because of any
originality of plot. Greg Grunberg and Lucas Turnbloom – the former an actor,
the latter an experienced graphic novelist and cartoonist – go for a mixture of
straightforward narrative and offbeat (even amusing) illustrations, but their
basic good-vs.-evil structure is highly formulaic. In fact, it is even more so
in Curse of the Harvester than in the
previous book, as we meet evil characters serving other evil characters because
they are, you know, evil, and one
particular bad guy (bad thing, actually) is supposed to have been destroyed
long ago but has somehow survived and is threatening the good guys again – the
sort of thing that even young readers will likely have encountered before. It
is the series’ structural specifics that need explaining, which they do not
receive in this second entry. The whole notion of “dream jumping” – the ability
to move from one person’s dream to that of another – is reasonably clear here.
But the way protagonist Ben Maxwell became a dream jumper, the way he and his
friend Jake have turned dream jumping into a business, the reasons powerful
evil characters appear in typical skeleton-and-darkness guises while good ones
show up in cute forms such as those of a bunny and a gopher – these and other
elements are simply assumed background in Curse
of the Harvester. And the sleep lab where something important is going on
(something very unclear in the context of this specific book) is totally unexplained,
as is the background of Dr. Alexson, who runs the lab and is here taken over
(in yet another unoriginal plot twist) by one of the dark forces of the
dreamworld. For those already involved in the Dream Jumper graphic novels, Curse
of the Harvester will be fun despite its clunky recurrent exposition, which
includes stilted dialogue: “A hideous creature called the Harvester has cursed
him! …If Jake falls deep enough into sleep, he’ll be pulled into the dream
world and delivered into the hands
of the Harvester, who will then feed
Jake to his master, the Vortex of
Nowhere!” There are still touches of humor here – at one point Jake tells
Ben, “You’ve been reading way too
many graphic novels” – but this is, by and large, an action-packed book that
carries readers along through pacing that mostly verges on the frenetic. It
will confuse anyone who has not read its predecessor and will be enjoyable for
anyone who has read it and has been
waiting for more of the same.
A much milder series,
presented as heavily illustrated novels rather than in full graphic-novel form,
is the Stick Cat sequence created by
Tom Watson on a track parallel to that of his Stick Dog books. Instead of a five-dog pack roaming the suburbs
looking for food and having mild but amusing adventures, the Stick Cat books feature two
city-dwelling felines in adjoining high-rise apartments who hang out together
and, in the first two books, manage improbable rescues of humans who get into
ridiculous-but-dangerous situations. It helps to know this background to
understand why the cats say they are determined not to do yet another rescue at the start of Two Catch a Thief, the third book in the series. The rest of the
background either falls into place bit by bit or is omitted in favor of keeping
the story moving. The animals here, like those in the Stick Dog books, are drawn ultra-simply, with sticks for legs and
rectangular or slightly ovoid bodies – hence the title critters’ names. Watson
likes to “interrupt” the Stick Dog and
Stick Cat books to make occasional
authorial comments, pretending in them to be a preteen creating the books
during math class. In the case of Stick
Cat, he is a boy just discovering that a cat-loving girl is kinda cute and
maybe sorta likes him – in fact, she is the reason he has started writing about
Stick Cat. This is not much of a background story, but it helps to know it
before starting Two Catch a Thief,
and Watson includes enough of it to set the scene. Somewhat harder to
understand is the relationship between Stick Cat and the cat next door, Edith,
who is a less-interesting and less-attractive sidekick for Stick Cat than are
the canines who accompany Stick Dog. Edith is both ultra-egotistical and
mentally dim, a combination that is not really as funny as Watson (or his
preteen alter ego) seems to believe. Edith’s misinterpretations and selfishness
are supposed to come off as cute contrasts to Stick Cat’s clear thinking and
analytical ways, but a lot of the time they are just unpleasantly
simple-minded. In Two Catch a Thief,
the plot involves a burglar who is somehow crawling around in the ventilation
ducts of the building where Stick Cat and Edith live, and who comes into Stick
Cat’s apartment to steal things belonging to Stick Cat’s human, Goose. The
burglar, for some reason, carries tuna along with him to feed to cats – this
makes no sense whatsoever, although it might be sensible for a burglar to carry
food to distract dogs – and Edith resolutely refuses to care about the thefts
happening in front of her eyes or even to acknowledge that they are thefts. She dubs the burglar “Tuna
Todd” and happily eats the treats (which are not even laced with something to
put possibly intrusive animals to sleep; again, this makes very little sense – Two Catch a Thief is much more poorly
plotted than the Stick Dog books). Even
when the burglar moves to the apartment Edith shares with her human, Tiffany, Edith does not see him as a thief, instead
complaining about all the things she does not like about how Tiffany treats
her. In fact, Tiffany treats Edith extraordinarily well – and it is only when
the burglar decides to steal Edith’s collars (he has correctly identified
valuables early in the book but now suddenly decides that Edith’s
“jewel”-encrusted collars contain real gems) that Edith rethinks her view of
him. Most of the fun in the book occurs after this, when Stick Cat and Edith
band together to stop the thief – then Edith’s dimness proves accidentally
helpful, which is a genuinely amusing touch. Even though Watson’s authorial
persona in the Stick Cat books does
not exist, Watson’s desire to create light and amusing cat-focused books to
complement his dog-focused ones does make sense in real-world terms (young
readers, after all, may prefer cats to dogs and may therefore not want to read
the Stick Dog series). Two Catch a Thief will be enjoyable for
anyone who already knows the Stick Cat
series and enjoys its underlying premise and its protagonists. Stick Cat
himself is a pleasant enough character, and if Edith falls short, that will not
matter to readers of Two Catch a Thief
if they have already decided, based on the two earlier books in the series,
that they like her personality.
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