The Bad Guys #9: The Big Bad Wolf. By Aaron Blabey.
Scholastic. $5.99.
Making Friends #2: Back to the Drawing Board. By Kristen Gudsnuk.
Graphix/Scholastic. $12.99.
Well, they can’t all be gems. By and
large, the books in Aaron Blabey’s The
Bad Guys series have so far been a great deal of silly fun, as Mr. Wolf,
Mr. Shark, Mr. Piranha, Mr. Snake, and Legs the tarantula try hard to overcome
their negative reputations by fighting a set of really nasty tentacled aliens
led by an especially repulsive head guy (actually head thing) disguised (some
of the time) as a super-adorable guinea pig named Marmalade. And if that
description seems to make almost no sense, then it is exactly right, because
the books, individually and as a series, make almost no sense. And that’s just
fine – usually. But Blabey has been making the sequence increasingly complex, for
example by not only including the mysterious Agent Fox but also introducing the
entire League of Heroes…and having one episode, involving time travel to the
dinosaur age, result in bringing a velociraptor into present times while
turning him super-hyper-intelligent and also having the Bad Guys themselves
pick up various super-powered superpowers. Whew. Blabey actually gets away with
the increasingly silly, increasingly complicated plotting, because neither he
nor readers will have any reason to take anything that is happening even one
iota seriously. But seriously, the ninth book, The Big Bad Wolf, pushes the envelope a little too far, and
envelopes, even those addressed to or by Blabey, can stand only so much
pushing. In this book, Mr. Wolf is gigantic and evil and destructive because of
events that happened in the last book, Superbad,
and get no recap here. Now the remaining Bad Guys have to stop him, except that
Legs has to get together with Agent Shortfuse to find a way onto the alien
mother ship to try to short-circuit the alien invasion that is happening while
Mr. Wolf is laying waste to pretty much everything. Matters are really getting
overly complex at this point, with the result that elements of the series that
have made it distinctive get short shrift (and in some cases, no shrift). Mr.
Snake’s reluctant admiration for Mr. Wolf is based on prior events and is a key
to the events in The Big Bad Wolf,
for example, but it is used only in passing. Mr. Snake has (imperfect) mental
powers that he has to use to try to stop Mr. Wolf from destroying, well,
everything, so Mr. Snake has to get into Mr. Wolf’s ear (literally) and whisper
sweet somethings into it – things along the lines of “cut it out already.” But
this doesn’t work because, it turns out, Marmalade is in Mr. Wolf’s other ear, countermanding everything
positive that Mr. Snake is saying. And besides, Marmalade (in alien form) turns
out to be able to remove all the superpowers from the Bad Guys – something he
never thought of before and something Blabey never got around to mentioning –
so suddenly Mr. Wolf and the others are back to just being well-meaning Bad
Guys who want to be Good Guys, which solves the destroy-everything problem but
leaves Mr. Snake absent, perhaps permanently, and leaves everyone and
everything in the clutches of the evil aliens, where they have been all
along…wait, that can’t be right. Umm, but it is: The Big Bad Wolf doesn’t really go anywhere, doesn’t really advance
the story of the Bad Guys (even in a silly direction), and really just comes across
as a setup for the next book, The Baddest
Day Ever. That may turn out to be the final one in the series, and if so,
that would be fine, because even super-silly sequences eventually run their
course, and The Bad Guys has just
about run its.
The second Making Friends graphic novel by Kristen Gudsnuk, although aimed at
older readers than the ones Blabey targets, shares many of the same approaches
and flaws. The Making Friends books
are also vastly over-complicated, trying to make up in pacing what they lack in
plot coherence; and the second book picks up right where the first one left
off, making no attempt to present a back story and not even trying to make
first-time readers (if any pick up this volume before the earlier one) feel
comfortable or knowledgeable about what is going on. Where Gudsnuk, who targets
middle-school readers, differs from Blabey, whose readers are younger, is in
wanting her story to have some level of meaning and significance beyond simple
entertainment. So she packs it with middle-school tropes involving mean girls,
friendship questions, classroom issues and more – and although none of these
elements adds much to the story, they do serve to complicate it ever further,
to such a point that many plot elements spring up quickly and disappear just as
speedily to make room for others. To understand Back to the Drawing Board, readers need to know, from the previous
book, that protagonist Dany has magic powers because of a sketchbook that she
inherited, and Dany, typically lonely in a middle-school-angsty way, has used
those powers to create a best friend for herself. This is Madison, who in the
first book frees herself from Dany’s control and starts living her own life,
but then ends up as Dany’s best friend by choice rather than by compulsion (or
something along those lines). In the second book, the mostly destroyed school
(wrecked in the climactic battle at the end of the first book, as is not explained) is back in session, and
there are plans to raise money to fix things up, and those plans involve having
a typical middle-school dance. In another plot strand, Dany continues to feel
inadequate and socially awkward despite her magic prowess and the fact that she
has used her abilities to give all sorts of magic to other students. So Dany
actually pays the local mean girl to be her friend (one of many plot threads
that eventually goes nowhere); and then Dany comes up with the brilliant (?)
idea of using the sketchbook to make a clone of herself that will have a
more-bubbly, more-extroverted personality and also be better at homework. This
goes about as well as might be expected – no, it goes better than expected, because Dany and Cloney get along beautifully
and really do help each other, at least until Cloney starts overstating some
matters and being a little too forthright about others and…well, maybe this is
what might be expected, after all. But wait – there’s more. There is also a
school bully who, it turns out, has his own
magic (that plot point comes out of absolutely nowhere). And his magic is tied
up with a blue dog, a genie of sorts called a “hinn,” and the dog is in a
bottle that happens to be in the possession of Dany’s parents (another out-of-nowhere development). And Dany accidentally
frees the dog, and learns that her parents
have magic as well (hoo boy), and that magic has consequences (well, duh); and
by the latter part of the book, it is legitimate to ask not who has magical
powers but who doesn’t (that seems to be a shorter list). A huge confrontation
with the bully and hinn, which involves people turning into animals (some of
them never realizing it), ends up as the book’s climax, but it is neither funny
enough nor pointed enough to make Back to
the Drawing Board a wholly satisfying sequel. Still, readers who liked the
over-complex, over-plotted first book will find at least some elements to enjoy
in this even-more-complex, even-more-over-plotted second.
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