(++++) STILL MAGIC AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Magic Tree House: The Graphic Novel—No. 1, Dinosaurs Before Dark. Adapted by Jenny Laird from the original by Mary Pope Osborne. Illustrated by Kelly & Nichole Matthews. Random House. $16.99.

     The biggest surprise in the new graphic-novel adaptation of the first Magic Tree House book is that it wasn’t created long ago. This is one book sequence that lends itself very readily indeed to graphic-novel format, with its basically simple stories, an underlying touch of the unexplainable/magical, and a dollop of education to go with a series of wholesome adventures. Intended for ages 6-10, Mary Pope Osborne’s stories of eight-and-a-half-year-old Jack and his seven-year-old sister Annie began in 1992 with Dinosaurs Before Dark (also known as Valley of the Dinosaurs), for which there was a companion book, Dinosaurs, that gave more information than the minimal material included in the adventure story itself. The first four Magic Tree House books all had accompanying more-information volumes available; after that, the connection broke down, with some adventure stories having no “more information” volumes and others having them in an order very different from that in which the adventure books were published.

     The publishing history of the Magic Tree House books is on the complex side, but the books themselves are decidedly not. The first 28 of them all involve Jack and Annie in time-travel adventures under the aegis of Morgan Le Fay – who does not appear at all in the first book, the initial reference to her coming through Jack’s discovery in prehistoric times of a medallion with the letter M on it. Dinosaurs Before Dark has the siblings finding a tree house near their home in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania, climbing into it, seeing that it is full of books, and discovering that if they look at a book’s pictures and make a wish to go to the book’s time and place, the tree house magically takes them there (after which it magically returns them to Frog Creek, since there is a Frog Creek book conveniently available in the tree house).

     To make the concept work as a graphic novel, all that is needed are illustrations of a couple of everyday kids, a high-in-the-trees tree house, and suitable pictures of whatever locations Jack and Annie are going to visit – including pictures of the inhabitants of those locations. Thanks to Jenny Laird’s carefully controlled adaptation and the pleasantly apt illustrations by Kelly and Nichole Matthews, Dinosaurs Before Dark has all the required elements seamlessly integrated into a pleasant, nicely paced, unchallenging-to-read, brightly colored, neatly designed presentation. Readers watch Jack and Annie discover the ordinary-looking tree house, climb up a rope ladder into it, examine some of the books scattered all around, and focus on one called Dinosaurs. Jack, seeing a picture of a pteranodon in the book, wishes he and Annie could go to where the flying creature is, and sure enough, they are whisked back to the late Cretaceous period, where they meet the actual pteranodon – promptly named Henry by Annie, that being the name of a friendly neighborhood dog in Frog Creek. And sure enough, pteranodon-Henry is friendly, as are other dinosaurs that Jack and Annie encounter: this is very much a fantasy world, for all the bits of science that Osborne includes in it. The only baddie anywhere is, inevitably, a Tyrannosaurus Rex – which, however, Jack and Annie outsmart, and which turns out to be noisy but not too much of a threat after all (to them or to the peaceful herbivorous dinosaurs). When the T. Rex does get too close for comfort at one point, helpful Henry swoops in and gives Jack a ride on his back, to the base of the tree that has magically come to the Cretaceous with the tree house nestled in it, ready to return Jack and Annie to their home town and home time.

     After his pteranodon ride, Jack tells Annie that “all the books are magic” in the tree house, so they can use the one showing Frog Creek to return home – and when Annie asks how Jack can be so sure about the magic in the books, he says he did not figure it out, not exactly: “It was more like I just knew it.” And that is pretty much what magic, including the magic of The Magic Tree House, is all about: readers just know that everything is all right, everything is interesting, and everything will work out just fine in all Osborne’s books and, by extension, in their graphic-novel adaptations. The books in Osborne’s series were amply illustrated (by Salvatore Murdocca in their U.S. editions) and always had a strong visual component in the storytelling, so they ought to work very well indeed as graphic novels – Dinosaurs Before Dark certainly does. Given the increasing visual orientation in kids’ everyday life today, graphic novels may even prove more suitable than the original books in bringing The Magic Tree House, with its heaping helping of adventure and soupçon of education, to a new generation of visually oriented six-to-10-year-olds.