Two
Dogs. By Ian Falconer. Michael di
Capua/HarperCollins. $18.99.
Big Nate: Release the Hounds! By Lincoln Peirce. Andrews
McMeel. $11.99.
Big Nate: Very Funny! (compilation of Big Nate: Welcome to My World and Big Nate: Thunka, Thunka, Thunka). By
Lincoln Peirce. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
Big Nate: Destined for Awesomeness. Based on Nickelodeon
episodes written by Mitch Watson, Elliott Owen, and Sarah Allen. Andrews
McMeel. $19.99.
Adorableness knows no bounds, only hounds,
in Ian Falconer’s utterly engaging Two
Dogs, which is one of those picture books for young children that grown-ups
will find themselves sneaking a peek at even when they are not asked to read it
to or with kids. It is just so endearing – almost beyond words. But not beyond
words and pictures: Falconer’s skill at combining written and visual art makes
the simple story simply delicious. It is the tale of dachshund brothers Augie
and Perry, who live in a typical suburban household, where kids go off to
school and adults work – leaving the pups alone all day and bored. That opens
the door to mischief – assuming they can open the door, that is. Augie and
Perry are used to barking at the squirrels they see outside, but one fine day
they decide to go outside. Augie
figures out how to turn the simple deadbolt lock – luckily, no key is needed –
and the pups get to have a wonderful time peeing in the garden, rolling in
raccoon poop, swinging on the kids’ swing set, using the seesaw and, eventually
and best of all, digging. Oh my, do
they dig! But then they hear a car, and they know the jig is up and they are
going to be in a lot of trouble, unless…well,
they rush back indoors, re-lock the door, and stand there barking fiercely, as
if protecting the home from something-or-other that has been out there making a
giant mess of things. Result: Augie and Perry are praised as heroes and given
extra treats, and a good time is had by all. Well, by all dogs, anyway. Falconer’s
pervasively delicious sense of humor and the skill with which he makes Augie
and Perry look realistic but anthropomorphic at the same time – what
wonderfully expressive faces they have! – make Two Dogs a thoroughgoing delight. And the final scene of the pups
floating on inner tubes in a swimming pool (obviously on some later day of
escapes and escapades), while one reads the book Lassie Finds a Way, fits the tone of Falconer’s work and the
dachshunds’ personalities perfectly. Two
Dogs is spot-on for kids and adults alike who find canine mischief
endearing. Plenty of young readers will be begging for dogs like Augie and
Perry by the time the book ends – which is about the only reason not to read and re-read this adorable
adventure.
Dogs are an integral element of Lincoln
Peirce’s long-running Big Nate comic
strip as well, although neighbor dog Spitsy – cross-eyed,
Elizabethan-collar-wearing and tremendously happy with cats, which Nate fears
and loathes – is scarcely on par with Augie and Perry. Nate has wanted a dog
for what seems like decades (it actually has been decades in the real world: Big Nate started in 1991); his father
has consistently refused to get one, which explains Nate’s frequent involvement
with Spitsy. However, Spitsy and other canines are not quite the reference
point of the latest Big Nate collection, Release
the Hounds! Those “hounds” are Nate’s feet, which (as the cover
illustration shows) are something like weapons of mass destruction in the wrong
hands…err, socks (when Nate takes off his shoes). The comically silly but
ultimately mild “yuck” element of Nate’s feet fits Peirce’s ongoing approach to
the mostly school-based stories of the 11-to-12-year-old title character of Big Nate. There is never anything mean
or hurtful in Nate’s pranks, and while Peirce makes fun of Nate himself by
showing him to be thoroughly self-absorbed and oblivious to his own shortcomings,
the cartoonist does so without unduly mocking his title character. He leaves
the mockery to other characters in
the strip – although even they (notably Nate’s best friends, Francis and Teddy)
know just how far to push critiques of Nate and when to stop pushing them. What
Peirce does so well in Big Nate is to
establish the title character as his own worst enemy. In the latest collection,
he gets to coach his soccer team temporarily and invents a formation that does
not even include the right number of players. He gets his umpteenth detention
slip from his least-liked teacher, Mrs. Godfrey, and makes his collection of
slips into a money maker by charging other students 50 cents each to view “the
world’s largest detention slip collection” (Nate does manage to turn some of
his failures into successes). He decides to become an author of children’s
books and creates one featuring a severed, bloody hand – to mix murder
mysteries with color education (“The sky is blue, the grass is green, the blood
is red”). And when it comes to dog matters, Nate offers to drop out of school
so he can stay home all the time and care for a pup; he shows Spitsy how to use
a Netflix account to watch Star Trek;
and he takes Spitsy outdoors to play in the snow – until the hapless pooch gets
his tongue stuck to a frigid street-sign pole.
Because Big Nate exists in a best-not-to-question-it time warp – the
characters go through the entire school year and summer, then start all over
again, still in sixth grade – older collections of Big Nate are just as much fun as newer ones, and do not grow stale.
This creates the possibility of re-releasing previous collections in a new form
and with a new overall title, the latest example being Big Nate: Very Funny! This is a double-length book that combines previous
compilations from 2015 and 2016. Thanks to Peirce’s consistency of art and
characterization, the “collection of collections” is just as funny and just as
timeless as Big Nate strips created
more recently. Spitsy, for example, at one point is persuaded by Nate that
chasing squirrels will be fun – and ends up snared by the rodents and hanging
upside-down from a tree branch. Nate, a notorious goof-off when it comes to
school work, is determined to get 100 on one test so he can have a B for the
course – but puts his name in the wrong place and gets a 99, along with the
frustration of knowing he could get
good grades if they mattered to him. Also here, Nate works as a photography
assistant for School Picture Guy, a nameless recurring character always wearing
a Band-Aid on his forehead – and Nate soon discovers that first-graders are a
bit much for even a sixth-grader to handle. And Spitsy has a romance with
Francis’ cat and starts talking feline language (“myow myow myow”), leading
Francis to think that there may soon be some “little catdogs” running around.
Also, speaking of running around, Nate continues to try to prove to his crush,
Jenny, that he is right for her and
she should stop running around with Artur, the Belarus-born student who is
unfailingly nice, good at almost everything, very friendly to Nate, and
therefore obviously a poor match for any girl who could have Nate instead. There
it is: the lack of self-awareness that is one of Nate’s most salient features –
along with his weird seven-tufted hair and his penchant for relaxing by hitting
himself on the head with an empty soda bottle (thus explaining the Thunka, Thunka, Thunka title).
It was probably inevitable that the Big Nate comic strip would eventually spawn a Big Nate animated series, such as the one from Nickelodeon that provides a different way to look at Nate – and a different way to see him in book form, too. Big Nate: Destined for Awesomeness looks nothing like other Peirce (or, more accurately in this case, Peirce-derived) books, not only because it is a hardcover volume but also because Nate and his friends are shown in the now-ubiquitous “three-dimensional” computer-animated style that is increasingly used on TV and in films, to such an extent that it is almost passé. The animated-series-based Nate and his friends look enough like Peirce’s originals to draw in viewers who already know and enjoy the comic strip, and Destined for Awesomeness even includes a few pages of real Peirce strips that comment on or help develop the three stories in the book, which is in effect a graphic novel. Those stories make a variety of unexplained and inexplicable changes in characters from the strip. Peirce’s Mrs. Godfrey, for example, is a fine teacher who knows how much potential Nate has and is constantly trying to get him to live up to it and stop being a slacker – thus causing the ill will between them. For Nickelodeon, Mrs. Godfrey really is Nate’s nemesis, lying in wait for him to do something he should not do and determined to bring him down. Artur is no longer from Belarus but from the fictional Stylgravia. Nate’s father, Milton, and older sister, Ellen, are far more prominent in animation than in the comic strip. And the Nickelodeon writers push those two subsidiary characters to have some over-the-top real-world fears that are crucial to the shows: Ellen is claustrophobic and Milton is afraid to use any bathroom except the ones in his home. Having Ellen try to get her father to urinate in a non-home bathroom, and later having Milton brag about his bodily functions to Nate, really is a bit much – and totally out of keeping with anything in Peirce’s work. There are, to be sure, dog and cat elements in the Nickelodeon Nate shows: in one, Nate and friends try to capture numerous stray dogs that have escaped after Nate, misusing his father’s credit card, has bought their freedom – the plan is to harness the dogs, win a sled-dog race, and use the prize money to repay Milton. As for cats, Jenny has one, so Nate is freaked out when the two work on a school project together, and eventually he lets the cat out of the house and creates a Rube Goldberg- style trap to capture it – thus fulfilling the assignment he and Jenny were doing, which was to make a Rube Goldberg-style mechanism of some sort. Big Nate: Destined for Awesomeness will be more fun for readers who already know and like the Nickelodeon series than for ones who are only familiar with Peirce’s original work. It is considerably less awesome than the Peirce-drawn books, but it does manage to show that Nate is an interestingly adaptable character as well as a perpetual sixth-grader.
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