(++++) WE GO WHERE HUGO

Superworld: Save Noah. By Yarrow & Carrie Cheney. Random House. $17.99.

     Amazingly adroit and delightfully dizzy, Yarrow and Carrie Cheney’s Superworld: Save Noah – the first book in a planned series – reads as if Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret was run through a time machine, video game and shredder, all at the same time. It looks that way, too. The Cheneys, a husband-and-wife creative team sharing some mighty peculiar brain cells, have come up with an amply illustrated story so outlandishly, outrageously outré that one can only hope they create several more series entries before the whole thing gets spoiled by being turned into yet another overdone CGI-based movie (don’t laugh: Yarrow Chaney was production designer on Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 – not that those were overdone).

     Superworld: Save Noah channels the appearance of Selznick’s wonderful creations while entirely lacking their heart, soul, emotional heft and sensitivity. And that is absolutely fine, because this book takes the highly-highly-illustrated format of the not-really-a-graphic-novel form perfected by Selznick in a direction all its own: toward ridiculousness. And it is wonderful ridiculousness, from the initial setup featuring Noah and his 18 broken bones to the “inconclusion” in which Noah is hurtling to certain doom that certainly will not occur, for certain.

     You know those jokes about people who wear aluminum-foil hats to prevent evil extraterrestrials from reading and controlling their minds? (OK, maybe they’re not always jokes.) Well, what if aluminum foil really could prevent something extraterrestrial from affecting people? And what if that “something extraterrestrial” happened to be something that people want to affect them? Like the bestowing upon them of superpowers? Well, there’s the premise of Superworld: Save Noah. On the title character’s seventh birthday, he was dressed in a costume made entirely of foil when a meteorite slammed into Earth and bestowed superpowers on all people except those who happened to be dressed entirely in foil. There was exactly one such individual. And this makes Noah the only non-superpower-endowed person around and thus the only one available for superheroes to save and supervillains to target. And oh yes, saving and targeting will happen, because as Noah explains right at the book’s start, “One thing you’ve gotta understand about super-people – they’re all sick with what I call ‘super-brain.’ It makes them obsessed with super stuff. They spend all day, every day, looking for excuses to switch into tights and capes.” And then they have to do rescues, meaning rescues of Noah, unless they happen to be super-villains such as Dr. Destructo, whose “Prime Power is super-genius, so he’s a master of deception, manipulation, and misdirection. He’s also a super-genius marketer – every six months he launches an updated toy line, video game, cookbook, and chart-topping pop song to coincide with his latest upsized mech-suit.”

     This is great stuff – adults will laugh even more heartily than kids will at the super-marketing notion and a lot of other stuff in Superworld: Save Noah, such as the choices of superhero names: Noah’s best friends are Replay (“anything he can do in a video game, he can do in real life”); Hairstrike (“her super-hair is a picture of what’s going on inside her head – ten things at once. …She can easily fight six villains while licking an ice cream cone and petting a puppy); Hugh-Mongous (“he’s always looking for an excuse to GO BIG”); and Nightingale (“she’s what’s called a Fixer [and] can fix anything from a broken bridge to my broken bones”). Notice how each name gets its own little back story that proves its suitability – the Cheneys are really good at this stuff. Noah’s parents are High-Rise and Shockwave (yeah, those names make sense, too), and his little sister – who got a double dose of powers when the ones that would have gone to Noah were deflected to her – is Psychlone, and wow, does that turn out to be apt. And then there’s Noah’s grandma, Granimal, who can “change into any creature, real or imagined,” and is a lot more fun than his rather straitlaced parents except when she’s, you know, covering Noah in slime or goo or pinning him to the ceiling or something. Granimal “loves to surprise attack me to hone my survival skills,” and lives in the sort of home-for-the-older-crowd that fits right into Superworld: “Give a bunch of elderly people superpowers and immortality and, well, you do the math.”

     The world-creation in Superworld: Save Noah is so good (ridiculously good) that it is almost a shame to get into the story. In fact, readers – kids and adults alike – will likely want to linger on the marvelous illustrations through which so much of the tale, Selznick-like, is told. (The “giant Grandma-headed boa constrictor” alone is worth some extra contemplation time. As is the map of the western parts of the United Ultra Super States of Awesome America.) But there is a story here, and in some ways it is the weakest part of Superworld: Save Noah, since it is the usual “outsider disrespected by everyone turns out to be the only one who can save everything” trope of preteen fantasies. On the other hand, Yarrow and Carrie Cheney take this thrice-told tale and tell it with just the sort of spin they bring to everything else in this book. For instance, Noah first learns that he is needed to save the world because he is bombarded by spam messages (which eventually turn out not to be spam after all).

     Anyway, the plot – yes, Noah does have to save everyone, and can do so only because he is not like everyone else, meaning he is not super-powered – is really not the point here at all. It is a necessary element of the book, like the clothes dummies on which the latest fashions are displayed: you have to have something on which to hang all those overpriced pieces of fabric, so you need a foundational element, a mannequin, on which to construct a fashionable (or, in this case, super-heroic) edifice. Readers will certainly follow the plot through its twists and turns (some predictable, some not) in order to keep up with the humor and silliness and silly humor pervading Superworld: Save Noah. But no one is going to believe that Noah will fail in his quest (although – fair warning – of course at the end of the book there is a cliffhanger in which he seems about to fail). The point is that the Cheneys have super-cleverly constructed a laugh-out-loud, dramatically unbelievable bit of fluff and nonsense that it is almost impossible to put down once you start experiencing it (not just “reading” it: again, there is a multimedia element here that shows the authors’ Selznick channeling). The book’s title, in fact, has to be turned on itself and contorted, pretzel-like or Granimal-snake-like, to keep the whole roller-coaster ride in some sort of perspective: really, the book could just as easily have been called Noah: Save Superworld.