(++++) SERIES OF PLEASURES

Phoebe and Her Unicorn 17: Punk Rock Unicorn. By Dana Simpson. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Peculiar Woods 1: The Ancient Underwater City. By Andrés J. Colmenares. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     The longer Dana Simpson continues with her Phoebe and Her Unicorn series, the more subtlety she is able to bring to the relationship between the title characters – while always staying true to their basic personalities. In Punk Rock Unicorn, for example, Simpson shows a lovely day on which Phoebe is unusually in touch with the world outside her own immediate vicinity, and is distinctly unhappy about it: “There’s so many bad, scary things going on in the world! The fact that it’s big and bright is just making everything worse.” Marigold’s response is to create “a small, dark, rainy universe for you to be sad in,” with Simpson doing the next panel entirely in black and white except for splashes of color in Phoebe’s clothing. The final panel of this strip, still in the “dark” universe, has Phoebe cuddling against Marigold, eyes closed and smiling, as the unicorn looks lovingly at her – very much as a parent might in similar circumstances. This is a lovely expansion of the basic “best friends” foundation of Phoebe and Her Unicorn, and in no way detracts from the involvement of Phoebe’s actual human parents. And Simpson knows not to lay on the emotion too strongly or too often. There is a different “dark universe” elsewhere in this book, “a dimension that is a dark mirror of our own” and contains “dark” versions of both Marigold and Phoebe. Sure enough, through a dimension-connecting portal comes a “dark” Marigold – wearing a monocle – and a “dark” Phoebe with a toothy grimace, shouting, “DESTRUCTION! DOOOOOOOM!” and asking, “Is there anything in this dimension I can set on fire?” It soon turns out, though, that the “dark” characters “are both kinda disappointing,” as regular Phoebe puts it, and regular Marigold confirms, “They are not as bad as I would have expected.” And perhaps that means the regular Phoebe and Marigold are not as good as they want to think they are… Well, anyway, another entry in the latest book has Phoebe deciding whether to try out for the school play. All Phoebe’s friends think that’s a great idea, but Phoebe tells her mom that nobody asks what she wants to do – it is just that they want her to try out, “and that makes part of me want to NOT do it just to spite them.” Phoebe’s mom may be a bit player in these adventures, but her response here is perfect: “I’ll be proud whatever you decide, you contrary little weirdo.” And Phoebe has a big smile as she says, “At least my mom gets me.” Phoebe does try out, and the play turns out to involve both a unicorn and a snail, and the snail is the featured character, and Marigold decides to wear a “shimmering shell” to help Phoebe get ready for the tryouts, and the whole sequence spins off into an unusually long and detailed series that includes everything from Marigold creating a snail backstory to Phoebe “procrastinating by reading about procrastination.” Add a dose of “magical spy drones”; a unicorn “beauty drive” that involves donating beauty “so there will be extra beauty on hoof. For emergencies”; and a song about unicorn magnificence that Marigold has written, which has just one note, since “music is about the notes you do NOT sing” – and you have another thoroughly enjoyable compilation focusing on friendship, magic, silliness, and an occasional touch of heartwarming events, the entirety adding up to plenty of reasons to continue finding Phoebe and Her Unicorn delightful.

     A series has to start somewhere, of course, before it can hit its stride and try to become as long-lasting and smoothly successful as Simpson’s. And there is much to hope for in the first volume of Peculiar Woods, a distinctly odd graphic-novel (rather than comic-strip) sequence by Andrés J. Colmenares. The title is the name of a town that used to be called – well, no one is quite sure, but it may have been “Whatever Woods” or “Forgettable Forest” or something like that. The name change, intended to draw tourists, never quite caught on. This may have something to do with “the flooded town” nearby, whose origin is a mystery but guarantees that there must be spooky things afoot. Just how spooky? Well, nine-year-old Iggie, protagonist of the series, soon finds himself lost in the woods at night, fleeing his suddenly-alive blanket, talking to a rock (which talks back), meeting a couple of animated chess pieces, and discussing matters with a walking-and-talking chair. And those are not even the spooky things. Colmenares’ art is of the flat, Internet-ish type, relying on unexpected twists and turns rather than character development to move the story along; and he seems aware of this, as when he has classmates in Iggie’s new school identify him as the kid whose hair “looks like a huge kidney.” Which it kind of does. As for that “new school” thing: Iggie has just moved to Peculiar Woods, brought there by his aunt – who has raised him – to live with his mother, who has until now been unable to care for him (reasons unknown, at least in this series opener). Colmenares does know how to get a story going, with this first series book being an adventure in and of itself and also clearly setting up future volumes through small mysteries dropped into the story here and there. Plus one large mystery, that being the flooded town: “How did it happen?” asks Iggie, but if anyone (or anything) knows, this is not discussed. Something of what happened is revealed as the book progresses, though, since Iggie joins his blanket and the chair on a quest to find “the ancient underwater city” that the chess pieces are seeking because the king rules (or ruled) it. The king needs to return even though his city has always been at war, because “you can’t run away from your problems forever,” and that is sure to be a statement of importance to Iggie as well. Colmenares tosses in lighter elements throughout the book, for instance by having the chair do yoga (the chair, whose name is Boris, has more personality than Iggie does) and try to outrun a herd of horses, leading the chess king to ask, “Are we doing sidequests now?” Eventually the intrepid explorers meet cute but dangerous beavers and a washing machine named Lazarus Gallington who turns out, maybe, to be the underlying cause of a lot of the problems in the tale. Peculiar Woods is a touch disconnected and sometimes a bit too frenetic for its own good, but it is an appealing mixture of adventure and humor that certainly has the potential to stay engaging for at least a while. Whether it will or should do so for as many books as the Phoebe and Her Unicorn series has spawned is not at all certain, but perhaps the next Peculiar Woods entry will provide some hints about that mystery as well as others.